Alright everyone I have been given the task of wrapping up the rest of this today. No easy feat so before I begin a warning for everyone that I may begin to ramble or become unfocused during this entry as I go over the last 3 days of the camp. Now that we have that out of the way lets begin shall we?
Lucky for me there is only a little bit really worth mentioning on Wednesday. Mind you a little in comparison to other days. Lets start out with the Great Object Hunt! That's what I'm calling it at least. You remember how there was a point system while we were at camp? Well there were 4 random objects hidden around the camp with varying point values. There was a Football helmet, a bowling pin, a toy dinosaur, and a mascot for one of the local sport teams. People had claimed everything except that solitary bowling pin. This seemed baffling to me why the only bright white object which isn't that easy to hide was the only object never found. After all, bowling pins aren't exactly small and they happen to be bright white most of the time as well. Too put it bluntly I never found it either and this left me hugely dissapointed. I even went to the farthest corners of the campgrounds finding buildings that people didn't even know exist.
Next up was a small game similar to grab the bacon. A game where you have a square formation of people all around the football with each person having a number. When your number is called you run out and attempt to bring the football to your side. This game instead had 8 inner tubes like used to raft on water sitting in the middle in a tower. Our team decimated during this little exercise as we had 2 very heavyset instructors who were allowed to participate and ended up dragging anyone that tried to get in their way. It was amazing to watch but the fun soon ended even though we won there was obviously a casualty. One of the girls that were participating ended up getting trampled when someone was trying to bring back one of the inner tubes. I still don't know who did it personally.
After the injury all of the teams ended up retreating to the other side of the field and formed a humongous prayer circle. I honestly felt stupid sitting around doing nothing. That's what I felt at least. This massive display of faith and the only thing I could think was this feels ridiculous worrying about someone that not only do I not know but also worrying about something that is completely out of my control. I was probably one of the only ones thinking this though as it was an amazing sight to behold. Something I will not forget for a very long time as it blazes in my head remembering it now.
Come Thursday most of the previous night is forgotten and people move on with their daily routine. On this day our prankster team member starts his plight on the few points that we had gained throughout the week. Starting out in the morning we all find a frog in grass as we wait in line for the breakfast doors to open up. This one mischief maker then decides to pick up the frog and hold onto it until later and breakfast is starting to wind down. He then runs over to one of the tables full of girls and throws the frog onto the table very much alive. This soon freaks out all of the girls ridding us of a lot of points. This though is sadly the beginning of his second prank.
I don't know all of the details on this one but I do know that this is how we lost the remainder of of the points we had. The same kid soon decided that during one of the morning prayers I believe on the same day to steal the bullhorn and walkie talkie of one of the instructors at the camp. He then walked all the way back to the cabin blaring the bullhorn without any of the instructors noticing. He is soon called out about the bullhorn at the next prayer meeting but he manages to keep the walkie talkie hidden for a while.
Next up we reach a brand new experience for me which is Skeet shooting! First time I have ever fired a gun personally but I had a general idea on how to fire a gun. It was truly amazing wielding a weapon for the first time and of all places at church camp. Mind you I never hit a target which left me fairly sad but I did manage to fire a 20 gauge shotgun a few times before returning to one of my favorite board games I have ever played. The game of Risk.
The first thing I always hear Risk compared to is Axis and Allies which I have never played before and neither can I find a copy of this game either. The entire game is based around world domination which I have all of the strategies to win but sadly none of the luck. The luck comes from the fact that you need to roll dice in order to determine who wins in a conflict and I had all of the awesome defensive positions and knew where to move my men but I could not defend any of the locations when I needed to. This left me sad as I lost yet another game due to some strange rules that I don't agree with. For example if one person wins then they flat out win without any casualties to their troops. This is nice for when you are attacking but because of this you can attack for a very long time after you have enough troops in one location.
One of the final things for Thursday was the Talent show. Let me tell you all something right now. I despise Talent shows! Seriously though they are pretty bad most of the time as people just end up doing a lot of singing without any real work other than remembering the words to one song or another. Usually a very popular song of that week. Also known as the flavor of the week songs. This talent show I saw some surprisingly nice talents like one kid got up on stage and did a full drum solo. Another kid managed to recited a ton of Hamlet which was just astounding to watch him do. Even the Judges were dumbfounded by this talent of his. My team sadly were singers. I had nothing to add to my team really but the song the majority of the team was doing was clever. The classic song "Lean on Me" The kind of song that gets everyone on their feet as they start swaying back and forth with lighters in their hands singing along. Sadly we were running behind on time at this point of the show and we didn't get to finish the song costing us dearly and we overall lose the points that could be gained through this event and the whole point competition.
Here we all are on the last day of the camp trip and this day is pretty simple for me to write about. The reason why is because after the goodbyes for the day there isn't that much to talk about. I was so fatigued from the constant upbeat atmosphere as well the constant interaction with other people. This may have made me overlook some potentially interesting details on this last day and this left the most memorable part of this day the getting back to Kansas City part of things. There was the bus ride home where I was surrounded by a bunch of kids who were determined to keep me from napping on the way back home. Along with annoying me to the point of almost snapping they decided to pick on the bus driver on the way back as well. I was happy to make it home alive just like everyone else may have been but these kids didn't exactly help my confidence of getting home safe.
Anyway here we are at the end of the blog post and I hope you all haven't fallen asleep yet as I didn't have that hard of a time with this part of the blog like I thought I would. In fact it was easy enough that this only took 2-3 hours instead of the estimated 5-6 I was dreading the thought of. Now that this is done my next blog entry can be about other things like the fact that school is coming up soon and the plans with that.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Camp Week: Part 2
Alright everyone I'm going to not post as much this time nor do I think that I'm going to complete my whole camp week today. I'm going to finish up Tuesday and then stop most likely so that it isn't so much of a chore to read the whole thing. I will attempt to post for Wednesday and Thursday on their respective days but I will be at my moms so there may be some predicaments there. I can make up for them at some other point. Maybe over the weekend? Who knows?
Anyway outside of the swimming on Tuesday I attempted a game of Laser Tag with some kids I met at the camp. I think I did pretty well with my the team that I was on. Not bad for my team still means I did pretty horrible. I feel that I was too supportive and didn't do that much and since none of my team heeded any of the advice I sent my entire purpose was to make shots at people that my team was distracting. Not much, and sadly I lost a good chunk of the time but I had a lot of fun so I guess that it was all worth it.
The best part of the day comes at night with game of Capture the flag. The entire thing was done in the middle of the night. All of the lights turned off and everyone had only thin glow sticks to identify each other. It was amazing! Remember when I said that my team was there to win? Well we almost won this event because of our amazing defense. You see the main rules were that you had to be identifiable for your team hence the glow sticks, your flag had to be retrievable, your flag had to be able to be seen, and don't leave the radius of where flags could be placed which means no going behind buildings. My team had the genius idea of sticking our flag on the end of a stick along with a glow stick and shove it up a tree so that people could barely see the glow stick and could still retrieve the flag. We didn't lose since no one grabbed our flag but we didn't win because when the game was called we hadn't grabbed anyone's flag either. It was so much fun because we left so many people confused with such a plan that by the end of the game people were constantly going after our flag to no avail.
Anyway outside of the swimming on Tuesday I attempted a game of Laser Tag with some kids I met at the camp. I think I did pretty well with my the team that I was on. Not bad for my team still means I did pretty horrible. I feel that I was too supportive and didn't do that much and since none of my team heeded any of the advice I sent my entire purpose was to make shots at people that my team was distracting. Not much, and sadly I lost a good chunk of the time but I had a lot of fun so I guess that it was all worth it.
The best part of the day comes at night with game of Capture the flag. The entire thing was done in the middle of the night. All of the lights turned off and everyone had only thin glow sticks to identify each other. It was amazing! Remember when I said that my team was there to win? Well we almost won this event because of our amazing defense. You see the main rules were that you had to be identifiable for your team hence the glow sticks, your flag had to be retrievable, your flag had to be able to be seen, and don't leave the radius of where flags could be placed which means no going behind buildings. My team had the genius idea of sticking our flag on the end of a stick along with a glow stick and shove it up a tree so that people could barely see the glow stick and could still retrieve the flag. We didn't lose since no one grabbed our flag but we didn't win because when the game was called we hadn't grabbed anyone's flag either. It was so much fun because we left so many people confused with such a plan that by the end of the game people were constantly going after our flag to no avail.
Monday, July 14, 2014
Camp Week: Part 1
Welcome back everyone to another blog entry. I'm sorry that it has taken this long before I have been able to get around to my blog but for the last week or so I have been over at a Church camp. I also have to warn everyone in advance now that since a lot has happened over the course of the week this will be a much longer blog than usual. I'm going to try to not ramble as much as usual but I can guarantee you that everything will not fit into three paragraphs like usual. Let's begin at the beginning, shall we?
We begin with the first day and location. The campgrounds were out in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma. The entire camp was nice and all but there was a massive feeling of isolation from the rest of the world considering that there was no electronics allowed except for camp instructors. In other words despite the huge amounts of people it almost felt like there was nothing outside of the campgrounds. I woke up at about 5:00 in the morning to make sure I got all of my stuff together and start heading out at about 6:30 to meet the bus to head down to the campgrounds. By this point in the trip barely anyone knew one another so it was a fairly quiet ride down there. The real fun starts when we get down there for the first day.
We are all assigned to a group of people around our age and how long we have all been there but for the most part randomly assigned within those areas. Doesn't sound like a huge group to work from but there were plenty of High School boys who were on their first year at the camp. I ended up with what I like to call the misfits. While there were the thinkers, the athletes, and the "players" we were the team that was there to have fun and win as a way of saying that we aren't the worst team here. Our team name was the Redneck Kings of Funk. We bonded all instantly with the common goal of winning the camp games for the year.
I haven't gone over the fact that there was a point system that took place throughout the entire week where if you did something that was worth a merit your team would be rewarded with points. These points would then win you a pizza party at the end of the week. Examples of point applicable things are like winning the Capture the flag game which we will get too later. I won't ruin anything about the ending of camp so you'll have to read to the end if you want to find out if I won or not.
Pretty soon after all of the teams have been chosen we all ended up going to bed due to the fact that everyone was pretty darn tired after waking up early to get to the camp on time. The arrangements of the cabins weren't that bad except the fly problem and the people I bunked with were pretty quiet during the nights since we were all pretty tired. The main problem I ran into was snacks. Not the lack of snacks but the abundance there of. We weren't that hungry but we brought the equivalent of a 5 course meal of snacks each. Just a ton of food that each of us brought in separately. I decided to share mine and my full bag of cheese puffs were gone in the blink of an eye.
On to Tuesday where a lot of things start but before we begin I have to remind you all that this is a church camp so before I can continue much farther I'm going to go over what made this a church camp and not some camp where a lot of Christian kids happened to go. First off every day after breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner we all went to the chapel and started praying. Next up is that all of the kids came from Churches from Kansas and Missouri and only churches.
Everyday for me starts with breakfast and Their food was probably the worst part about the trip. Has anyone else reading this ever had a McRib from McDonald's. Well I have and they served me another one for lunch. The same mystery meat object stuffed in a bun and tastes strangely like barbeque. The most appetizing thing that they served me there was actually the salad bar which I enjoyed every day with vigor with a hearty dose of bacon bits and cheese with a drizzle of Italian dressing.
On Tuesday I went down to the springs for the first time which is pretty much the spot where everyone goes swimming. It was a constant 55 degrees Fahrenheit and that made it freezing in comparison to the rest of the area. Along with this there were several ways to enter this little area. There was the zip line, the Trapeze like object, and finally the most preferred way of entering the Blob. A giant inflatable where one person was on the far end and the other person jumps down on the opposite end sending the first person into the air and back down into the water if done properly. A simple but extremely fun way of doing things sadly I was just a bit too scared to do this myself. I personally went for the other inflatable.
The other inflatable was what I liked to call the igloo for some strange reason. It was pretty much a giant inflatable jungle jim on the water. Extremely scary for people like me. The main reason behind this is because the entire thing was in the water of course making it very slick. Along with this if more than one person climbed to the top at a time the whole thing would begin to buckle under the weight. This got even scarier if you were close to the inflatable. It never sunk but I felt that it got a little bit too close a couple of times.
Alright well everyone I think I'm going to wrap this all up here for the moment and continue it tomorrow. With the basic info out of the way part 2 should be long but I have no clue how long. I might cut out a couple of things but not too much since I haven't been posting that much lately. I hope you all come on over for tomorrows post and I'll see you all tomorrow for part 2
We begin with the first day and location. The campgrounds were out in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma. The entire camp was nice and all but there was a massive feeling of isolation from the rest of the world considering that there was no electronics allowed except for camp instructors. In other words despite the huge amounts of people it almost felt like there was nothing outside of the campgrounds. I woke up at about 5:00 in the morning to make sure I got all of my stuff together and start heading out at about 6:30 to meet the bus to head down to the campgrounds. By this point in the trip barely anyone knew one another so it was a fairly quiet ride down there. The real fun starts when we get down there for the first day.
We are all assigned to a group of people around our age and how long we have all been there but for the most part randomly assigned within those areas. Doesn't sound like a huge group to work from but there were plenty of High School boys who were on their first year at the camp. I ended up with what I like to call the misfits. While there were the thinkers, the athletes, and the "players" we were the team that was there to have fun and win as a way of saying that we aren't the worst team here. Our team name was the Redneck Kings of Funk. We bonded all instantly with the common goal of winning the camp games for the year.
I haven't gone over the fact that there was a point system that took place throughout the entire week where if you did something that was worth a merit your team would be rewarded with points. These points would then win you a pizza party at the end of the week. Examples of point applicable things are like winning the Capture the flag game which we will get too later. I won't ruin anything about the ending of camp so you'll have to read to the end if you want to find out if I won or not.
Pretty soon after all of the teams have been chosen we all ended up going to bed due to the fact that everyone was pretty darn tired after waking up early to get to the camp on time. The arrangements of the cabins weren't that bad except the fly problem and the people I bunked with were pretty quiet during the nights since we were all pretty tired. The main problem I ran into was snacks. Not the lack of snacks but the abundance there of. We weren't that hungry but we brought the equivalent of a 5 course meal of snacks each. Just a ton of food that each of us brought in separately. I decided to share mine and my full bag of cheese puffs were gone in the blink of an eye.
On to Tuesday where a lot of things start but before we begin I have to remind you all that this is a church camp so before I can continue much farther I'm going to go over what made this a church camp and not some camp where a lot of Christian kids happened to go. First off every day after breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner we all went to the chapel and started praying. Next up is that all of the kids came from Churches from Kansas and Missouri and only churches.
Everyday for me starts with breakfast and Their food was probably the worst part about the trip. Has anyone else reading this ever had a McRib from McDonald's. Well I have and they served me another one for lunch. The same mystery meat object stuffed in a bun and tastes strangely like barbeque. The most appetizing thing that they served me there was actually the salad bar which I enjoyed every day with vigor with a hearty dose of bacon bits and cheese with a drizzle of Italian dressing.
On Tuesday I went down to the springs for the first time which is pretty much the spot where everyone goes swimming. It was a constant 55 degrees Fahrenheit and that made it freezing in comparison to the rest of the area. Along with this there were several ways to enter this little area. There was the zip line, the Trapeze like object, and finally the most preferred way of entering the Blob. A giant inflatable where one person was on the far end and the other person jumps down on the opposite end sending the first person into the air and back down into the water if done properly. A simple but extremely fun way of doing things sadly I was just a bit too scared to do this myself. I personally went for the other inflatable.
The other inflatable was what I liked to call the igloo for some strange reason. It was pretty much a giant inflatable jungle jim on the water. Extremely scary for people like me. The main reason behind this is because the entire thing was in the water of course making it very slick. Along with this if more than one person climbed to the top at a time the whole thing would begin to buckle under the weight. This got even scarier if you were close to the inflatable. It never sunk but I felt that it got a little bit too close a couple of times.
Alright well everyone I think I'm going to wrap this all up here for the moment and continue it tomorrow. With the basic info out of the way part 2 should be long but I have no clue how long. I might cut out a couple of things but not too much since I haven't been posting that much lately. I hope you all come on over for tomorrows post and I'll see you all tomorrow for part 2
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Hobby Hunting
Lately I have gotten back into my hunting for a new hobby. This has happened plenty of times which can get annoying but I have to start using some of my new found discipline in order to accomplish my goals. Over time I have learned to act in ways against my current wishes at the time and it has taken a couple of years in order to finally get this down to a reasonable level. In other words I've been working on being disciplined by... being disciplined. That makes sense when you put it like that. When you think about it though you don't get better at anything without practicing that skill. Your talents are honed by using your talents after all. For example I wouldn't be this good at typing if I didn't type this much. I have about a 40 Words Per Minute typing speed that allows me to type out all 3 paragraphs in about 30 minutes if I know what I'm going to be talking about.
Talking about my blog what does everyone think about changing the focus of my blog. I know that this is a little bit sudden but I'm no longer home schooled which is important to remember. I can always reminisce but Day in Adventure just won't cut it anymore for me. I hope to dedicate a little bit more time to my blog and improve some of that quality with some of my new freedoms and time from Summer but who knows. I might set up a Twitter and possibly Instagram account in order to spread the word and let people follow me if they wish. Include some more media and maybe get a proper picture of me so that people can see who the heck I really am. I might even try to work on one blog entry over the course of a week in order to get more into a blog so there is more substance in the reading material. This could make the blog a little bit more disjointed but I will be able to start spanning myself over more paragraphs.
Did you know that I absolutely hate Selfies? Seems random, I know, but, This is the main reason why no one has ever really seen my face on the blog. Strange to see that one small choice as to not post a picture of myself can leave me wondering if anyone is even interested in me but more in the substance of my life. Then again, That's what my blog is about. I don't primarily write to let people get to know me but so that I can review my life and day to day rituals. This blog is an exercise of sorts. It allows me to learn more about the way I speak and act in reaction to people and peoples reaction to me. Feedback is what I always want but I don't get that much surprisingly. I wish I could see more posts as over the last few months only one person has posted a comment and that was my Grandpa. I have heard that there may be a problem with the comment section on my blog but I have no clue and I may need to double check this personally to see if there is something wrong.
Talking about my blog what does everyone think about changing the focus of my blog. I know that this is a little bit sudden but I'm no longer home schooled which is important to remember. I can always reminisce but Day in Adventure just won't cut it anymore for me. I hope to dedicate a little bit more time to my blog and improve some of that quality with some of my new freedoms and time from Summer but who knows. I might set up a Twitter and possibly Instagram account in order to spread the word and let people follow me if they wish. Include some more media and maybe get a proper picture of me so that people can see who the heck I really am. I might even try to work on one blog entry over the course of a week in order to get more into a blog so there is more substance in the reading material. This could make the blog a little bit more disjointed but I will be able to start spanning myself over more paragraphs.
Did you know that I absolutely hate Selfies? Seems random, I know, but, This is the main reason why no one has ever really seen my face on the blog. Strange to see that one small choice as to not post a picture of myself can leave me wondering if anyone is even interested in me but more in the substance of my life. Then again, That's what my blog is about. I don't primarily write to let people get to know me but so that I can review my life and day to day rituals. This blog is an exercise of sorts. It allows me to learn more about the way I speak and act in reaction to people and peoples reaction to me. Feedback is what I always want but I don't get that much surprisingly. I wish I could see more posts as over the last few months only one person has posted a comment and that was my Grandpa. I have heard that there may be a problem with the comment section on my blog but I have no clue and I may need to double check this personally to see if there is something wrong.
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