Sing Around the Lake and Canoe Formation!

I know I should never get complacent with technology. I’m the I.T. guy around here. Like a lot of things, I have enough interest to know a bit about things techy, but not enough to get us out of every pickle. I am a pretty good problem solver though. I got complacent tonight. Let me back up a little bit. I was feeling so confident and “ahead” this afternoon that I thought…I’ll go out to the farm for the last day of activities with the girls. I had some things to do out there. We’re building some garage doors for one of the buildings because I couldn’t find anything “campy” enough. Our carpenters needed a little direction. The garden needed some weeding and a couple of the rows of beans were a little yellow so I picked up some lime on the way out. Perfect…I arrived about the time the girls did. The sun was hot midday, I had worked up a sweat and after about thirty minutes of garden tending, I couldn’t help but wander over to where the “farm girls” were happily constructing a store bought slip n slide on the hill to cool off. I like to do everything big, so my idea of a slip n slide is going to Lowes and buying a roll of plastic big enough to cover your house…finding the biggest hill around with a good landing spot and soaking that baby with Dawn dish detergent. So, as they were taking their “mini” slides, I slipped around to the pond and dove in. They couldn’t believe it. “You can swim in there”?! This is a mountain spring fed pond…cold and deep on purpose….perfect for swimming. We had tubes from the river, three lifeguards, and the inaugural swim in our farm swimming hole. Nothing says carefree summer like a dip in a great swimming hole fully clad in shorts and t-shirts 🙂 It was a great afternoon.

Back to my story. I lost track of time. The girls headed back to camp, and I stayed and did some of the tilling I had intended to do. Tonight’s evening program starts with a selection of our favorite images from the summer that you all have enjoyed online projected in a slide show on the big screen in McLeod. It was also bag supper, so I didn’t “have” to be back to help dinner get started and was a little late…not too late, but maybe a little. I had already copied the images to a USB “thumb” drive, so they were ready. The music was “CIA” (Camp Illahee Appropriate) and on an iPod. By the time I got there to plug the thumb drive into the projector, the entire camp was seated and ready except for Hillbrook, who arrived shortly after I did. We started the show with images of CITs when they were babies or first Illahee campers and then now…and then the show. The images came up…and then stayed up. The transition was set for 3 seconds, but they were taking closer to ten! We had 400 of them for a 30 minute slide show at 3 seconds per…triple that and we’re talking an hour and half. What was wrong? The girls were loving it, but those of us who are keepers of the schedule knew that this would throw us back a bit. 30 images into it, I realized…I had loaded the full resolution versions onto the thumb drive and it was taking the projector that long to read the files! Yikes…nothing I could do at this point, but made a note on my tickle file to remind myself next session.

A day in the life…of a camp director who has too much on his plate, and will always defer to fun stuff with campers. It’s not “world peace” we’re dealing with here (thank goodness). The girls loved seeing themselves on stage, clapping, shouting, singing…we finished in an hour (some didn’t take the full ten seconds) and then each hill gathered around the lake around their own campfire and serenaded the other hills in song. This is always such a beautiful time, on a clear cool summer’s eve, with twilight falling, friends arm and arm and the sounds angelic echoing from the hills. Our girls chosen for canoe formation finished the evening with a terrific display of precision canoeing, candlelit and very dramatic with Pachelbel and friends providing the cadence. It was a terrific last day of activities in the Heavenly. Our 3 day trips girls returned happy and with lots of tales about the Best 3 day ever. The staff concurred and I previewed a little video that makes me think that maybe indeed…

Tomorrow will be a full day. I know A Lot of girls who are going to be happy to see you on Friday, but not so happy about the reason you are here.