We have great potato salad

I have a big 'ol paper to write for tomorrow, but I wanted to blog update more often, so I'm going to dig up an old draft that never made it to the blog. Not sure why this one never got published, but it's over a year old and chock-full of memories. I think I'll comment throughout. This will be much faster than writing an actual blog and I can get back to my comparison of McCain and Obama's convention speeches. Womp Wommmmmp. I guess I could post that once it's graded, but it'll probably be mad boring. But I digest. Without further ado (and also without Freddy Adu), I give to you...an old unfinished post from June 20th, 2007.

Whoa!

Camp Phillip is crazy.

I recently spent a week and a half up there, and it was quite the experience.

First of all was junior staff training week, which I never can do justice to on a blog. I'm not actually sure I've ever tried to do justice to it, because the majority (or totality, possibly) of my readership was there for it. [On this note, does anyone non-Becca read this anymore? I guess Bethy and Paul read the last one, but...blogging seems to have gone the way of myspace and the dinosaur, I suppose. Oh well, I will work to keep blogging alive.] So I'll say this - C'mere, Sonny.

That isn't actually a reference to anything that happened during training week [Rather, one of the funniest things Kyle Fax has ever said], but there were a lot of fun things that happened, a few highlights, in no particular order

- PM/PM [technically "A.E.P.M" but who likes that name?] after campfire on Wednesday
- Doing our campfire (The sheer enjoyability of working with my group, getting some laughs etc..[and of course, cheating to make sure we all ended up in the same group. So clique-y. But our campfire rocked, so it's okay. "I'm ruined!!"])
- Playing "Bubba ball" with Andrew Lehman, many females, and Pablo the random hispanic boy (I'm pretty sure that was his name, at least the Pablo part)
- Finally having Elliott Kasprzak as a counselor in his last year at Camp

And obviously there are more, those are just four that were on the top of my head. Overall, a fun week as always.

Next after training week was Family Fest (A.K.A. "WELS stock" - actually a pretty good name for it). I didn't really know what to expect for family fest, because I had never been to one before. The only reason I was staying was because I was unexpectedly [of course I was unexpectedly scheduled...is anyone expectedly scheduled for Jr. Staff duty? Put it together, Blake of 15 months ago.] scheduled for pee wees the next week, so it was far easier to just stick around.

Family fest ended up being, through all the activities and attractions, mostly kitchen work. Just as well though, the kitchen has its moments. It all counts as volunteer hours for scholarships, eh? I did get to end up seeing a lot of people I probably would not have seen this summer otherwise, including but not limited to: My host family from Manitowoc day camp, Dan Brunner and Dave Moldenhauer and this girl that came with them who I didn't know but everyone else seemed to for some reason [this was Hannah Brunner. Looking back, I feel dumb for not knowing that at the time], Adam Carruthers (yes!)[Evan told me that during SALT training, Matthew was talking about campfire planning and how when taking camper suggestions for games like Fortunately/Unfortunately, stuff like "Adam Carruthers!" should not be picked, because not everyone would get it. He actually used that example, which I find hilarious, because I think I started the Adam Carruthers at campfire thing.], and Ben Stein, who is getting married.

But essentially, family fest just meant that I was more tired for the half-week of exhaustion also known as pee wees.

For those who don't know (which I doubt is anyone), pee wees is a camp that runs a good portion of the day (but not 24/7) for kids in grades K-2. I'm not sure how much I have to say about the actually counseling portion of the week, because as long as you can imagine me trying to corral 7 very different 6-year-olds during each activity, you have a pretty good idea of how it was [Might I add, this will make me a totally awesome dad. I hope. I would like to be a good dad some day...and also a good uncle, because how sweet are family gatherings going to be when my family convenes with Uncle Evan and his? I'm already looking forward to it.].

But because of the ages of the kids, they're only with us for the day, and they're with their parents for the evening, so we get a lot of time to hang out with our fellow pee wee staff. This week, though, because of the far greater number of female junior staff as compared to the numbers of males, the ratio of junior staff was 7 girls to me.

So that was a little different. If I was going to hang out with anyone, it was going to be with girls (most of them younger than me too, only one of the seven had done Jr. Staff before - a couple of them were campers during the most recent week I junior staffed [I remember looking at the sheet of volunteers and not seeing any names I recognized and then asking Sarah Thurs to volunteer so there would be someone else I knew working pee wees with me. And she obliged, how nice of her. But I actually made pretty good friends with a bunch of the newbie group, which included the likes of Clare Sievert, et al. And now Caleb Schmiege is friends with Clare, and not even directly because of me. Small WELS world.]). Luckily they were a neat bunch, but I was in on more "girl talk" than I think I've ever been in my entire life up to that point. We even had a soul-pouring out reflections, that involved crying.

Well, I wasn't crying, but still. It gives you an idea.

It was fun though, they were a really neat bunch of girls. It was just a totally new experience to me.

So I guess this is why this draft never found its way onto the blog...because I couldn't come up with an ending. I also chuckled at the title when I opened this, because I believe it's from a long-forgotten series of texts and phone conversation(s?) with a certain disgruntled Badger Girl's State attendee (not Allison) and myself. Not sure what else I can comment on in that post that I didn't already cover throughout. But let me just say this: C'mere, Sonny.