You won’t hear from me for about a week unless I find internet access at camp which is very unlikely.
What do I hope to accomplish at Mt. Juliet’s camp this week?

1. Provide young people with Christian teaching and encouragement.
2. Grow closer to the folks from my own congregation.
3. Have a good time, after all it’s the last vacation day I’ll have until Labor Day.

I’ll be leaving straight from church right after morning worship service. The rest of the crew is going at 1PM, but I hope to get there early to help setup. Besides whenever anyone sets a specific time to leave, they usually leave at least 30 minutes later than when they originally said.
Let’s try a little experiment. If you do read this weblog, leave a comment in the comment link right below this post. Even if you only want to give your inituals instead of your real name, leave a comment. I still don’t know how many people read this. I am curious to see who is reading this.

At Short Mountain one of the kids told me I was their favorite counselor. This made me feel better about myself. Even though I was technically not a counselor….only a visitor who stayed only 2 days….somehow I had made a difference to someone.
Darrell seems to think that he doesn’t get enough sleep at camp. Personally I think he could get plenty of sleep. During the afternoon hours Darrell would go back to the cabin and sleep for several hours. Then he’d stay up til 3AM for some reason. He’d say that it was to watch over the camp. But I’m not so sure. Sometimes it was for putting together the camp daily newspaper, but that could be done earlier on. It doesn’t even come out until later the next day. Who’s to say they couldn’t do it during the after breakfast time?
During the night I did put the Chinese flag on the flagpole at camp. It was meant as a joke, and I think most people thought it was at least funny or somewhat unusual. I was told that one person was offended by it, but I don’t know who. So I guess I should apologize to anyone reading this from SMBC who may have been offended. I’m as patriotic as anyone else. The idea of a Chinese flag appearing on a flagpole in the heartland of America is just absurd, which is what makes it funny. It really wasn’t meant as a political statement in any sense of the word.
Someone bought a duckling and brought it to camp. At one point they put it in the camp lake. But later on they retrieved it because we thought that it couldn’t survive on its own. So somone brought home a duck from camp.
Obviously the camp computer is working. I was chatting with some friends there yesterday. Glad it started working, but then again I wish would could have fixed it without having to format the drive. I was hoping to post some weblog updates from camp, but it just didn’t happen in time.

Short Mountain was good. I went horseback riding Wednesday. The only problem was that I got a horse (Gabriel) who wasn’t trained well yet. So it kept getting off the trail. I had to steer it (which I wasn’t good at anyways).
Their pool is pretty deep in spots. 9 feet is available for diving. And the 5 foot area is a bit deeper than 5 foot. I thought it
Another computer guru and I worked Wednesday night and Thursday morning trying to fix the camp’s computer. Seems that ever since they installed Norton Anti-virus, they haven’t been able to get their modem to dial out. After trying everything else, we finally formatted the computer and put Windows 98 back on it. Unfortunately we couldn’t get a driver for the modem, so it was not usuable. I think they sent someone to buy a modem (with an installation disk with a driver preferably).
The other part of the time we refilled some drink machines. Those drink machines become empty quite frequently when you have 230 thirsty kids in the middle of July. I figured it would be neat to see the inside of a drink machine, and help out a little bit by filling it up. Refilling the RC drink machine was no problem. We knew exactly where the different brands of drink went. The Gatorade machine was a different story. It was confusing. The selections and columns were labeled weird. We filled it up wrong and ended up having to fill it again. Gatorade all tastes the same anyways, what difference does it make? Anyways it was cool to see the inside of a drink machine and to figure out how it works.
The best meal at camp? High school pizza for lunch on Thursday! It had been a while since I had this. We ate them on the typical lunchroom trays you’d see in elementary and junior high schools. The whole meal reminded me of a school cafeteria.
The strangest meal? Eating what looked like a corndog for breakfast. It was actualaly a sausage on a stick wrapped in pancake batter. Tasted good.
This camp seems to be run pretty smoothly. They have a good staff and everyone seems to know what to do when it comes time to do something. Wednesday night was parents night. We must have had 500+ people for worship services that night. No enough chairs for everyone.
Someone had posted porn site listing on the church webpage discussion board. I deleted it as soon as I got back. It’s a bit frustrating that this type of thing happens, especially when I go on vacation. Something like this does not happen to often. I try to take them down as soon as I find out about it.
In other news…
Disney Plans Theme Park in Shanghai, China….this should be cool if it is built and opens.

I am back from Short Mountain. I left at around 9:30PM and got back at around 11PM. I had planned on staying just for the evening worship service. We had a few responses and I felt like I needed to say some encouraging words to those who responded. We did have a baptism tonight. It’s always good to leave camp on a good note.
I felt genuinely accepted there. Everyone seemed friendly and encouraging toward me. They run a smooth camp for having so many people.
Now I must get some sleep. Stayed up really late last night…..got up early this morning for a hot shower.

Leaving for Short Mountain camp today. Just staying for a couple of days. Darrell and Tracy will be there, plus the rest of the Center Chapel crew, who are usually friendly toward me. We’ll see if it was worth taking off 2 days for. I’m the type of person who must go somewhere on their day off. Since already work from home it makes no sense the hang around the house on my days off.
Since the camp is completely full, I’ll be sleeping in a bed of someone who got sent home early. Saturday I asked Darrell what was the likely scenerio – a little kid being sent home because of homesickness or a teenager being sent home because of fighting. He said hopefully the homesickness part as they don’t want any violence at camp.
It’s sorta sad. This marks the beginning of the end of summer. In 2 weeks more than likely I won’t take off anymore days until Christmas since I really won’t have a reason to take off. I’ll look forward to the obligatory have-a-good-time message from “bob.”

Should I ruin a good thing� by inviting Mt. Juliet’s youth group to Taylor Christian Camp next year? Will the whole space time continuum be disrupted? Dogs and cats living together….mass hysteria. But seriously I am not sure if the MJ crew would mesh together with the Taylor folks. Both seem set in their ways.
I am apprehensive that if the MJ crew were to go and do something highly disruptive and asked not to come back…would I be able to come back to TCC? Who knows. In this day and time where church politics and disagreements seem a certain as death and taxes, you can pretty much guarantee a missunderstanding in one form or another.
MJ’s parents have a peculiarity of bringing home their kids early from camp on Thursday night. There is so much more you could do if everyone would stay the duration of camp. That extra night for devotionals…. I don’t know why it is encouraged or seemlingly popular among the kids and parents. You paid for 5 and a half days at camp. You should stay the entire week.
I have been told to take MJ’s camp in stride. Nothing is really planned out to a tee and things can change at the last minute. While I understand that some things can’t be planned for, I want some type of order to things. Am I expecting too much? To be honest, last time I went to camp with MJ when they were by themselves….’96 and ’97….it wasn’t exactly jump-up-and-down scream-and-shout type fun. It had its moments, but there was just something missing.
On another aggrivating note, Comcast and Alwaysonline have once again decided they can’t stand each other and won’t connect. This means I can’t view my webpage nor any other webpage on Alwaysonline. This usually lasts for a few hours or sometimes days before it is corrected. The very reason that I can post to this webpage shows that other sites can see this, just not me. The drones at Comcast seem to think it is my computer’s problems, while I know that it must be their problem. My mom is pretty anxious to get her company’s webpage up and running. It’s hosted by Alwaysonline, so there is no chance I can get it up and running right now.