Camp Phil - Episode II - Revenge of the Pirates

This is the blog of what I remember of camp. Given that it's a couple of weeks ago and I have a terrible memory you'll only get a brief summary. Dr-dyb said I should have been writing a daily blog so that I could just copy and paste it in once I got internet access but I had no time to be doing that as everything was so hectic.

The main thing I noticed from camp was that I was much more confident this year. I pretty much knew what I was meant to be doing and didn't feel nervous about getting on with it. Knowing all of the team from the previous year was a bonus... especially given that I was in charge of them again and this year was ready to exert my authority ;-)

Camp was great at first... but then the kids arrived. We had some ice-breaker games and then a barbecue. Last year the barbecue was pretty rained off and one general helper kept trying to get the barbecue going despite all the rain by just using a hair-dryer... unsuccesfully obviously.

The theme for camp was 'Pirates'. When I came up with it I wasn't quite sure that it passed on the right message of God's love for us all and how we should treat our neighbours but we went with it anyway and the team and kids seemed to enjoy it. Some of us just went around shouting 'arrrrrrrrrrr' the whole week.

On Sunday we went to church in North Berwick who showed a video (15) of James Bond chasing a bad guy and the baddie getting away and thus winning so the message I got from that was that no matter how hard you try the baddie will always beat you... I'm not entirely sure that's the message the minister wanted to get accross but that's what he got accross.

I was running the tuch shop this year and I got a large amount of stock which Dorothy said I would never shift. One of the key rules of retail is buying at the right price, that's often more important than the price you sell at. I was told that Freddos were a really popular seller but I decided against buying them when the unit price cost slightly more than I could sell them at which meant the more I was able to sell the more of a loss I'd be making. You need the right balance between popular items and the mark-up you can put on them. A couple of the older leaders were shocked at my blatant capatlism especially once I started link selling and making special offers and megadeals to encourage the kids to buy more. Some leaders didn't have so much of a problem with that but more of a problem with how hyper all the kids were from the masses of sugar they were getting... it was for the greater good though as all the profits went back to SU.

On Monday a couple of the groups made videos. Stephen starred in one and played himself brilliantly. When Donald gets the right cable I'll download it and stick it on the interwebnet.

On Tuesday afternoon we went to the flight museum which was boring and involved a lot of walking.. I was more interested in looking for a seat than for classic planes.

Every day I did a modern bible study which was optional for the kids unless your name was 'David'. It was called "The Wide Awake Club" and generally David wasn't wide awake which meant that Stephen had to go into his room and shout "Wide Awake Club" before carrying (usually helped by Tim) David and his duvet outside and back in the other door. Generally somebody would have to sit on David or somehow otherwise restrain him without being kicked or bitten too much. Very often he needed gagged to prevent him shouting "I hate the Wide Awake Club" too loudly and distracting us from our bible study.

On Thursday we went to Blair Drummong Safari Park. I was dreading it because last year I hit the wall on the Thursday and was feeling exhausted and grumpy and really didn't have a very good time at all. This year I had a much better time. I led a sing-song on the minibus all the way there and when we were there the leaders all got the dodgems to themselves at first and we had a great dodgem fight. Why does it tell you to avoid head-on collisions when the people know that's exactly what the signs are going to make you want to do all the more? I love dodgems and coul dhave stayed on them all day if it wasn't for the fact that I had kids to look after... that and I was drawn my the wofting aroma of freshly cooked doughnuts. Mmmmm, doughnuts ::drool::

We had a drive round the safari park and I was able to see quite well as Raymond leant me a pair of binoculars and after that I went on a peddle boat... which I didn't pedal. Donald and I sat as passengers in the back as our man-slaves peddled us.

On Thursday night I was having a lovely wee chat with James in the kitchen when Donald interrupted us and gave us a row for being up too late... it was only 3am. Generally I call everyone who goes to bed before 5am and doesn't get up by 7am a light-weight but Donald wasn't amused. He was more angry with me as I'm meant to be the one who tels leaders to go to bed if they're up too late.

On Friday there was team sports day and a lot of people got very wet. I wasn't planning on being one of them until right at the end Fraser had the cheek to throw a whole bucket of water over me. I was... nae... I am... totally livid and vowed revenge on him. He was very fortunate that his belongings didn't all end up in the Peffer that night but I could see the look of fear in his eyes due to my impending revenge and I really thought that I would like him to constantly be looking over his shoulders and I could draw his suffering out longer and longer. I know his address and the trains are free for me... so, I'll be seeing you soon Fraser, mu ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, we also sang some great songs all week, arrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I feel I should thank the rest of the team for making camp such an enjoyable experience but as I pride myself in my levels of ingrattitude I won't.

A long weekend?

Hi Folks,

At the risk of falling behind I thought I better do a blog post. It's 6:30am and I'm up! It's either because I'm so into Personal Power right now that I've got a brilliant routine or because I went to bed at 7:30pm last night because I was really really really tired!

Last Thursday my health held our long enough to meet Paul and Dyb for lunch. Alan wasn't able to make tea oweing to some bad news he'd had which meant I could get on with a task I'd been putting off. Dyb supplied me with the required cable so I was able to get on with the tedious task of converting over 3 hours worth of audio cassette to CD which stupidly when I said to the person I'd do it I thought would take ten minutes... given it's tapes and you have to sit through the whole thing! I also had to reduce the hiss, remove clicks and pops and split it into tracks and burn onto CD so it really was a long task in the end!

About half an hour before I was going to get the bus home (I was doing all this in 'my' office at the church) I heard it raining outside. Now, for us saddos who have to get the bus places, from the church to Donald & Dorothy's is quite a long journey if you're reliant on the bus because you have to walk from the church about about two miles to the bus and then get the bus for an hour OR you can walk up the hill, along the road, cross over, wait for a bus, get that bus a mile and a half down the road then walk to the lights, cross over, walk up to the nearest stop and get the bus to their house for an hour. I decided to put off that journey as long as possible in the hopes that I wouldn't have to do it in the rain so I sent Stuart a text to tell him I was at the church if he had anything needed sorted for the Sunday service that required my tech.

He texted back to say he'd be straight over. When he came over he offered me a lift home so that we could put some files off of his external hard drive onto my laptop.

He stayed for a chat with us all for a while and the two of us also sorted out some of the service order.

On Friday we went to get some of the items of tuck shop for camp from various places and I made the eight sets of notices for the weekend, put the finishing touches to the Tape/CD's and did more work on the scripts for Sunday morning and night. In the evening I was watching an episode of The Simpsons but fell asleep so I went to my bed early but got up again after a few hours and then went to bed at my normal time.

Saturday was a long day of hard work at Scoughall.

I opted to avoid that and stayed at home instead :-) OK, I was still ill and by this time my gout was starting to kick in so I was doing my best to not let people notice that I wasn't walking quite as well as normal. The best way to do that is to not walk very much which only makes it a lot worse anyway. Oh, now I remember what else happened on Saturday! The people from the work party came back after they'd worked and quite a few of them stayed for a while and then some of us decided we'd go out to see Shrek 3 at night. Those of us who were going had a takeaway with The Webb's and Donald's parents and then Me, John, Laura, Other John, Stephen, Johnny, Alan & David went to the cinema.

I have to say I really enjoyed the trailers and I have two real reasons for saying that.

1) I really did like them, I'd love to see some of the films 'trailed'.
2) They were all I saw. About two minutes into the film I fell asleep and didn't wake up again until the closing credits.

On the plus-side I've now not ruined Shrek 1 and 2 for myself which I've never seen.

I was still missing some things I needed to know from Stuart in order to put the mornings service together and I knew he'd be stressing about it so rather than demanding them from him immediately and stressing him out more I just texted him and said not to worry and we could go over the things together and finish them off in the morning at 10 o'clock rather than going to the 1st service.

Having had a good couple of hours to sleep in the cinema I stayed up until my usual time and caught up with Dr Who... not literally, I watched a few episodes... I don't actually know the man.

On Sunday morning I met Stuart at ten and we finished the service up... or, so I thought. When I set things up at 11am there were suddenly a whole lot of changes needing done. I decided getting stressed just makes everyone more stressed and less productive so just took everything in my stride and got on with making them all whilst my pre-programmed 30-min pre-service autoplay with notices/songs/videos/welcomes etc ran up towards the 5 minute countdown. Stuart changed the batteries in the radio-mics and but mic packs on himself, Fiona and the speaker whilst I busied myself making all the changes like removing one song and replacing it with another and adding backing tracks I didn't know about from a CD I'd just been handed which I quickly needed to rip.

This was the first First Sunday that Fraser hasn't been around for and generally there are now two or three people on tech but I found myself alone doing it. Being the control freak that I am I actually loved it. Not only that but for the first time ever neither the chairman or the speaker wanted the clicker and wanted me to progress all of their stuff manually. The biggest worry is that I didn't have enough arms to do lights, video, powerpoints, recording, sound etc. It kept me busy and on my toes and it went without any major disaster although I still think I'm not as good a sound man as I am a video man. People are also spoiled by Fraser doing sound who really is very good at sound and loves sitting twiddling diles even when people like me would think the sound is fine.

We don't have a young people's lunch in July or August as people are always away so John, Laura, Other John and me went to get some food. John Gillan spotted the Quiz Machine so we had a play on that and made a staggering £7... good times! Unfortunately our meal was a lot more... bad times!

Yesterday I picked up three weeks worth of meds at the Chemist (which makes for quite a big bag) and didn't do a great deal more that was especially productive. As mentioned earlier I went to bed at 7:30. I still feel a bit horrible.

I'm also starting to worry about various things that I have going on in my head and also in the near future and need to get on with preparing the scripts for church for the two weeks I'm away and also get preparing the mountain of stuff for camp I need to do. All that and I'm also getting the keys for my new flat on Thursday... and I'm still ill! Oh, and my foot and wrist are in a pretty bad way. Arthritis has flaired up which means I can't get anything done which requires the ability to walk or lift anything.