Hey fellow uberweb enthusiasts. So let me tell you about our youth camping trip.
It was a great time. Friday morning through Sunday afternoon. We had a much smaller group this year of 15 people, but nonetheless a good time was had by all.
The food was good, company was good, speaking was good, weather was awesome. We got there around 12:30 Friday afternoon and unpacked. One nice thing about having a smaller group was having so much less stuff to set up. They had enough help so the first thing I did was get out Andrew’s extremely desireable lounge camp chair.
I had a love/hate relationship with that chair all weekend. Love when I was sitting in it, and hate because it was stolen as soon as I got up. Everyone needs a chair like that. Yes. Thanks Andrew!
Friday evening we did an interesting activity. We split into 5 groups of 2 and sat with backs to each other. One person was the “artist” and the other had to describe a picture to them one shape at a time using only geometric terms. Needless to say, it was really pretty difficult. It was used as an analogy for our relationship with God, and how we have to trust Him because He can see the big picture, while we may only be able to see one “shape” at a time.
Friday night we did something different… a 7-player game of Monopoly.
I was leading for the longest time with houses on Park Place and Boardwalk, but somehow Rachel managed to knock me out at the end.
Highlights of Saturday included volleyball, swimming, tinfoil dinners, and s’mores. And in the true spirit of good old fanishioned, primitive outdoors camping, several of us stayed up and watched 24 on my laptop until the wee hours.
Good times, good times.
And of course what would campout be without the late night pranks?
Last year we put Hans’ tent on the pavilion roof while he was brushing his teeth. This year, Darrell and Naomi’s tent zippers were tied together. Good fun, and no revenge was dealt due to their great mercy. Thanks
Another mandatory experience was having a some form of great water/shaving cream/sand fight right before leaving on Sunday. So I grabbed a Super Soaker someone had kindly left on one of our picnic tables, filled it with hot water, and set off to make several people’s bottoms very wet. Unfortunately this act was not as well received, and revenge was freely dealt out. Luckily I had expected this and brought an extra change of clothes.
All in all a good experience. Tim’s speaking was really a blessing and gave me lots of things to think about.
One unfortunate consequence of said late night pranks was the lack of sufficient hours of sleep. At home, I took a 4 hour nap, got up for an hour, and then slept through the next 12. 16 hours of sleep, I’m pretty proud of that fact.
Today I got a new cellphone. It’s an LG VX8300 and I’m very happy with it. I was able to connect to my laptop using a virtual Bluetooth serial port and then use the excellent, open source BitPim to transfer wallpaper images and ringtones to the phone. So much better than paying 2 bucks to download a 30 second clip “ringtone.”
More on the phone, the disgustingly orange Verizon color scheme is finally not the only option. You can select some very nice, animated menu themes, and change the colors of the status bars. This is what sold the phone for me. I played with phones at the Verizon store for about 45 minutes and found that I absolutely despise their default theme, and how changing it was impossible on most phones. So I highly recommend this phone, not just for the scheme options, but it seems to be very well designed and full-featured. Woot!
So I learned something new on the way home from camping. My car gets significantly better gas mileage on the highway. Last time I filled up after a week of driving to work and around town, I got 26 mpg. Filling up after driving home, I found it got 36 mpg. A pretty amazing difference I think. It doesn’t really make sense to me. I was going anywhere between 70 and 85 mph for 2 hours. Seems like those higher speeds, which equal higher engine RPM and increased drag would be detrimental to mileage. Anyone care to explain?
In other news, I registered for the fall semester today. My list of required classes is diminishing rapidly. Looks like I’ll be taking 6, which leaves me little spare time. 4 are regular 16 week session, 1 is during the 2nd 8 weeks, and 1 is online. Joy. Oh well, I take comfort in the fact that it will all be over soon.
Thanks for reading and have a great day!