My Near Death Experience

I went to Kankakee last night for a post camp meeting with Sara and Caren. We have to do a report after camp is over that explains how camp went, what we’d like to see changed at the campground, as well as the expenses we incurred. We went out to Baker’s Square and had a grand old time.

After that I decided to tag along with Sara, since she was headed out to camp to hang out with the senior highers. Senior High camp is this week, and I know a lot of the kids from either quizzing, or from camp last week as several of them volunteered. I figured it would be fun. I’d hang out for awhile and go home.

We get there and we’re just hanging out when we see kids getting ready to leave on a hayride. It’s not really a hayride as there’s no hay, but it’s fun non the less. You pack about 45 people on a rack behind a tractor and go. We were hanging out “by” the hay rack when several of the kids tried to get us to go. The finally convinced us and both Sara and I jumped on. We do the hay rack ride at EC Camp, but being a director I haven’t been in a few years, si I was looking forward to it.

We spent the first 20 minutes driving really slowly down the road. We finally came to a turn off into the woods, and the tractor driver gunned it into the woods on these back trails they have at camp. It’s a little freaky at night, but nothing to frightening. We got stuck in the mud a few times, since it had been raining earlier, but with the help of some of the guys we were able to push through it.

We reached the middle of the trail and then turned around. Somehow on the way back we took a wrong turn (probably because it was dark), and ended up driving next to a river bed that had dried up a long time ago. As we started to drive past it the wheels on the right side of the rack started to slip and give way. At this point I thought I was a goner. The rack is going to flip over and crush me, along with most of the kids on the ride. After a momentary fright I started looking for ways to grab people and throw them off the back (since we were relatively close to the back) in order to get them out of the way. Luckily the driver realized what was happening, so he stopped the tractor and one of the adult leaders frantically told everyone to get off. We were still slipping a little bit, but as people get off it started to stabilize. Once everyone was off the driver was able to pull forward and everything was OK. We then proceeded to walk back (Sara and I and another camper), while everyone else jumped back on.

Let me just tell you. Frightening. I’m not even kidding. I swore I was going to end up on the nightly news. “Teens and Adults Die in Freak Hay Ride Accident.” I think it’s going to be at least a couple of weeks before I have the courage to get back on one of those things. :)

Ode To My Cell Phone

My cell phone died a horrible death this past Friday. Luckily, because it’s a pocketpc windows phone I was able to reset it to factory settings. It would power on just fine, but then it wouldn’t boot into the OS. It just sat there. After a factory reset everything was back to normal, or so I thought.

Putting the phone back to factory defaults wipes the configuration that’s stored in the phones memory. This included all of my contacts. I realized I was going to lose them when I reset the phone, but I thought I had a relatively recent backup of all of them in my outlook since I sync my phone with outlook (No, I do not use outlook for mail). It turns out since I switched laptops in December I had not synced my phone. My old laptop had become a hand me down, so no luck there. I also had a backup of my pst file on frenzy (our file server), but that died a horrible death when our raid array got corrupted.

At this point I was a bit distraught, but I had one last hope. My old phone was a windows mobile phone, so maybe it had the contacts from December. I could merely sync it with outlook and then sync my new phone. Again, failure. My old phone had been sitting around for so long that the battery had died and wiped it’s memory. I’m really shocked that they didn’t make the memory on those things solid state. I mean seriously, what’s the point of having the phone if you take out your battery and the backup battery drains in a few weeks and you lose everything?

So, yeah, as you may have guessed I have lost all hope. All of my contacts are gone. So if I haven’t talked to you in the past week it’s probably because I don’t have your phone number. I can rebuild most of it, but there are certain people I had numbers for that I haven’t talked to in years. I may not talk to them for a long time, but now I don’t even have the option. It’s going to be awhile before I can piece it all back together, but I have high hopes that with all of my friends I can get the numbers I’ve lost. I just wish I had ben more careful with backups. Live and learn I guess.

CALL ME. I won’t call you. :)

EC Camp 2007

Last week was EC camp. For those of you who don’t know, I direct co-direct a camp for special needs kids and adults every summer through the Nazarene Church. This past year was my 12th year and 6th as a director. It’s amazing how time flies. I remember when I was just a high schooler doing camp for the first time. We actually reminisced about that this past week. I remember being terrified my first year and now I’m a director. Crazy. Simply Crazy.

Anyways, camp was great. I started the week not really wanting to be there, because I had worked a ton to get stuff done before I could leave for camp. I went into the week exhausted. We arrived at Sara’s house on Monday night at about 10:00 PM and proceeded to spend the next 2 and a half hours working, trying to get stuff done that had to be finished before I could unplug and do camp. It was rather stressful to say the least.

Once camp started I was fine. We started Tuesday morning with training. Training went well. I think we did a good job of balancing the training for the new counselors (about half were new), as well as for the old ones who had heard everything before. We didn’t get a lot of questions, so I guess that’s a good thing. Campers, arrived an hour after training. We had most of our usuals, as well as a few new campers.

We had one camper who tried to “run away” on tuesday night, at least that’s what it looked like. He wandered away from the cabin at bedtime and just happened to be wandering toward the road. Everyone got a little stressed out by the situation. Everything turned out fine, and actually he was found back at his cabin, but for about 10 minutes it was a little crazy.

The rest of the week was relatively normal. We went to Splash Valley twice, horseback riding once. A group from Cincinnati did our chapels again.

We also had our annual pepsi shots event. That was a lot of fun, though I missed the first part of it since I was helping Jed find the campground in the middle of the night in a rainstorm. I ended up downing 11 shots (I have no idea how much pepsi that is but I should figure it out). Scott (who won) downed 22 shots. Everyone probably would have had more, but we ran out of Pepsi. How depressing. :)

By the end of camp I was happy I was there, and I was really sad to go. That’s usually how it happens. Camp is really hard the first few days because it’s a lot of work, but then by the end you don’t think you really want to leave.

I did put up all the pictures I had. You can find them here. I’ve also given you a few spoilers below.

Our theme this year…

Horseback riding…

Splash Valley…

My sister and I…

Pepsi Shots!

I’ve been busy….

23 days since my last post, and messages like this….

(Names have been changed to protect the odd)
>10:14:53 AM DotNetGroupie: Driscoll
>10:14:54 AM DotNetGroupie: words cannot express how disappointed I am with you
>10:14:57 AM DotNetGroupie: here I go on a 10 day vacation and have nary a new blog post to read when i get home

….have forced me to reevaluate my priorities when it comes to my blog.

I had several posts I wanted to write in the past three weeks and things just got in the way. I was going to go back in time and post about all the stuff I’ve been doing, but I think I’ve decided to let it go and move on to the stuff that’s currently happening as it’s fresh in my mind. So hang on as I clog the RSS feeds.

High School Jipped Me

I discovered over the weekend that I was jipped by my high school education. I’m pretty sure it’s a global conspiracy. Recently I have become utterly fascinated by language. I am trying to learn German and I am studying the history of English in a couple of different books. As some of you know my goal is to learn several languages in the near future simply because I can.

Anyways, in my studies I’ve been listening to The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg. He’s an English writer/historian who’s done quite extensive research into how the English came to be. I purchased his book in audio form from Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales. He had quite the influence on the English language. I studied Chaucer’s work in school, but was unaware (or perhaps I was and forgot) that what we read was a modern translation of his work. I must say I wish I had read the original, because even though it’s Old English it’s still dang cool.

Here’s an excerpt from wikipedia.com.

The Original…
>This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,
>And God it woot, that it is litel wonder;
>Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.

The Modern Translation…
>This friar boasts that he knows hell,
>And God knows that it is little wonder;
>Friars and fiends are seldom far apart.

Here’s a link to the entire excerpt.

Now I have embarked on a mission to obtain a copy of this work in Chaucer’s original writing. I want to read it in the original Old English. Why you may ask? Simply because I can.