July 4th Reminded Me of Oregon

July 6th, 2009 – My highlight of the 4th of July was a beer. I was in bed before the sun went down. But I was reminded of the 4th in Oregon as it did rain. If it wasn’t for the lightning and thunder accompanying it, it would have been like a typical Oregon 4th.

The weather here is about the same each day. The sun is out, it is warm. The clouds come, it cools off a little. The thunder clouds come and so does the rain. Almost everyday is having some rain, but it usually passes kind of quickly.

Yesterday (Sunday) was a pretty mellow day around camp. Not many activities for the kids and lots-o-meetings for the staff and counselors. I, not being either of those, wonder about doing as I like. I did do the first pottery firing in the kiln. I set it and then went to see what else was going on. I came back about an hour later to popping and exploding sounds emanating from the kiln. The final results – the majority of the pieces exploded and there were 1,000s of shards to be cleaned up. A few survived and a couple just blew the bottom off themselves. I think we will have to up our quality control and criteria for what gets fired. I we’ll need to make sure it is very dry before it goes in. And maybe a waiver for the kids to sign stating they won’t be upset when their piece becomes pieces.

I also took a hike up ‘A’ bluff yesterday. It’s the highest of the ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ bluff threesome. A bluff here is a hill that has a rock outcropping on it. I missed the cutoff and went a little out of my way to finally get to the bluff. But the last part of the hike is more of a choose your own route rock scramble. Having not come in the correct way, neither did I find the easiest way up. I just made sure that anything I went up I also could made it down. It’s surprising how much easier it is to go up a bunch of rocks then down. But once at the top the view was great. Unfortunately I left my camera in my pack that was back in the car in the camp parking lot. I’ll have to climb it again to get some shots. Once on top I did locate the easier routes up and down to the top of the bluff. In fact I was real close to the place when I first approached the rocks, but I went counterclockwise rather than clockwise to find a good route up. And being a little impatient, I didn’t circle far enough and scrambled up a route that would have caused my damage then needed if I misstepped.

Today was another choose my own adventure day. I chose to go around to the other activities and snap some photos. There were many all day events for the campers, so I thought it would be a good time to get some candid photos as an excuse for going on my own little nature walk. Of course a number of the events were off site and others I had no idea where they were taking place, so I just did the ones I could find. This including getting some pictures of 3 girls on top of ‘A’ bluff, the girls trying out for the inter-camp rodeo coming up on Saturday against the boys camp, and the high rope challenge being lead by Travis. Along the way I also picked up a couple nature shots of animals and flowers.

All this took longer than I thought about, so I missed lunch back at camp. This just meant I got to get my own from the leftovers in the frig. No great, being that it is left over camp food, but the selection is not bad as there is usually stuff from several meals waiting to be eaten. And if it’s not finished by Sunday, it becomes part of the $1,000,000 buffet for Sunday lunch – yummm!

Well, I need to go make a phone call.

Reporting from The Nature Place (www.thenatureplace.net)
Paul