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OA work weekends are events driven partly by planning and partly by force of personality on behalf of the youth and adults of the lodge.  Normally, a non-trivial part of the latter is Mike Shavel and his attention to people’s needs that borders some people wrongly interpret as obsequiousness.  He has attended near every lodge event for the past five years, sometimes going to comical extent to do so, “I traded two vacations for the right to be away on Mothers’ Day” and such.  Mike was away this weekend and event turn out was unusually high.  The weather held up and after a successful auction, I spoke with another adviser:

Me: Seems like everything went well this weekend.
Adviser: Yep.  A bit heavy on the last minute registration but that’s a happy problem.
Me: What about the ceremonies?
Adviser: Still below where we should be, but better than usual.
Me: The food seemed ok too.  Nothing ran out even with the attendance overage.
Adviser: Yeah, don’t tell Mike.
Me: Why?
Adviser: He might get the idea in his head that he can spend time with his family.
Me: Someone’s gotta keep his bald spot growing.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and there will be a freak lightning strike during the lodge meeting.

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The April work weekend was very damp, forcing the candidates and brothers into the dining hall for much of the afternoon during which the chief described the OA to the assembled Scouts.  I remember having been in similar situations where I had to fill time with stories and such and at first I smiled at our shared pain.  That is I smiled until his talking hit the 1:15 mark and my compunction against commentary dropped and wrote “stop talking” about 30 times on the Chief’s Facebook wall.  He stopped talking after about 95 minutes and then the true reason for the wall of speech became obvious.  The candidates were supposed to happily and silently toil to set up the camp as part of the Ordeal, instead they undertook the far more difficult task of happily and silently toiling to remain conscious.  They will be our lodge’s greatest generation.

 

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Sometimes I yell things at OA Executive Board meetings and this sometimes gets me into trouble.   At one meeting earlier in the lodge year someone mentioned that the lodge wouldn’t be having a chapter video competition so there’d be no videos at the lodge banquet to which I responded “Oh, there will be videos”. That turned into me challenging Brendan MacDonald to video contest. Tomorrow is the banquet so I started working on mine which was going to be an educational video about the power of the OA sash.

My first step was to find background music, preferably something with pizzicato strings a la 1950s educational music and found this:

I wanted something more like the background music here:

And finally, Steve pointed me to this:

Which was near perfect.

Along the way, I found that educational video is a thriving industry with its line musicians, sellouts and mavericks.

I had allotted six hours to the task and I’d blown 3.5 looking for background music and a 1950s style font.  Progress.

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The fudge from yesterday was quite good.  Not “salvage an otherwise shitty day” good, but nonetheless good.

I headed to Chris Fosmire’s house with the parts of the Bucktail for assembly and adviserly merriment.  I got there and laid out the parts and 1/2 the group assembled inserts while the rest of the group folded.  If I had my stuff together, I would have collated the center sheets and either stapled them or at least sorted them.  Midway through, we realized that some of the households were to receive two copies of the newsletter which happened because of a glitch in my formula for determining if the two people had the same address.  Finally, someone noted that some of the content was cut off by the fold because of how much paper was in the middle.  I was hoping this was going to be my last Bucktail, the magnus opus of newsletter generation for Ajapeu Lodge and the last time I’d have to fabricate content on behalf of a youth but I can’t let my legacy end with such obvious flaws.

I look forward to seeing what I will have done wrong in 2012 to keep me on until 2013.

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Part of the reason I like working with the Order of the Arrow so much is that what I do for them is very discrete, I take pictures, run auctions, update web pages, and publish the lodge newsletter: The Bucktail.  This gives me a bit of a soapbox for my views and I have no hesitation in using it.  This year, I waged war with fonts.

From the 2010 drop list:  “The following brothers have failed to pay their 2010 dues and will be dropped at the end of the calendar year.  They have been listed in shameful Comic Sans.”
From the 2011 drop list:  “The following brothers have not yet paid their 2011 dues and must pay to maintain active status in the lodge.  They have been listed in the respectful but unremarkable Century Schoolbook.”

I dropped “shameful” from the final copy but were space available I would have listed fully paid members in Tahoma and those who’ve paid ahead for 2012 in a fine Garamond (ligatures are what separate men from animals) or even the timeless Bodoni.

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Ajapeu Lodge is really close to getting Quality Lodge for its 9th year in a row and the lodge adviser has recently issued an offer of 4 premium lodge flaps for anyone who gets 5 people to re-up dues.  The set auctions for about $120 in total and this was sufficient inducement to view the unregistered list which I was glad to find was rife with staff members for the camp at which I once worked.  In about 15 minutes I’d sent out a dozen Facebook messages and 5 people replied and paid.  This brings me up to 9, and I may be able to get 15.

If all works out well, Christmas this year will be paid for entirely with Shelby Patch Company’s gold mylar embroidered wares.  To everyone who’s been lazy about re-registering, thank you.

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Every OA auction I do comes with a standard boat of personal terrors as, while I do research on each item with the assistance of some long-memoried fellows I still have a largely extemporaneous style that can theoretically get me into trouble.  I’m terrified of a Freudian slip or two words coming too close together and forming an ethnic slur and a dedicated team of braincells scan for such things.  A second set of fears is picking a bad minimum bid. $3 is cheap, $5 is normal, $8 is special, $20 is expensive/established price and I refuse to reduce the starting price once announced.  If I miss, I miss.

Bids were sluggish so I moved to a popular item, a grab mug.  I raised it stating the opening bid at $5.   Only one person bid and it sold for $5.  Historically, this means nothing as grab mugs were once sold at a fixed price of $3 consisting of a $1 mug and two or three $0.50 to $1.00 patches, but I’m somewhat proud of getting $12-$18 for these so $5 represented a crisis of confidence.  I was a bit shaken but moved on eventually returning to another mug.  This time, I did exactly what I did last time but mentioned that the mug was rare in that it had a blue fleur-de-lis but was a Boy Scout mug.  Hands shot up and I was redeemed.

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Staying in Totem felt both homey and odd as normally I stay there because I lacked the basic camping gear to stay elsewhere which I rectified to complete woodbadge last year.  Now, I had the more respectable excuse that I owned the appropriate gear and that I’d even recently stayed in genuine national parks but said gear was in Tucson… and I had the blog to prove it.

My work seems lazy during OA weekends, I usually sleep through breakfast and then tool around a bit and see what odd things I need to do before the patch auction.  This time, I was asked to up with an entirely fake copy of the Bucktail (the lodge newsletter).  I’m quite proud of the list of fabricated facts:

  • Mark was the only gospel apostle to not get Eagle but helped Luke get Brotherhood.
  • Tohickon is the Lenape term for “place to dispose of bodies”.
  • The insulation in Totem Lodge is made entirely of Triscuits.
  • As a prank in 1975, Ockanickon Scout Reservation was sold on Craiglist in exchange for 8 beaver pelts and an antique flax wheel.
  • The Science Center’s basement contains a capstan operated by Ordeal candidates which powers the xenon space laser used to calibrate the camp’s telescopes.
  • The camp’s totem poles are actually ancient Indian cell phone antennas.
  • Bill Mischke is challenged to a duel on average 1.12 times a summer camp season.
  • Ranger Dave Smith is a three-time New York Times crossword puzzle champion.
  • The diesel engine was invented and perfected in what is now the Handicraft Lodge.

The full fake document should be available shortly.

In the OA, besides generating fake content, I do little besides running patch auctions.  Tonight’s auction went frighteningly well with a reasonable start, reasonable end, no cases of me accidentally insulting someone’s sexuality or cursing, and a good selection of items.  I celebrated with a slice of re-frozen cheesecake which I thought was the cause of my insomnia but it turned out to be an observation my subconscious had noted that my active faculties hadn’t: I sold the 2004 NOAC two-piece for $40.

Friends don't let friends pay $40 for this patch.

This patch debutted at $8 for the two pieces and is a simply hideous patch.  The top makes no sense without the bottom, the deer looks like he’s taking a whiz behind the tree, the reference is 10 years late, and using “Brothers” twice is jarring to the ear.  Eight dollars to forty dollars, that’s 61% interest compounded annually…  I disgust me.

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I was first worried that the new lodge executive board wouldn’t have the skills and abilities needed to thrive in Scouting and direct the lodge.  All this washed away when the lodge 2nd vice chief presented a motion that passed that the new lodge chief couldn’t say “awesome” more than twice a meeting.

That’s how parli pro was meant to be used.