Welcome, Magne Gundersen. Â You will be expected to harness your powers to improve Bucks County Council and play the hardingfele, and have an Henrik Ibsen night. Â Otherwise, you’ve got a lot of hands to shake.
Author: Terry
Meeting the Candidates
The quest for a Scout Executive, a task that seems to have passed with blissful ease for all but the handful of people who’ve dealt with nothing but for several months, is nearing its end and tonight was the antepenultimate event in the  process coming before the final interviews and announcement which will occur tomorrow.  I had been invited to a largely social gathering of the candidates, their spouses, the selection committee and a few others in Newtown and had a chance to talk to the applicants, each of whom had been drawn from across the eastern seaboard.  The banter was light most of the time and the common thread of the Scout experience came out in all cases as no one in the room didn’t have a summer camp story and I felt woefully underarmed with FOS (Friends of Scouting, a Boy Scout fundraising structure) gaffes, which I plan on being slow to accumulate.  After about an hour of chat I realized I had experienced something new in my Scouting time, meeting a nervous professional.  Most professionals I’ve dealt with were either entirely polish or were oblivious to harms but in most cases the excitement of “I want to do this job” was almost palpable and a welcome change from previous leadership.
All of the candidates were delightfully human, using their spouses as memory aids when someone asked a question or politely dodging the worst-of-both-worlds meteorology that marks the Mid-Atlantic.  All but one was was flummoxed when I asked what merit badge should be added to Scouting, the last said “pigeon racing” without missing a beat.  Any failing to dodge my conversational caltrops were made up for with my much easier question on the Anna Karenina question of Councils in “how does Bucks County suck in its own unique way and how will you fix it?”  Here, everyone rightly pointed out our inability to interface with the community, our marketing efforts which had made barely a ripple in the collective consciousness and the observation that our previous executive simply didn’t stay very long at events.  Two seemed to eschew modern communication tools in favor of the perpetual phone call and two were advocates of hyper-connectivity; I think either could work.
Tomorrow will be an interesting day.
Baking Arms Race
Making cookies follows a repeating cycle once the batter is made. Â For peanut butter cookies, after each tray does 7 minutes 30 seconds on each of rack A and C in the oven, they’re left out to cool for 9 minutes before being transferred to a cooling rack where upon the baking sheets are repopulated with dough and put in the oven. Â I ordered a second set of baking sheets and silicone mats thinking this would reduce my total baking time, instead I chose to double the batch. Â The double batch doesn’t quite fit in my stand mixer so I’m getting a 6 qt mixer which appears like it won’t quite fit in my appliance rack. Â A larger rack would require me to either move it find a new home for my crockpot.
It all starts small; this is why the national debt is topping $14 thousand thousand million.
Banquet Video
My video:Â sashtake1
It was well received. Â My normal rule is that I want a 6 to 1 return on delivery time vs. participant benefit time. Â It took me about 6 hours to create a 1:22 video so it’d have to be viewed 1581 times for it to be “worth it” by my calculus. Â There were a little over 100 people at the banquet and I’ve thrown it on Facebook as YouTube would pull it immediately as a blazing beacon of copyright infringement. Â To meet my false parametrization of time, I’ll just assume everyone I know on Facebook watched it twice.
Background Music
Sometimes I yell things at OA Executive Board meetings and this sometimes gets me into trouble. Â 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. Â Progress.
Non-Continuous Foods
Instantaneous anger of the esoteric could be considered my bailiwick as I’ve gotten angry over corn napkins, the pronunciation of pagan holidays, photosynthesis and now most recently the discrete nature of most foods. Sticking to “stop eating when you reach a point where you won’t be hungry again for a bit” has helped but has led to some odd portion sizings and today I got mad that I couldn’t have 4.5 chicken strips and 2/3rds of an orange as that would be my target portion size for a lunch. Going from having 21 tater tots to 18 was fine but 12 to 9 was much more noticeable despite being the same absolute gap. I can’t have a 1.5 egg breakfast sandwich but 2 is too much and 1 is too few so I’ve switched from sausage to bacon to pork roll and back to bacon after the chef at work started giving me double slices. I ordered a chicken salad last week and wanted 6 oz of chicken not 5 or 8 and upon going with the 5 had some salad left over as I hadn’t considered that’d I’d receive enough croutons to build a small bunker. Foods more amenable to continuous change tend to be grains that tend to put me to sleep or liquids which leads to weird cases where Max gets 2 of my 12 oz of corn chowder soup.
Strangely, other things ignore this trend as while I can limit myself to 3 Oreos at the end of dinner, I’ve not been able to master only having 4 Fig Newtons. I’m pretty good with having 3 oz of cheese but having 2 oz of corn chips proves elusive. So there is my first-world-problem temper tantrum of the week.
Fume Hood Notes
My split-timing has led me to want to take out years of annoyance about lab quirks on their unsuspecting possessors. One fellow has a sign on his fume hood sash that reads “Please keep closed when not in use. THIS MEANS YOU.” I asked my boss what would happen if I added a “Don’t post passive aggressive notes in the viewing area of fume heads. THIS MEANS YOU” sign next to it. Response: You’d have a lot more free time.
Bored Cakesumption
Coworker: You’ve brought in pineapple upside down cake before, aren’t you going to try something new?
Me: People seem to like it, and it’s easy to make. Â Was there a problem with it?
Coworker: No.
Me: How many pieces did you have?
Coworker: … two, but the second one wasn’t that big.
I’m going to continue to bring in pineapple upside down cake.
Closing Thoughts from Cincinnati
The Chevy Conversion Van clocked a whopping 14mph for the trip meaning 2 30mpg  cars would have been more efficient gas-wise but would have probably lost in terms of total cost once one includes tolls, wear and tear, and the time of the drivers.  Bob was glad to get his car back filled with origami bits like a dog, butterfly, and something he simply described as a “squarey thing” and I was glad to get back Wanda.  He described my Matrix as “sporty” which is a descriptor that would fit more to a shopping cart than my car.
Otherwise, I wanted to run down some closing thoughts:
- When settling large checks (like the $550 beergarten tab) I normally have to do two rounds to find unclaimed dishes as people forget appetizers or drinks. Â On my first go, what people paid for was within 2 dollars of the total.
- I stand by my default assumption that someone’s a reasonable adult even if they’ve displayed otherwise and only changing that assumption once one has done harm to oneself or has came incredibly close to causing irrevocable harm to others.
- The Internet promotes togetherness not isolation. Â When the web allows you to do something without interacting with a person like banking or shopping that’s liberation not solitude. Â While the plural of anecdote is not data, I have driven 25000 Interromiles proving this point.
- I think the InterroCoins made a good memento and inducement to pay quickly as that was the “unlockable” for settling one’s tab with me.
- I still dislike the term “drama” in reference to interpersonal problems.  People have feelings, rather strong ones at times, and in blatant violation of my second bullet point we’re not always rational but we have reason to be unreasoned.  The response to this should neither be derision or sanctimony but compassion and patience.  Drama to me is when the strength of a response isn’t commensurate with the importance of the topic and getting riled up over gay rights is fine but not over tea cozy styles.  Considering the importance of connecting to another person, there are few cases where true “drama” emerges in light of what’s at stake.
- Starting Team Interrobang has given me odd satisfactions. Â Both the traditional kind of “I’m glad we accomplished this” as when we reach some participation milestone or a member has a personal celebration but also a second-order kind of satisfaction from seeing the auspicious and unexpected. Â The delight of being proximally but not actively responsible for someone find happiness, either platonic or romantic, Â in another person is magical.
From Cinci
My target departure time of 10 AM was pushed to near 11 as I waited for everyone to wake up and say their good byes. Â Some partings were stronger than others with this being my favorite:
Memories
Chris Dodds volunteered to drive and I received some blessed sleep allowed by fatigue and a driver who didn’t consider the car a mechanical analog of the ball in a game of Pong. Â Once we started leaving West Virginia after I had switched to driving again, the weather got much worse and I averaged 45 MPH or less over much of the Appalachian Mountains due to snow, heavy rain, freezing rain, and more snow. Â My back hurt terribly and I was very happy to be home before 2 AM making the whole trip last just shy of 72 very eventful hours.
My first task after emptying the car was to start uploading pictures as I’d taken over 700, a new record for me for a weekend, and I was very excited to see how some had come out, especially those from the initial meetings on Friday evening. Â I almost started to cry when the camera showed a “card not formatted” error and no device in my house could read the card. Â I believe that card, and the images on it, to be dead. Â Damn. Â I then got a call that two of our group were stuck in Florida in a traffic jam caused by an exploded fuel truck. Â Damn. Â I found that our home dishwasher was broken. Â Damn.