As time moves on, new people in Scout seem weirder and weirder.  I arrived at Ockanickon shortly after 5 PM to a largely empty parking lot except for the minivan next to me.  They had the windows down and were talking about the weekend.

Me: Can I help you?
Driver: We’re waiting to register for the work weekend.
Me: I think registration is open now.  I can walk you over if you like.
Driver: Nah, the registration closes at 7, we’ll go near then.
Me: Why not go now and get a good place to sleep and move your gear before the rain comes.
Driver: It’s ok, we like our car.

My pricings at the Ockanickon Magic Tournament is highly correlated with how much stuff I still have.  Normally, I sell grab bags for $5.00 but having many left I dropped the price to $3.00 or 4 for $10.  A staff member was very happy to have sold 4 at once for the first time this season, he chalked it up to ability, I chalked it up to a 40% discount.

There were a surprising number of participants considering that Week 8 was our lightest and I was very excited when Joe kept showing me cards and asking me “did I want them?” to which I always said “yes”.  The problem is that my buy decisions are normally informed by who I think will take the card and I failed to consider that my next sales opportunity was not 7 days away but 309 days away as part of the 2011 camp season (I’d lose my shirt on dealer prices and FNM folk rarely buy cards).  Should anyone at that time wish to walk down memory lane and build a standard deck from a format that’s no longer current I will be ready.

Edit: I’ve come to learn I may have lost a Foil Jace, the Mind Sculptor that night.  Damn.

Despite today being the last check-in at camp it was an all-hands-on-deck event as several admin members were away and there was a large number of provisional Scouts.  I maybe typed about three lines of text but a continuous stream of volunteers gradually reduced my tasks to almost nothing.  The almost was that I was still response for the tricky tasks of getting a new bottle of ginger ale when we emptied it and also overseeing the distribution of the Sweet Spicy Chili Doritos.  It was quite possibly the easiest check in I’ve ever done.  That includes days where I simply didn’t go to camp.

After yesterday’s brush with historical idiocy, I should have know more was coming.  I completely flubbed a requirement in Cit World and I think what followed was some type of penance.  An African-American Scout came to me for help with Cit Nation and was looking to write a report on… the Lincoln monument.

Me: So you visited the Lincoln monument, what did you learn about it?
Him: That it’s big. Oh, and Lincoln was a good guy.
Me: What do you mean ‘good guy’?
Him: Um…..
Me: Well, he helped hold the country together when the South wanted to leave.
Him: Why did the South want to leave?
Me: There was a dispute with the North.
Him: Over what?
Me: … labor practices.
Him: What does that mean?
Me: The South wasn’t paying it’s workers.
Him: Why?
Me: Well, they were slaves.
Him: Who were the slaves?
Me: ….People from other countries.
Him: Ok. *shrugs shoulders*

If only rhetorical dodgeball were a sport…

I was playing Eagle director this week and since my staff didn’t feel comfortable instructing Citizenship in the Nation it fell to me.   Each of the citizenship badges is unique in ways besides simple scale and Cit Nation repeatedly asks the question “how does this affect you?”  I generally consider this a good question except that it takes a lot of time to review these pieces with each kid.  I don’t mind using a group discussion to cover requirements that say “discuss” but stuff that says “explain” tells me that there’s an individual imperative to stay something.  This extends into the pre-requisites that in one case asks the Scout to visit a national monument and explain its importance.

A Scout claimed to have visited the Lincoln Monument but that our department somehow lost his report.  Curiously, our department happened to also lose his paperwork for each other badge he was attempting while not losing a single requirement from any other Scouts, hm…. Regardless, I said that if he could verbally review the content he’d be fine.  He responded that he couldn’t as the experience of us having lost his stuff got him so upset he couldn’t remember anything… swell.  So, I led him over to one of the department computers and let him review the Wikipedia article on the Lincoln Monument and asked him the question of “why are so many protests held at the Lincoln monument”.  After a few minutes of reading, he called me over:

Him: It’s large.
Me: Yes, it is but do you think that’s the reason?
Him: Yes, the statue is also impressive.
Me: Well, that’s why the area may work, but why do people want to be associated with Lincoln?
Him: That’s not the question you asked. I can’t believe you’re putting me through this
*Cut him off* Me: I’ll send you to an article on Lincoln *he reads for a few minutes*
Him: Because he won the Republican party nomination for president.
Me: Not entirely.
*We go back and forth with these for a bit*
Him: Ok *reads for a few minutes*  Because he was slow to abolish slavery?
Me:  That’s like asking Washington why the Revolution took so long.   How about this, you need to prove that you visited.  Do you remember what the vendors were selling near the monument?
Him: Yeah! Pretzels as big as your head.
Me: Spectacular.  You’re done.
Him: Thank you for recognizing my work.

Every Tuesday, the camp office prints out a couple of copies of the magictraders.com weekly price list so I can buy and sell singles at the appropriate rates.  Normally I email them in ahead of time but this week I forgot and asked a staff member to run up to the camp office to produce copies.  I indicated that he should print the excel document that looked like magic price lists as I didn’t remember the name of the file but this wasn’t sufficiently specific so he returned with my thumb drive asking for specifics.  I made a change to the file name and he returned with the copies shortly.  I had changed the file name to “HEY, PRINT ME.xls”

I’m looking to expand what I sell at the OSR Magic tournament and have a few ideas.  For about 6 years I’ve sold “grab bags” that started as 3 rares, a foil, and 50 commons and uncommons for 5 dollars but abundance of cards has upped this to 7 rares, 3 foils, and 70 commons and uncommons.  Normally when I buy a collection I just skim the best cards off the top and turn the rest into grab bags which has vastly increased the quality of these to the point where they now contain planeswalkers, mythic rares, and a Mox Diamond.

To Add:

  • Dollar packs – 2 cards of each color + multicolor and an artifact and one rare ($1).
  • Color packs – 40 cards of a specific color, 5 rares, 1 foil ($5).
  • Pile of Lands – 10 lands of each basic type ($5).
  • Megapack – 35 rares, 10 of each basic land, 350 commons and uncommons, 15 foils ($20).

Now I just need to summon the hours to make these.

During Saturday retreat I took a pano of the staff both at parade rest and saluting the flag and was rewarded with my planning a gap into attending units I got these:

20100703-1523-StaffPano

2010 Camp Staff

I then decided to a print of the above which turned into a 13″ x 82″ print.  I started the print around 1:00 AM and finished around 4:00 AM.  The actual print time was about 15 minutes, so why the delay?  The Epson R2880 is a spectacular printer which has generated prints I feel that I was only tangentially involved in taking.  The problem I kept running into was that every time there was a printer error like forgetting to tell the printer to use the fed roll stock and in all cases the printer would clear… all 82″ which would have to be rerolled… by hand.

In the end, the print came out splendidly except that there are few good ways to view or display an 82″ print.  So, I set two records: one for largest print I ever produced at home and another for having wasted the most ink.

Today’s Cit World involved reviewing the basic rights of different nations and noting which were similar and which were different.  I posed the question “can anyone think of an exception to America’s granting of freedom of speech?”  Normally I hear something about libelous or defamatory speech, calls to violence or the old standby of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.  Instead, some little kid raised his paw and said “teachers aren’t allowed to teach the truth of intelligent design”.  In the past, when kids innocently said something like this, I’d rhetorically tear them a new asshole; this happened with regularity when I was in ecology and someone contested climate science and the occasional “medical secrets they don’t want you to know”.  Here, I simply replied “Can you think of a better example”, he shrugged his shoulders and we moved on.

I was very proud of my powers of self-restraint and thought myself slowly becoming an adult when I dismissed the session and hadn’t decapitated anyone.  Shortly thereafter one Scout and one staff member approached me saying “wow, Terry, I really thought you were going to hand it to that free speech kid”.

:-(

During the opening session of Personal Management I review how the notion of “Money is just paper” is simply horse shit.  We review a list of things from which people derive value and associate that with the actual value.  One person suggested family and when I asked what value one derived from family someone in the session yelled “boobs!”.  Not just “boobs!”, but more like “BÖÖÖÖÖÖBS!” with a very long “o” noise and and slight hint of “u”.  It sounded more like a maritime horn than a person and its length and suddenness dumbstruck the other kids.  Sadly, my back was to the board and I missed the call.