The dawn came early as I saw a battalion of cross-legged people move about the event field trying to find out why the bathroom door was locked.  The lush that gave me the the storage key hadn’t disabled the timer so no one could pee until 8 AM.  A mother told me that this wasn’t a problem and went on to talk about her outdoor bathroom practices using the phrase “pop a squat” at least five times and this was more my punishment for not thoroughly reviewing my needs with the park before hand so much as the crush of people searching for a place for their son to tinkle in a park with over 400 wooded acres.  The local Hess station probably saw a lot of visitors.

The closing ceremony was at 8:00 AM and at 7:40 a man approached:

Him: Can I have the completion certificates for my unit?
Me: I’m giving them out at the closing ceremony in 20 minutes after the Scouts’ Own Service.
Him: Oh, we’re not staying for that.
Me: I guess you’re not going to complete the weekend then.

He frowned and hurried his kids to his car.  I think he was the same adult that thought I was paid.

I brought everything home and here were my spoils:

  • 15 lbs of penne pasta
  • A box of Frosted Flakes
  • 120 eye droppers
  • 3 gallons of open fruit juice
  • A pair of prescription sunglasses, a pair of prescription non-sunglasses, a albuterol nebulizer, and a webelos neckerchief slide

I like the last the most, as my lost and found for the weekend contained five entries of “Webelos Neckerchief Slide” along with “shirt” (no additional detail given).

In exchange for using Tamanend Park for Scout events, the park asks Playwicki District to support occasional park-wide activities, this weekend’s activity was a clean-up of the Mill Creek that went through the park and 10 of us were there to help.  There were some other groups also helping and they broke into four main groups:

  1. Other Scout units
  2. Church groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses in this case, I think)
  3. A girl’s high school soccer team
  4. Juvenile parolees

The parolees had the blank stare of death in their eyes but the Jehovah’s Witnesses all had excessively long skirts for a creek clean-up.  I’m not sure which I found more unsettling but the most heart-breaking part of the day was the clean-up tallying.  We’d found about 80 plastic bags and 50 plastic drink containers totaling 30 pounds or so and one kid said “yea! We made a difference!”  … sure… considering that through the 70s and 80s the garbage dumped into the Atlantic from the US was measured in the millions of pounds per hour, our difference came out to undoing something on the order of a 1/6th of a second of that waste.  Wooo!   Oh, yeah, this number also assumes that the act of collecting the garbage generated no externalities like the granola bar wrappers we generated and bottled water we drank.

I’d unwittingly volunteered to do a Webelos Weekend and spent far more time preparing for it compared to any program I’ve ever run.  The theme was “Mad Scientist Training Weekend” and kids completed the Science related activity pins.

Highlights:

  • A fight between the Scout professional and the event staff over the breakfast drinks between water and juice.  The compromise: Tang
  • A leader asked if I could leave the pavilion light on as he graded papers saying he was a college professor.  I checked back and he was grading papers titled “and now you try: identifying nouns”
  • The evening meal for the kids was a mini-pizza and pasta for the adults.  A leader asked if he could bring out his propane stove to cook something and the administrative head shot it down.  He later approached me and offered me an Omaha Steak in return for some black-market grilling.
  • My dad was pressed into running a station after a station lead texted out sick.  Normally he doesn’t smoke on Scout trips as the outdoors calms him, apparently Cub Scouts don’t as he decimated cigarettes between groups in about 8 seconds.
  • The evening presentation involved five rapid-fire demos that Joe and I did involving Newton’s First Law of Motion and atmospheric pressure.  Joe and I made up a neat presentation where he breaks a brick over my hand with a hammer without injuring my hand to which no one responded.  HE BROKE A BRICK OVER MY HAND.  But when I used a playing card to seal a graduated cylinder everyone was stunned.  After the presentation no less than 5 kids approached doubting the card’s efficacy until they tried it.  Each was completely uninterested in how a brick broke over my hand.
  • I had to drive home to grab a broom to clean up the next day and picked up Max so he could go for a run in the park.  He was very interested the trip until he arrived, took a massive dump and ran back to the car.  I think my family’s dog may be responsible for a series of shit-n-runs.

Go Webelos.