New Apartment

Installation 3 in my catching up on my blogging.

Also in August, I moved into a new apartment. It is actual a house where 2 roommates and I are living in the second floor and a couple of girls are living in the first floor.


My room is still sparsely furnished. I decided to get a folding table instead of a desk because it was easier to move in and it gives me a lot of workspace. I also haven't gotten around to getting a bed, so I'm still doing the mattress on the floor thing.


I did, however, invest in a dresser, which I got for a very good price at a thrift store. Notice the stick in the corner next to the lamp. Ben Clifford found that our freshman year and thought that it would be good room decoration. It has been in my room ever since then, where ever I have lived.


This is our dining room (which isn't used as such very frequently). Behind it is the living room and behind that is a kind of windowed alcove type thing.


The back yard.


If you are familiar with the Space Tower at the State Fairgrounds, then you will know where my apartment is, because the Space Tower is right across the street. This is a picture out the front window.

The best part of the apartment is the location. It is 4 miles from school, 2 miles from the grocery store, 2 miles from a bike shop, 1.5 miles from the gym, 1 mile from church, and 10 miles from my parents house. Furthermore, there are excellent bike routes going to all of those places. Thus, bike commuting is very easy, which I quite enjoy. If it get's too cold to commute, there is a good bus system that isn't too hard to get on.

Cia comes to visit

And now for installation 2 of trying to catch up on my blogging.

Also in August, Cia came to visit for a weekend before going to Ireland for the semester. It was really nice to just hang out with her for a couple of days. The first day, we went to the zoo with the family, (extended family where also visiting from Michigan). It has been a long time since I've been to a zoo, so it was fun to visit one again. I realized that I'm still a little kid at heart, because I thought it was great fun to see the animals, especially the monkeys and the sea otter.

On Sunday, after going to church in the morning, we decided to go adventuring in the afternoon. It was super fun and slightly sketchy as we went to a weird park. It is straight East of downtown Saint Paul but still before you get to the bluffs. It used to be a railroad yard but they are trying to turn it into a park. In the process of exploring the park, we found...

A fun rock wall to try to climb on. With no crash pads, I didn't go very high.

A sketchy abandon building. We thought about trying to get in, but the door was locked and we didn't want to crawl through a broken window. Notice, there is both graffiti and broken glass in the picture.

An old beer cave. This was cut into the base of the bluffs. The bars where quite sturdy, so we didn't try to break in.

For how close the park was to downtown, there are some parts of it that are remarkably beautiful. Notice, you can see a silhouette of the capital towards the right side of the skyline.

Overall, it was a wonderful weekend and I was sad to see Cia go on Monday. But, she needed to head off to Ireland.

BWCA trip

I'm a bit behind on my blogging and haven't written anything since camp, so I'm going to try to catch up this weekend.

During August, my Dad, brothers and I all went camping in the BWCA. It was quite a fun trip for me because I am already it good shape from camp. I had already spent 30-40 hours in a canoe this summer, so the canoe was second nature and just plain fun. I was also in good enough shape that I was able to carry a pack and a canoe over a portage in one trip. Perhaps the best way to capture the trip is not by describing it but by showing some pictures.

This is all of the gear at one end of a portage. We had to pull it all out of the water and carry it over the portage.

Here, Jeremy demonstrates how to carry a canoe. Note he also also carrying a pack. Together, they probably add up to ~70 lbs.

This was my favorite portage, because it was short and it was quite pretty. It was on a stream and it was just there to get around some rocks and waterfalls.

Benjamin and I were canoe partners for the week. He made a solid power house. We meant to teach him how to steer, but didn't really get around to it, so I was in back all week.

There was a fire ban in effect for a lot of the week, but we were able to have one fire, which was really nice.

Overall, the BWCA is quite a beautiful place.

Last week of camp

Well, my last week of camp was another week of doing Pioneers. As with all of the programs I'm in charge of, it was a huge adventure. On our first day out in the canoes, I was listening to the weather radio in the morning, which forecasted rain, but nothing severe. Then, we were hearing thunder while we where out on the the river, so I flipped it on again. The first thing I heard was that there was nickel sized hail and 30-40 mph winds headed at us. There was really no cover anywhere close to where we where, so we pulled out on the side of the river on a little spit of land, because we didn't want to be out on the water if lighting hit. Then, we flipped the canoes over and put one end up on a log so that we could crawl under them if hail hit.


Until hail hit, however, we thought it was better to stay farther back in the trees for protection from lighting. Furthermore, by the time we got things arranged, we where already soaking wet and people where getting cold because of the wind and wetness so, we didn't want to go under the canoes because we wouldn't be able to huddle for warmth. Thus, we spent 30 minutes waiting out a storm with no real shelter from the rain and cold other than our huddle. It was quite an adventure but at the end of the week, campers said it was actually one of their favorite parts. Luckily it didn't hail and it blew over it in under an hour leaving us with sun for the rest of the day. So I turned one of my campers into a mermaid.


The rest of the canoe trip was relatively uneventful and the horse overnight after that was relatively uneventful, except that I ate too much bannock (deep fried bread) and had to puke in the middle of the night. The hiking overnight after that, however, was wrought with adventure. Bryce and Steph decided to bring out all of our luggage using the horse wagon. Bryce was pretty sure the horses could pull the wagon through the creek on the way out, but wasn't totally sure because he hadn't done it before. Turns out that the horses could, but it was a hard pull for them and it looked pretty sweet.

Bryce and Steph decided to stay for dinner, which was fun because we don't normally get guests on my programs. Dinner, however, continued to be an adventure because we got hit with a rainstorm. It greatly slowed down the process of cooking dinner, so we didn't eat until really late, but at least we had tents for shelter and some of us just sat under the horse wagon.

Some people thought that it was fun and a big adventure and some thought it was miserable






By the end of the week, I'm pretty sure that everybody thought that it had been a fun week and that the rain had just added to the adventure of it.

Pioneers

This week I was working on the Pioneer program. What is the Pioneer program? Well, that is a good question and it is what I spent my week learning. Neither I nor my co-counselor had done the program before so we did a lot of winging it. Sunday night, we headed straight out to Black Hawk park on the Mississippi, where we camped for the night. On Monday we loaded all of our stuff into canoes and canoed through some backwaters and a little bit of the main channel of the Mississippi until we got to a campsite where we set up for the night. On Tuesday, we canoed through some more backwaters until we got the Ferryville, where we were picked up and taken back to camp.

Upon arrival back at camp, we had about 30 minutes to get ready to get on the horses so we could ride up to the bluff, where we were spending the night. The ride up to the bluff was quite an adventure because my horse wasn't behaving very well. When we started heading up the road to the bluff my horse turned around and took off in the other direction. I fought with the horse for a while until the wrangle decided it would be best to switch horses because she could handle him better. Then, were just starting back up and another horse spooked and kicked mine. So my new horse turned around and ran back down the hill and started running circles on the challenge course. I managed to get him stopped, got off and walked him back into the line up. When I got back on, however, he turned around and ran back down. This time he absolutely refused to move, no matter how hard I punched him. Eventually, the wrangler came down and round house kicked him in the ribs, which got him moving. After that, the rest of the ride was pretty uneventful.

The night on the bluff went pretty well except that a girl got really sick, so I was up at 1:30 am and ran down the bluff with a flashlight to wake the nurse and somebody to drive us up to the bluff. We got the girl down to the nurse's station but neither Kathryn or I got back to sleep until 3:30, so the next day we where really tired. It worked out ok, though, because all of the campers were also tired, even though they hadn't woken up. Also, the sick girl was better in the morning, so she was able to rejoin us, which was nice.

Because everybody was so tired, we ended up taking it easy on Wednesday and spent most of the afternoon playing in the pool. In the evening we hiked out into the back of the valley where a new campsite had been mowed down for us. It was a great night. We where supposed to have gone for a long hike that afternoon, but nobody was up for it. Instead we ended up doing a night hike by flashlight, which was an adventure and was easier because it wasn't hot out. We got pretty lost because I only had a vague idea of the trails back there, so it was a lot of fun. While we were out, we came across a dry stream bed which we thought would be fun to hike up. We didn't want to do it in the dark because there was a high risk of spraining ankles and not everybody had flashlights, so we came back the next morning and hiked a ways up it.


That was the general extent of the weeks excitement. Last night, after all the campers left, some friends and I went to a local pastor's house to spend the night. He had put out an invitation to anybody that wanted to get off camp for a little while. It was really nice to get away for a little bit and to be in an actual house. I also got a chance to talk to him about baptism for a while, which I wanted to do because he seems like an extremely solid guy.

Mustaches mean business

This week, some of the guys decided to have a mustache appreciation week on camp, so I went all out with the handlebar mustache. I kept my goatee for Sunday so that I didn't sketch out the parents too badly but on Monday I shaved down to a handlebar mustache. It made for a lot of good laughs. At one point during the week, we where having watermelon and I discovered that we had a huge watermelon knife. Because I was trying to look sketchy, I decided it would be a good idea to pose with it.


Apart from the mustaches, the week was a massive adventure. The biking was relatively uneventful. We didn't go as far as the previous week, but we had a good time and nobody got hurt. The canoing, on the other hand was quite an adventure. The weather radio was saying scattered thunderstorms and a heat index of 100 degrees. As such, everybody was wearing swimsuits and I was carrying 6 extra gallons of water. About three hours into the trip, however, it started raining and the temperature started to drop. A lot of people were already wet because we had been swimming earlier, which didn't help. We got to a bridge and held all of the canoes together with Robbie (my co-counselor) hanging onto a rock so that we were out of the rain, but we weren't going to be able to hold on very long, so I started working on getting the canoes out of the water. We pulled them up onto the rocks and got everybody out and huddled up to try to warm up the people who where really cold.


I was hoping that the rain would pass and sun come out so we could continue the trip but when the rain continued I wanted to check in with camp (and my cell phone was in the med kit). Turns out, however, that there was no cell phone reception. Then a guy showed up from the canoe rental place and told us that the storm wasn't going to let up and the river was rising fast. I thought about trying to just get to our campsite for the night and then see what things looked like in the morning, but the canoe rental guy said that the site would probably be under water by the middle of the night. I decided to leave Robbie with the campers and go with the rental guy to try and call out. We drove to the top a hill and I got cell phone reception but the battery in my phone died. Then he took me to the canoe rental place and I used the phone there, but all the camp numbers where in my cell phone, which now didn't turn on. I called anybody who's number I could remember hoping that they would have internet and could look up the number, but nobody was home. Then I got the guy to drive me to bridge 10 where all of our stuff was with a van and a horse trailer. There, we had a back up cell phone with all of the numbers, so I was able to call in to camp and tell them the situation. Dick was already on the way out to meet us so they wanted me to sit tight until Dick got there. This was a little annoying because the canoe guy and I had already decided that we were going to drive the van and trailer to bridge 7 to get the campers into warmth (I had been gone for an hour and they were bordering hypothermia when I left). Luckily, Dick showed up in a couple minutes and fully supported my plan right away, so we where able to take off. So I ended up driving a 10 passenger van and a horse trailer back to camp, even though I'm not supposed to drive camp vehicles and I'm not supposed to transport campers. Just driving was an adventure because the rain was still going really hard and both the van and trailer where fully loaded, meaning there wasn't much braking or accelerating power. I was pretty happy when we where finally back on camp and safe.

I have a ton of other good pictures from the week, but the internet is being really slow around here this weekend.

Camp

Now that I have my laptop down on camp, I can continue to post to my blog. This might be a long post because a lot has happened. Last week, I was doing Peddle Paddle, which is 2 days biking on the Elroy Sparta bike trail and 2 days canoing down the Kickapoo river. On the first day of biking, I told the campers that the holy grail of the peddle paddle program was to bike the entire Elroy Sparta trail, so of course the campers wanted to do it. That meant that we had to do 40 miles round trip to Sparta the first day and 30 miles round trip to Elroy the next day. On the way to Sparta, we ate lunch to late, so one of the campers was bonking really hard, but he still wanted to keep going. After lunch everybody perked up, so we made it. On the way back, we had some campers get dehydrated (their fault, we kept telling them to drink water). The trip to Elroy went a lot better because we made sure they got more food and they realized the importance of water and would chug water whenever we gave them a chance. Over all, it was a pretty brutal 2 days, but I'm really impressed that the campers made it, and that they were so determined to do it.

One of the cool things about the Elroy Sparta trail is that it is an old railroad bed and there are some really long tunnels on it. One tunnel is .75 miles with no lighting, so we had to bring flashlights and walk through the tunnels.


The tunnels actually made it really nice because it was cold in the tunnels so it was kind of like taking an air conditioned break from the ride. Coming out of the tunnel at the end looked really neat because where the cold air from the tunnel met the warm humid air outside, it would get really foggy.


After the biking, we had 2 days of canoing down the Kickapoo river, which was also an adventure because there were still a lot of trees down into the river from the floods earlier this year. In some places, we even had to get out and pull our canoes over trees. By the end of the 2 days canoing, I am actually really sore. We were canoing for 4-5 hours each day. The scenery totally made up for the work though. There are a lot a places where cliffs rise directly out of the river. I was looking at a lot of them and thinking how much fun it would be to go rock climbing up them because the water is always deep at those places, so you could free climb and the water would save you in a fall. There was a cliff directly across the river from our camp site, so I got to try climbing, but there was a lot of moss on the rock and not many holds in that spot, so I didn't make it very far out of the water.


When I got back to camp, I discovered that my birthday had completely come and gone without me even realizing it. The other counselors gave me a hard time about forgetting it and then decided to make up for it by making me a cake and giving it to me before the staff meeting in front of the entire staff. To keep with tradition, I made sure to take a picture with the cake, just like Mom would when I was younger.


One really cool thing that we did with the campers this week was to give them personal devotions time to read their bibles. We only had time to do it twice, for 30 minutes each time, but in my opinion, it was the most important thing we did all week. More important than the bible studies or the worship times. The first time that we did it, the campers were a little unsettled and didn't really know what to do, but the second time, they were really excited. I talked to some of the campers about it and they told me that this was the first time they have actually sat down and read the bible. In my opinion, it is an extremely important thing to do, especially for these 9th graders and they are sorting out who they really are and what they really believe. I hope that they continue to read their bibles now that they are home.

The week before last, I was working with the SITs (Staff In Training) which is the most amazing group of campers I have had so far. They just have so much maturity and depth to them. Sometimes when I was working with them, I would forget that they were still highschoolers. In fact they where so amazing that they each deserve to have a picture on here.

Jeff
Dan
Cole
Danni
Devi "Sugar Cube"
Chelsea
RyleeRachel

It is really good that I had such amazing campers that week because I was really sick and they were the only thing that kept me going. The Saturday before they came, I was really tired and achy so I ended up going to bed at 8:00. Sunday morning when I woke up I still wasn't feeling real great and when I went to the bathroom I got really dizzy and almost passed out. I ended up sleeping for the rest of the day except for 4 hours in the evening, so I didn't get to greet my SITs or spend the first night with them. Monday morning, I still wasn't feeling great but decided to go for it anyways, so I met my SITs then. By the end of the day, I was feeling worse and had a really stiff, sore neck and back and a headache. I was thinking about going to bed early and asking my co-counselor to do devos, but we were planning on telling faith stories that night and I didn't want to miss it. So I took 2 tylenol and 3 advil (yay for mixing drugs) and had to lay down for part of devos, but it was totally worth it. There was so much depth and maturity in each of the campers stories. I got progressively better over the week, but it wasn't until Thursday that I could actually make it through a day without taking some kind of painkillers.

The reason I bring up my SITs is because this last week (while I was out on Peddle Paddle) they were back on camp shadowing counselors. When I got back to camp, I got to see them all again and I remembered just how much I like them and how happy I was to see them again.