Chicago Excitement

This week went by in quite a rush.  I spent all of Monday cleaning Tamarack and Pine cabins so that I could join Dave and Phyllis Douglas on a recruiting trip to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.  We had a lot of rain and a melt that made the roads super icy.  After getting the truck almost stuck a couple times I grabbed my skates in the afternoon and skated over to the Brown's.  So much fun.  I wish I could ice skate to get around camp all the time.

Puzzling after the ice skating.

We left for Chicago on Tuesday morning.  I'm not a big city person, but I do enjoy the novelty of it periodically.  Plus Rob is in Chicago, and that makes it worth the trip right there.  I had Giordano's pizza for the first time on Tuesday night.  It was tasty and filling.  The next morning we tried the Yolk, which is a breakfast specialty place just a block away from Moody. 

Yum.

I didn't just eat in Chicago though.  I also spent a lot of time with Rob, and Dan Krueger (summer staff at camp in 2011).  I found a nice room at Moody called the Fireside room.  It's a room where you can't talk.  And yes, I voluntarily went in there.  I enjoyed the quiet while I slept and read and slept and read for hours.

I didn't just sleep and read in Chicago either.  I also stood up at Camp Barakel's booth for Campfest.  It's harder than it looks to stand for hours while people come by and check out your booth.  It seemed that most of the folks at camp fest were looking for "their" camp and they kind of hustled right to it.  There were several people that came looking for information, but most of our visitors were former summer staff that were happy to see their camp represented. 

This is when I was getting tired of the city.  I had too many backpacks and was jammed in a train with a ton of people.  It was actually impressive to watch Rob read from his e-reader without any poles to grab onto during the jerks of the train.

On the way home we stopped off in Dimondale to pick up a new camp car.  It's an Oldsmobile Alero very similar to mine only this one was white.  Someone said the white paint makes it the "good" twin to my "evil" black car.  I've never had so many warning lights in a car before, even with my old beater car from high school.


Nothing serious, but I was seriously praying for safety on the way up.

Once back at camp I joined Mike Baker in hanging some bearskin rugs in the West Side Chapel and then Dan Haines joined us to cut and split some wood out behind the East side parking lot.  This weekend was a little different because we had a Sr High retreat on the West and a Jr High retreat on the East.  I think many youth groups brought their whole group, then split them between the two sides of the lake. 

So camp continues.  We received a little snow this weekend and hope for more in the coming weeks.  The tubing hill is looking good so far, and we're doing what we can to keep the skiing open.  Please pray for us as we continue to strive for the Gospel here at Camp Barakel.

Winter is Happening

Now is the time when Winter just kind of flies by.  Snow is on the ground.  Campers are skiing and tubing.  I'm doing a lot of dishes and feeling exhausted most weekends.  It's a good season.

Well first thing last week Brad was leaving and he smashed his truck into a tree.  The roads get pretty icy after the sun beats on them all afternoon and that combined with a downhill turned into this:


Yep.  That's about all you need to see.

 The good news is that he was ok.  The airbags went off, but the seat belt held him back from getting slapped by one.  Part of my week was spent helping to get stuff out of the truck and scavenging the tires and the tool box in the bed of the truck.  The tires worked out well and will hopefully be thrown onto one of the trucks we use at camp for going to town. 

Cleaning and sharpening the chainsaws.

This week Mike and I needed to work on the chainsaws.  We put them through a lot of wood, so cleaning and sharpening becomes a normal task.  This week we dropped several large trees in behind one of the staff houses.  It would have been pretty comical to watch us climbing up and down the very steep hill in at least 14 inches of snow.  A couple stories came out of this one adventure.



Me cutting a tree down.  I was aiming too high above my notch.
Looks like a monster was on the loose or something.

 First, I was trying to clean up the brush around the base of a tree so I could maneuver more easily around it.  Sometimes brush grabs the chain and pulls it off the bar.  Well that happened and I felt it tugging on my jeans before I even knew what was happening.  Thankfully it didn't get through to my leg, but it did leave a nice hole in my jeans and a little bit of a hole in my long johns. 

These are from the old Girl's Dorm.  We cut them up for Terry to make sweet tables out of them.

The other great moment was when Mike almost dropped a tree on me.  We're pretty cautious when finishing off a tree.  We keep an eye on each other and make sure we're not in the path of the tree.  Well I was at the bottom of the hill and watching him notch and back cut on a tree.  He had aimed it to go sideways on the hill, but it decided to come straight down to me.  I ran away about 5 steps and turned just in time to see it land about 10 steps behind me.  Whew.

In general it was kind of fun.  We had a lot more snow this week so I spent a fair amount of time cleaning.  I enjoy cleaning in one main way:  I can listen to music and sermons.  So I listened to my new David Crowder Band cd (which has been on repeat for the whole week basically), and I snagged a couple of Alistair Begg sermons.

This is Winter.  Lots of work as the time flies by.  I enjoyed the last Father/Son retreat and now I'm looking forward to more people coming and going over the next several weeks.

Finally the Snow is Here

For those of you who followed the fire we had in December, our wood supply is looking good.  We took a lot of trees down in the maintenance yard and cut them up for boiler wood this weekend.  It was a lot of fun and we had some major help from some of Mike Baker's nephews. 

They were able to lift some huge chunks of wood onto the splitter.

Because of the extra help and extra work over the past couple of weeks we've been able to basically catch up on our wood supply already.  The splitter has saved us countless maul strikes.  Now Randy is thinking we have just about enough wood split to get us through the retreat season for the boilers.

The Skytrak lines them up, and Mike Alchin cuts them up.



Some of the guys kept the brush pile going all day.



We left about 12 stumps around the yard.  Now it's open for some landscaping and a redesign.

When we weren't moving wood around, we had a stove to replace in the East Side Dining Hall.  Last week one of the stoves caught on fire through what I'm told was an electrical issue.  Thankfully there was no damage to the dining hall, but the stove sustained too much damage to fix it.  So this week we moved the old stove out and then put the new stove back in.  It was one of those lifting things where you can hardly get enough guys to carry it around.

I think Kieth spent a lot of time wondering exactly how we'd sort all of this out.

And finally... SNOW!  We got the snow we needed to run the tubing hill this weekend.  It loaded up all the trees so they sagged real low.  Very much a Winter Wonderland for the weekend.  With that came a lot of work on Friday to clean it all up.  Brad Smith, and 6 kids from Mike's family really helped out, cleaning up the whole West Side of camp before lunch.  It was a great effort.

Something about 6 inches of snow on a tether ball caught my eye.

So the snow was here for the Father/Son and Winter Teen retreats.  It was neat to see so many people I recognized this weekend.  I had about 3 campers on the East Side and several folks that I've just met over the years here at camp.  Several of the dish workers were former summer staffers, and of course I was excited to see Rob and Elizabeth helping out this weekend. 

Tom Harmon and Brian Harmon were the speakers this weekend and I was really excited to have both of them here.  They speak so much differently, but they both are very clear about the Gospel message which I understand was well received this weekend.  Praise the Lord for that!


The sun trying to break through the clouds on Monday morning.



Winter?

They say it's Winter here, but it's definitely not what I expect out of Winter.  We had a fair amount of snow as the weekend approached, but 50 degree weather on Friday torched the snow off the hill.  Thankfully the ice rinks held up well for the Father/Son and College/Career Winter Retreats. 



Staff kids and seasonal at the first hockey outing of the year.


Camp seems like it would be crippled without snow, but it really isn't.  With cold weather the inside options become even more fun, and the messages in chapel are just as penetrating as ever.  Because of the College/Career Retreat I was running pretty hard this weekend trying to catch up with people and keep up with my responsibilities.  I was able to play broomball with some friends from years past and we won the tournament with much of the team we had last year. 

As for projects, we took a bit of a break from wood this week to hit a couple different things around camp.  We tore down a shed near the West Side Trading Post (that I didn't even know was there) and carried the "jail" shed away from the East Side Trading Post. 



West Side Shed.  We kicked most of the boards out.  It was fun.

The East Side Shed was tricky to pick up and move.  But we managed to keep it in one piece.

Dan Haines put together a small (but heavy) fence in the Archery and Riflery areas on West Side.  The goal is to make it so that no one can be standing anywhere near where the archers are shooting.  I think he accomplished that, and I also believe this fence could take several shots from a battering ram.

This thing was super heavy for lifting.  That's me creeping up top with Dan's camera.

Extra curricularly I ran the clock at a girls basketball game and welcomed Kevin Pierpont and Reuben Peck to the trailer as Seasonal Staff for the Programing department.  It should go well because they are clean guys, but time will tell how true and consistent that is.

I'm also leading a Bible/Book study that Phyllis Douglas organized.  We had our first meeting Sunday evening with 8 guys from Fairview.  Our book is "The Measure of a Young Man" and we were able to set a reading plan after reading through the introduction.  All the guys stayed for a while to play/watch some different games.  I'm looking forward to going over the first unit next week.

So it's busy here.  We're praying for snow, but we're ready for anything at Camp Barakel.

Now for Another Year

This week was mostly unproductive with some spikes in the action over the weekend.  So how about we focus on the action?  Thursday I played volleyball and had a blast.  I'm always talking about how little running or sports I get in on at camp in the Fall so volleyball was good.  Then Friday I spent most of the day working on my car with the Youth Pastor at my church, Tim Wygant.  My car has a lot of humming and we figured it was a wheel bearing.  So we started looking into it on that raining Friday.

Tim working on the lug nuts.

Well we figured out quickly that the brakes were about as low as they could possibly get without making any screeching or grinding.  So we grabbed brakes and a wheel bearing down at good old Autozone.  That's when the next problem occurred.  We couldn't get the hub nut off to get down to the wheel bearing.  We had a good socket but even with a huge pipe we couldn't get it to budge.  When the axle started to look like it was getting stressed we gave up for the day. 

You can see the hub nut.  I have some ideas for how to attack it next time.

Now I'm just hoping (and praying) that everything holds together as I get ready to attempt another shot at it here at camp.  If needed I can just take in to the Fairview Garage to have Cliff take a look at the whole deal. 

After getting the car back together I rolled out for a Saturday Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Grand Rapids.  I knew a fair amount of people there and enjoyed seeing old friends while staying active.  My team finished second, but more importantly it was a pretty chill day.  After that I drove over to Rochester to celebrate the New Year before heading up to camp this afternoon. 

The first thing I got when I arrived was a package (and some nice Christmas cards from some of the staff).  So I figured the package was a shirt I purchased for my dad.  It ran late and didn't make Christmas, but I wasn't too worried about that.  He still would get it.  When I opened it to see exactly what I had purchased, this is what I found:

A medium petite dress valued at $64.

So yeah.  Probably not a great gift for dad.  I checked the slip and it has my real order with the proper price.  Now I just need to figure out how to return this lovely dress sometime.

Now it's 2012.  I'll be here at Camp Barakel for the rest of the year (Lord willing) and I'm hoping God will open hearts as we present the Gospel through 4 more seasons of camping.

Thanks for following!