It's Over! The summer is at least.

Summer camp is over at least.  We wrapped up the summer with what we call HIS-ability camp.  It's a life changing week for many of the Summer Staff.  You have to see it to really have any affect.  Just hearing some of the testimonies, including one man who's happy he has a brain injury from a car wreck because it brought him back to Jesus.  At the same time he is sick of that body and is super excited for the return of the Lord.  Really good stuff.  Made me teary eyed a couple times.  

I enjoyed seeing a lot of the regulars this year, including my two former campers.  This time I programed with Rob, so I didn't get to spend a lot of time with any individual campers.  But I did get to meet a lot of others.  After that slow week the summer staff takes a bus up to Mackinaw and back.  It's a full day for sure, but a lot of fun.

But now I'm home.  I have about 10 days here, and I mean to relax for the most part.  I try to contact my friends and spend some time checking out Battle Creek, but most my time will be spent playing disc golf and watching movies.  Here are some pictures of my first full day here.

After watching some movies and going for a run I ended up at Begg Park disc golfing.  I was surprised my phone could snag the disc in the air.  I only played 10 holes because I wanted to keep moving around town.  

Some kind of International, or National Balloon championship is going on this week.  They were all over in the sky for sure.  Very pretty in the sunset light.  I went to my old school, Southeastern, to watch them from the hill top.  Crazy to think I was a Hilltopper 15 years ago.  

So I went up on the parking garage I like to try and see the balloon's or the sunset.  Didn't get either very well.  But I did remember the awful squiggly lamp posts and then I noticed the sidewalk is swervy as well!  It's quite odd looking.

 

Then I found this bench.  It's not finished, but it's quite ridiculous.  Pretty much Willy Wonka here.  Just need those cones to taste like candy corn.

And here was the sunset.  Wasn't great on the rooftop but the clouds came in and added a lot of texture.  This is after I went to get ice cream with my mom and her aerobics friends.  Kinda random bonus fact right there.

Thanks for following!  Hopefully I'll be back to posting about camp consistently soon.

Summer is Looming

Blogging gets rough in these summer days.  Almost all 16 of our waking hours are scheduled, and sometimes even more.  So I figured it would be fun to put an update quickly this morning.

A couple weeks ago we took about 30 trees from behind Crosscut to make room for terraforming.  We actually cut about 10 trees, then they fell on the rest of them.

The bottom of the tree is all busted up.

So we notch it and push it over.

 Then Mike and I spent 2 days working on split rail fence on the East Side.  4 of his nephews came along for the second day and I was impressed with the amount of fencing we could get in over such a short amount of time.

Big changes!  No more parking behind the Dining Hall.

Here's the choke point that cuts off the familiar parking area.

Now we have workshop.  We have something like 60 people coming and going around camp.  Learning Archery, Riflery, Counseling, Laundry and so many more camp activities.  It's busy, but it's a blast.

Swimmingly

Graham Lake at the beach our Youth Group usually spends a lot of time on in the summer.

Another of Graham Lake.  I've always enjoyed tubing here, or just sitting in the sun on the dock.

It's a busy couple weeks around camp.  We have cleaning assignments during the week, and then we still try to finish up as many projects as we can.  I also sneak off to water the plants periodically.

People think I'm crazy, but I love watering the plants.  Especially with the rainbow spread out on the spray.

Zipline training was last week and I enjoyed working on the tower again.  I'm really comfortable working with the campers and strapping them onto the cables.  It seems like the enthusiasm for the zipline has settled down, so we're not crazy busy the whole time.  We still keep a steady pace going though.

The normal view from the tower.

 So one more week of maintenance before my second summer as a programer on the West Side.  We have plans to work on some more parking lots, cleaning, and cutting down some more trees.  Really seem to be changing the landscape all over.

New dirt is here to terraform this parking lot into a path.

We're almost to summer.  Just one more retreat and the summer staff will arrive in full force.  We'll see if blogging continues as well.

A Walk Through the Creek

I was home for the week and enjoyed a walk down memory lane in Battle Creek.  I'll comment on the pictures as they go by.  Almost all of them were taken from basically the same vantage point, only changing which direction I take the pictures.



 This WAS Cereal City USA.  I never entered the building, but I did pass by it about a thousand times in the bus, on foot, biking, and driving.   You can see they are gutting it out in this picture.  Soon it will be the Battle Creek Mathematics and Sciences Center.  So when I visit my old teachers I'll have to get used to this new location.

 This is a picture looking West-ish.  I've always thought he weeping willows look really cool at this distance. 

 This is a view that is almost 180 degrees from the other one.  Another weeping willow draped over the river.  Both pictures were taken from a bridge.  On either side of the bridge it looks like city, but along this stretch of river it's really pretty.

 This is just to the right of the other picture (the same pine trees on the left).  It's Kellogg's HQ and it's a very interesting building in downtown.  I've been through the place a couple times back when Rob worked there.  One time we stopped there on a road rally to grab a laptop with a card that could grab internet from satellites.  Now most people have access to it on their phone.  Just one more thing that changes.

 The river.  I think they like to put rocks alongside of it because they're prettier than this scraggly stuff.  I kind of like this though.  I remember riding my bike as fast as I could down the path on the left (just above the rocks) and under the bridge.  Then it would turn out that the river was high and there could be as much as 3 inches of river passing by.  I used caution after that.

 The Cereal City building is just to the left of this picture.  You can see a construction barricade in the picture.  I like the stone work they did on that pipe.  Made it stand out in a good way.  Like someone might have made it centuries ago. 

 This is a bus stop.  Not the pillar in the middle, but at the first light post in the background.  Now the road just loops off of Michigan Avenue (the main drag) and then around back onto it.  When I took the bus it had access to the other main road in town.  It's kind of odd to have the road just stop in the middle of town.

Another angle of the bus stop.  I remember waiting here many times.  It felt safer than some of the other bus stops I could choose from.  It was also a good place to work on my skateboarding tricks.  Which consisted of riding my skateboard.  I could go down curbs well, but I could not ollie to save my life.

 This is the building across from the bus stop.  It used to be Rapid Eye Art Studio or something like that.  Now it has no markings on it and it looks generally abandoned.  I know my dad brought me here a couple times to get my brother some nice art supplies. 

 And this is Pizza Sam's.  My youth pastor works here on the weekends and I spent some time chatting with him while he swept and mopped.  Funny how much it's like camp.  Late night chatting while sweeping and mopping. 

Other highlights from the trip include a road rally, installing a hose hanger on the side of the house, cleaning up the gutters a little bit, and the Water Festival.  I should explain the Water Festival a bit.  It's sponsored by local businesses and several levels of government as a way to teach kids about water.  All kinds of lessons about water from where it goes when you flush, how we affect it with our construction projects and landscaping, and how to conserve/preserve it.  I went to the first one in 2002 as a high school junior, and now I help coordinate the high shoolers.  It's just a bit of running around Kellogg Community College along with some slight problem solving.

Blogging may hit a snag as summer catches on.  Two more weekends of retreats.  Pray that we finish preparing camp for the summer months.

This and That

Here is the opening for the new parking lot on East side.  You can see into the softball field.

Several of the new trees near Heritage.

I think I'm caught up on pictures from other weeks now.  Last week at camp included a variety of jobs.  We finished up the new walls on the new equipment shed.  We like to call it the cow pen sometimes because that's about what it looks like.  In fact, whenever people visit us, they generally greet us with a moo.

A new project that popped up worked out really well in the deluge of rain we experienced this week.  Heritage lodge is getting some work done for the sake of its name.  It's beginning to look a bit like the museum in the West Side Chapel, or the Blockhouse.

Ready for Winter?

Me and Mike spent our time working on installing the door of the old Girl's Dorm furnace in the corner of the Great Room.  It was interesting because it's very heavy and comes in several parts.  We think it'll be a fun addition to the lodge.

Pictures are terrible in the Great Rooms.  At least they are with my camera.   You can see the doors are operable.

I don't know which is better.  The flash, or no flash. This one shows the letters better.

With all of our projects we've turned to the outdoors a lot more lately.  And with that has come the need for holes.  Post holes that is.  Split rail fencing, 4x4's for the cow pen, and now some 6x6's for a new porch on Cedar Cabin.  Digging holes is a chore because every couple digs I have to dig out a couple big rocks.  It seems like whenever I get fed up with it, Mike will switch holes with me and then I'll find all the rocks in his hole.  On the 6x6's the holes were easy to dig.  Some rocks, but it went really easily, especially for Mike.

The new porch will be fun to work on.

Now I'm back to Battle Creek for the week.  Looking forward to the usual church events, and then making my way back up to the CoLabor Challenge at camp this weekend.

Camera Found

Good pictures/video from last week that I'd forgotten about.

Mike managed to carry it over to the maintenance yard intact.  That made it easier....

.... to burn it all at once.  We checked for the burn permit and were cleared, but I figured I'd keep an eye on it because of the harsh winds.  A very hot... stinky fire.

But that was a couple weeks ago.  In fact I'm kind of blurring what we've done which week.  I think it was this week we cut down a bunch of trees between the East Side soccer field and ballfield.  All that cutting gave me a good opportunity to use my new safety glasses and earplugs.  This clearing should make room for a nice parking lot that is not on the side of a hill behind the dining hall.  I'll try to snag some pictures of the area once it gets leveled off and cleared out more.

We also pulled most of the scaffolding out of the East Side Dining Hall and abandoned Dan Haines to work on painting and wall papering in there.  Mike and I spent some time adding in a fence in front of the ESDH and even planting some trees in there.

Mike is watering some of our trees.  The fencing really fits in well.

While we had the tree planting bug we headed over to add some trees behind Heritage.  The new parking lot back there left a lot of sandy area that is bare of trees.  Hopefully several of our transplants will make it.

Most of our time was spent putting up some poplar planks on the new woodshed.  The new woodshed is the old equipment shed.  The equipment is going in the new equipment shed that hasn't been built yet.  Did that sound confusing?  Cause it kind of is.  Once the building is up, it'll all become clear.

This was my office for a couple days.  Some of the wood was so wet it sprayed.

This is the cow pen.  These planks will make it easier to stack wood across the whole width of the building.

So that's it for now.  I feel I should have snagged some more pictures from this week, but maybe I'll add them next week.  Keep working out of a deficit until I catch up.  The important thing is that we're very busy up here, and time is running short before summer staff arrive.  I'm excited!

Lost Camera

I think I know where my camera is... but I'm unsure.  We had a fire meeting on Wednesday, and I know I had it there, but as we tried out different trucks I lost track of it.  I just had a promising conversation with Jeremy Linsley concerning possible locations.  You see, the fire meeting involved taking a team of three people (mine was Kieth Boeve, Jeremy, and myself) and performing a task with each fire truck.

Riding on top of the water tank.

So the fire meeting was a lot of fun, and we all had to start and operate each water pump, generator, and truck.  This is what happens when Lee Brown is in charge of these things.  Anyways, I left my camera in one of the trucks.  I checked them, but now Jeremy is saying that maybe I didn't check one of the trucks that stays outside.  I think he's right.

All that was basically to explain that I don't have the pictures I planned to have for this post.  Instead I went through and took some pictures of the project work in the East Side Dining Hall.  We're really hoping to finish up most of the main dining hall this coming week, but for now we've finished with the sound panels on the ceiling. 

This is what the ceiling looks like now.  So now you won't be shocked if you come visit us.

We still need to wallpaper and tidy up before campers begin to use the room.  But it really is starting to look like a dining hall once more.  We're just excited to get things moved back into the dining room and the backpack room.  We started this at the beginning of March, and so it's been about 6 or 7 weeks now.

No carpet in the backpack room.  We have a special carpet guy coming from South Carolina to work on it.

The weather is getting better again.  In fact... it seems like it's been May for about a month now.  This opens us up for more outdoor work.  Mike Baker and I have been trying to clean up the trees when we get moments between the major projects, and the new wood shed (old equipment shed) still needs work on the walls.

We're all busy right about now.  Programers are thinking of Spring camps and Summer programs.  Maintenance guys are trying to get everything wrapped up before guests come up this Spring.  The office folks are keeping all the details and the volunteer staff in order.  Through all that we say goodbye to our last "normal" weekend before summer.  From here on out we'll have guests every week through mid August.

Thanks for following!