Random Update Time!!!

Random Update Time! Nothing exciting has happened recently with the composting project, seeing as we’re waiting for the grant people to tell us if we get any money. If we don’t, well, I have to figure out some way to raise $5,000 before August. Bake sales, anybody?

          Anyway, since the Gold Award stuff is on hold, I figured I might as well blog about something related to Girl Scouts. This Saturday my troop hosted its… *counting in head*… fifth and final Camp Out in Patton Park extravaganza. The term “camp out” is used loosely here… most of the girls who are camping out order pizza for dinner rather than cooking it on a grill, and this morning when I popped out of my tent I noticed a whole lot of dads making pancakes for their kids. Apparently, the troop leaders needed their men to save the day when they realized how much they hate sleeping outside with a bunch of noisy seven year olds.

          Since this is my troop’s final year hosting, we’re handing down the proverbial torch to the next girls in line—a bunch of rising sixth graders. Yeah, I’ve noticed the age gap… it takes a lot of stick-to-it-iveness to remain a Girl Scout through middle school. It takes enough effort just to survive in middle school without the scouty label, so I pity/respect these poor Juniors.

          I’ll probably help run the event with them next year, because I can’t let things go and also I’m fairly sure they’ll need me around to keep control of the other troops. Let’s get real; they’re not much older than the Scouts they intend to lead, and will probably end up making their leaders do all the work (like my troop did in the beginning… SORRY GUYS).

           Personally, I enjoy camping. I don’t even mind peeing in the woods so long as there aren’t bugs crawling up my legs, but apparently I’m the only one. None of the little girls in my town really relish the idea of being away from their snuggly warm homes; the camp out in the park was our idea of getting people excited about roughing it while still being within a five-mile radius of their real beds, in case they got sick of the bullfrogs singing in the pond at two in the morning. (Which is a VERY loud and slightly trippy experience, I’ll tell you. When the mist falls, being near that frog-filled water is like being in a giant grey room that issues loud croaking alarms from all sides precisely when you’re about to fall asleep.)

          Anyway, over the five years it has sort of evolved into a day of themed activities, a campfire with enough off-key singing and “scary” ghost stories to last my entire life, and a night of squealing little girls eating candy and sharing secrets in their $4,098,123,513,588 tents. WHICH IS TOTALLY AWESOME. My troop uses my family’s mansion-sized tent, and we act exactly like the little Daisies and Brownies once the day is done. But during the activities, we are hard at work—because we’re the hosts, we run all sorts of games throughout the day.

          This year’s camp out was Olympics themed, and each troop got to pick which country it wanted to represent. (We were the UK, since it’s hosting the actual Olympics this year. Also we have a lot of One Direction fans in our troop.) The stations we had were volleyball, discus, gymnastics, soccer, and track & field. Of course, those are just names. Nearly every year we end up just making up theme-fitting names for Nuke’em, Frisbee, freeze dance, soccer, and a relay race. (Once we did a Harry Potter theme… we had “toss the quaffle”, Frisbee—no creative names here— The Yule Ball, quidditch, and the Triwizard tournament. The one different thing we did do was the “make your own wand” station, but we ran out of decorations halfway through and a handful of girls just got spray-painted sticks. Hey, they thought that was freaking awesome so whatever, right?).

           Naturally, since I suck at volleyball, I was put in charge of that activity station. Being the flexible people we are, the younger scouts and I played Fishy Fishy Cross My Ocean most of the time instead of actually trying to figure out the rules to our designated game. And you know what? Those girls thought I was a genius; they totally didn’t care that nobody has ever won an Olympic medal for not being caught by the shark—of course, some of them were pretty good. I think that maybe some variant of Fishy Fishy should be in the Olympics, because I can totally pick out the gold medalists from a young age. One girl just chose to run across the ocean whether she had been called or not, and if she was tagged, she cried. Needless to say, nobody tagged her, and that five-year-old Daisy won hands-down every time. I admire her strategy.

           Some Girl Scouts aren’t so admirable. Don’t get me wrong, about 95% of them are so sweet I want to put them in little display cases (not really, don’t worry… maybe). But there is always that 5% that really seems to be up to something. Either they’re kissing up to me—first mistake: I’m not all that powerful, it’s not going to get you anywhere—or they’re blaming some tiny sweetheart for the dead frog they put in a leader’s shoe or the beach ball that “accidentally” hit some unsuspecting eight year old in the face. Seriously, you can tell who’s got the psychopath gene from a very early age. I can pick the future angsty teenagers out of any lineup of Scouts. My favorite game to play when they’re all running around used to be “which one’s going to be president”, but it is definitely easier to pick out the future assassins. It’s unnerving just how many future prisoners and crazy pet-killers there are among them.

           I could go on, but I’m freaking exhausted and there was no point to this post anyway. You had to be there J

           Admirable or crazy, young or old, I love these girls and I love this camp out. I’m going to have so many separation anxiety issues when I graduate and don’t have Scouts anymore. One of the colleges I’m looking at is William & Mary, which has an amazing everything AND HAS GIRL SCOUTS. Sold. Now all I have to do is be smarter and maybe they’ll take me.

Once a Girl Scout, always a Girl Scout!

*facepalm* I think I might be a dork.

More updates on composting and the dumb school system to come, as soon as I get working on it.