Scouting Thoughts

Posted on by Jordan

I wanted to wait a while after having finished the Scoutmaster training to let my thoughts settle in a bit before I wrote this post. I may have waited too long, and lost some of the wild enthusiasm I had before, but I am going to try and put something together none the less.

Even without owning a TV it has been impossible to miss the fact that we are in an election season. Obviously this election, like most elections, is important, and there are plenty of other places online that talk about why. I bring this up because I was captivated by the idea expressed at some point during the training that “it is easier to build a boy into a man than repair a man gone wrong” The exact words were more elegant than that… but you get the idea.

I don’t want to sound overly grandiose, or set expectations too high for the guys coming out of my troop, so I suppose I should scale that back in a little until I have some idea what day to day working with the troop is like.

As much as I thought I had nailed down in my head what I was going to say in this post it is becoming remarkably fuzzy…

First off, it was very refreshing to realize that the goal of Scouting is to let the boys develop character and maturity through being able to learn, and fail, in safe environment. I guess I should explain, in this context ‘safe’ basically means ‘nobody is going to die’. Not that anybody at the training wants to see a kid get hurt, but there was an expectation that when you turn a dozen 13-year old boys loose with pocket-knives, a few bad-aids may be needed before the day is done.

I somehow managed to go my entire time in scouting as a boy without realizing that the adults weren’t doing that much of the “leading,”   and never would have guessed that it was by design. If things are running properly, the scoutmaster isn’t suppose to do anything but act as an advisory for the senior patrol leader and the guys supporting him. I could be remembering an overly-ideal troop setup, and I haven’t been with my new troop long enough to know how practical that ideal is, but I know it is a real goal of my local troop. So much a goal, that one of the longer standing Scoutmasters is best known for his ability to smoothly guide overly-helpful parents away from the boys so they can continue to struggle putting up a tent!

I hope this doesn’t make me sound like I am excited to watch a bunch of kids get hurt or something. I am just really happy to know that Scouts aren’t overly protective or so scared of a lawsuit that they wrap everything in foam.

I know that my first real job with the troop will be as an assistant patrol advisory for one of the newer patrols. This means that another Scoutmaster-trained parent will be the primary guy trying to gently steer them towards earning their next rank, and I will fill in behind him. It also means I will be working with 13-year old boys… my dreams of building better citizens for tomorrow may not last long against the booger-jokes and giggling, but at least I can try right? 🙂

-Jordan

A Payoff

Posted on by Jordan

As many of you know, Heather and I ended up being rather enthusiastic fans of Dave Ramsey program.

A sort of honesty-check moment came back in January, when we wanted to purchase a new camera. Rather than just boot the budget out for a month and buy the camera we started setting aside some money each month.

This past weekend we finally hit the threshold of “enough saved” plus “feeling like we might actually take advantage of the improved features” and decided to buy.

Heather and I are now the proud owners of a Canon Rebel Ti.

I hit the research fairly hard for a few days beforehand, and if your interested, dpreview is an amazing resource. What I found was, in short: It is really hard to go wrong, and really easy to get overwhelmed by information and choices.

I ended up aggressively steering Heather towards this camera primarily because the photography club we joined is made of largely of Canon fans. I figured there would be more people able to help explain the camera, and some of it’s features. We haven’t really figured out how to learn something together yet, so I am trying to leave as many options open for each of us to figure stuff out as possible.

My expectation was, that given the release of the Rebel T2i we would be able to find the Ti fairly cheap. Online it seems everyone else had the same idea, and I wasn’t finding much in the way of a deal. Saturday we made a trip over to the local photography shop with the idea that we should probably hold the camera a few times before we jumped in with both feet. Not only did we like the camera, but they had a rather attractive instant-rebate + second lens deal, making them more attractive than Amazon. The idea of having the rest of the weekend to play with the camera wasn’t too shabby ether 🙂

Having played with the camera for a day or two now, I cannot say enough good things about it. The only bad thing is it is so easy to squeeze off picture after picture (up to three a second!) we managed to create a huge pile of pictures that so far haven’t been sorted through.

The other downside is, as much as we thought we were starting understand photography better, it takes about two seconds to drown in menu options that we don’t understand. The wonderful counterpoint to that is simply that we don’t have to care, throwing the camera into “auto-mode” and shooting turns out better results than we probably deserve to be getting.

I feel a little bad not posing a picture of one of us, but we kind of looked like bums all weekend (or at least the times we had the camera in tow), so you will have to be content with a picture of my other weekend project:

I am rather proud of that too 🙂

-Jordan

Camp Out Debreif, Physical Report

Posted on by Jordan

I haven’t even started writing this post and I am already afraid I am going to beat scouting to death as a blog topic in the next few weeks. I guess that is the downside to my using this blog as a place to post whatever comes to mind… anyway bear with me, it isn’t the only thing Heather and I are up to! 🙂

In an attempt to keep this brief and focused, I am just going to talk about the practical side of the training weekend, and leave my reflections on it for a later date.

First off, as you might have guessed, not all of my camping gear was 100% ready to go after having been packed away for the past ten years.

Things that weren’t perfect:

  • The elastic in my tent poles — completely dead!
  • My cold-weather sleeping bag
  • ‘flint and steel’ kit — not really flint, whatever it was made out of was corroded beyond use
  • Sleeping mat — still functional, but they make much nicer ones now
  • Flashlight — got me through the weekend, but the switch tried to die a few times
  • First-aid kit — didn’t need it, but the bandages are looking a little… crispy at this point

Things I apparently don’t own anymore:

  • Mess kit
  • Hatchet — not that I need one at this point, but I used to have one I though
  • Camp shovel
  • Extra rope

Last but not least, things that worked just fine:

  • My tent — ignoring the pole issue
  • Rain gear — didn’t need it, but still appears to be in great shape
  • My hat

Beyond equipment, I felt like the majority of my ‘scout-craft’  type skills weren’t too rusty. I still remembered most of the knots, and I don’t have any doubt as to my abilities to light a fire. First-aid is one I should re-visit I am sure, and the compass driven navigation course was more challenging than it should have been. I am really looking forward to getting more opportunities to hone all of this stuff.

Going back to equipment, I ended up feeling really sheepish when I unpacked my sleeping bag and said “oh yeah, I am still allergic to down, and this is a down bag!” The other detail I had forgotten about until the next day, when during a session they pointed out that cold-weather bags shouldn’t be stored in their compression bags long-term. I have a feeling a decade counts as long-term, and it might explain why the insulation wasn’t performing as well as I might have hoped. Luckily it wasn’t really that cold.

Most of the other things I had at least weren’t surprises; they were just products of my not finding the time before the trip to replace/restock/re-evaluate them. It’s really kind of exciting, although given the time of year most of my “shopping” probably going to be constrained to appending items onto a wish-list. At least I don’t anticipate anther camping trip for a few months now.

If that was too much naval gazing, I can at least offer you a link to the pictures I took

-Jordan

Long Weekend, Short Post

Posted on by Jordan

Hey there!

I really have so much to say about scouts right now, and I am really excited after having just completed an entire weekend devoted to scoutmaster training.

Sadly, I am really tired and haven’t even dealt with all my gear yet.

Hopefully I can find time to pull together my thoughts enough to have a coherent post about how scouting looks from this side of graduation. Worst case you will end up with a rambling info-dump, but the faster I wrap up this post the better our chances of avoiding that are.

-Jordan

A Weekend In Des Moines

Posted on by Jordan

As I think I mentioned before, this weekend was notable in that Heather and I didn’t have any plans for it.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think we were bored though!

Saturday was spent mostly cleaning… but after being on the go for so long the place really needed it.

I should back up though, Friday night we walked over to eat dinner and go to a movie at the mall we live next to. It only took us a year to actually get around to doing that! Heather and I often walk around the outside mall in the evenings when we want to go for a walk, and frequently we comment that we should take advantage of our location to walk to dinner and a movie, but ether we have been busy, or there haven’t been movies we wanted to see, or other things just kind of got in the way. Not anymore though! We finally walked over to a movie.

Ok then, back to Saturday… We had a wonderfully lazy morning, then cleaned like mad, then had a chance to go over to a friends house and meet a friend of theirs who is starting a mission of sorts in Mexico. It was neat to hear them talk about what they have seen in Mexico, and what they hope to be able to do there. It was also nice to just be together with friends from church in that kind of “around the kitchen table” setting and just enjoy being together.

While talking that night we found out about an annual event in Des Moines, called the “World Food Festival.” We were excited to learn that it was an all-weekend event, so decided to swing through after church Sunday.

As you can kind of see, it was a little crowded there, but there was no shortage of food to be had. Apparently we should have been writing down what we tried, because I can’t remember anymore… It seemed so obvious at the time, hmm…

Heather had some chicken fried rice, and a spring roll, I had a gyro, and then we sampled some Ethiopian rice dish, and some vaguely South-American vegetable pastry:

The pictures are from my phone, as somehow despite our intentions of learning more about photography, we managed to forget to bring a camera with us today. As you can start to see from the view behind me in the first picture, there were some interesting things we could have taken, if only we had planned ahead a little better. I suppose this let us enjoy the food more, although frankly the authentic spring roll, and the rice dish weren’t big hits with us.

I suppose it’s cheating to throw up this post with a few hours left in the day but I can all but assure we won’t be doing anything else blog-worthy today 🙂

-Jordan

P.S I just realized I haven’t ever put up a post about the Farmer’s Market here in Des Moines… despite having pictures and even some video from when my parents came to visit. I guess I should keep that in my idea list… In the meantime this festival isn’t at the same site, and was perhaps a quarter of the size of the farmers market, just to give prospective against something that I haven’t ever talked about directly.

A Few More Details

Posted on by Jordan

As I mentioned before, our nephew really warrants a picture now and again:

The other item worth mentioning is that after the wedding, I helped Heather remove the bobby pins from her hair. 43 pins later, we were done. I was really tempted to let the count slip by one, because 42 is a much cooler number, but it was 43.

To quote Heather “well, this may explain why my hair didn’t move at all for the past eight hours”

As I write this Heather and I are looking forward to a rare weekend with nothing planned! I hope it is every bit as nice as it sounds right now 🙂

-Jordan

The 2010 Wedding Season Draws To A Close

Posted on by Jordan

Just thought I would sit down and type out a quick post, as Heather and I just got back from Kansas City, and the last wedding on our calendar for this year.

We closed the year with a wedding that contains a lot of ties to us.

First off, Casey was in our wedding. Second, we met Carson when he came as Casey’s date to our wedding, and finally I put together an awesome website for them! (Looking through the archives, I did the site sometime back in February)

Okay, maybe my making the website wasn’t a major point of connection, and to be honest hacking up a WordPress theme isn’t really much to brag about. The real connection is that Heather and Casey have been friends from early childhood. I have enjoyed getting to see Heather interact with such a great friend.

On a related note, I am glad to be done with weddings for the year! I tried not to be jealous of the wedding couple as they monopolized my wife’s time over the course of the weekend, but there isn’t a ton for a spouse of a bridesmaid to do during all the ancillary activities that take up the proceeding days before a wedding.

The plus side of a KC wedding is that we get to see our nephew on the trip! Heather is enamored with Holden, and complained vocally that I got to see him more than she did this time around. I should really throw up a picture as he seems to change ever time we see him!

I think that sums up another eventful weekend…. now I should go to bed, as somehow Monday is going to be here again already.

-Jordan