At Camp, We Dance!

Does your camp constantly break out into spontaneous dance parties?

 

Yep, mine too.

How amazing is that?

There have been many times I’ve gotten a kick out of it; there was one summer when we had to explain to the staff that no, we can’t program in “spontaneous dance parties” because that’s just not how spontaneity works; it’s been a running joke ever since.

When we do have actual, legitimate spontaneous dance parties they are a phenomenal energy builder, a 5 – 15 minute dance party between programs or when everyone is feeling low energy (like on a rainy day) is a huge moral booster!

 

There was also the summer (many moons ago, at my old camp) that the ACD and I gave the staff 15 minutes of down time while we went to set up the evening activity – which was going to be a team building session.

When we returned to fetch them we could hear the music long before we got to the building, then we could see jumping and dancing through the windows before we entered.

We walked into pure pandemonium, there was a high energy dance party going down, they were dancing on tables, on chairs, and bopping all around the floor.

We both burst out laughing (then we politely asked them to carefully step down from the tables and chairs if they were going to continue dancing… then we used that as an excellent example during a risk management session later that week… but I digress)

We put our team building session on hold, because they were bonding on their own, in a way they came up with, and in a way that works.

And it’s not just my camp – camp communities everywhere experience this amazing ritual.

Catching Up

Hi friends,

Sorry I’ve been away for so long – it has been a bit of a whirlwind these past few months!
Here’s a quick re-cap of my life incase ya’ll are interested.

• We’re well into camp pre-season and registration is BOOMING! Three of our biggest sessions filled up by the end of February and the remaining 5 sessions are getting fairly close too. We have a bunch of new campers, which kind of worries me for all of the returning campers who haven’t gotten in their applications yet – we may have to add another session if this keeps up. So as you can imagine, the camp office has been busy!

 

 

• My husband and I bought a house!! (A teeny, tiny, cute little house)
  It’s all very adult of us, which I must admit super freaks me out, every time I need to chat with a lawyer, whether it’s to buy a house or get some advice on a camp matter, I’m slapped in the face with the thought “OH YEAH! I’m a full fledged adult!” which is an easy thing to forget while I bomb around in a tiara and rain boots (yep, that’s happened … more than once – see the photo below for an example of my typical adult status).

 

Here’s a shot of the Assistant Camp Director and I adulting so hard! We were dressed up fancy for the interpretive dance of the first day of camp we “choreographed” for talent show The stars were obviously because of how magical the dance was!! 😉

 

• The house we bought just happens to be 4.5 hours away from where I work…. sooo… that’s a thing.
  We bought a house in our hometown (and pretty much paid for it with lint & buttons from our pockets – we got a great deal!!).

Anyway, back to the point – as we were buying the house, I was submitting a proposal to my work for a trial “work from home” arrangement. It was a very, very, scary time. I seriously love my job, and if they had said “no way, Jose!” I would have been incredibly sad. I mean, I would have understood but that would mean that my options would have been to start a new camp in my new home, or to find a new career – neither sounded particularly appealing right now. (Mind you, having my own camp would be AHH- MAZING but that’s something that takes planning, and money, and not something that should be done on a whim – plus I still feel like I have more to give to my current camp).

So after submitting my proposal and having a few meetings I was surprised and delighted to be told “sure, let’s give it a shot!” so I’m working from the head office in the city for 2 weeks a month and working from home a few hours away for 2 weeks a month, until a move to camp for the summer.
Fingers crossed that it all goes well!!!

I’ll talk more on the proposal process in another blog post.

Photo credit: MarkMoz12 via Foter.com / CC BY                                                                                     *Not our actual house. Although it IS about the same size… peh. heh. heh.

 

 

• We were the victims of fraud.
  THAT was a bummer!!
  I won’t get into all of the details, but amidst all of the house buying and proposal writing, someone transferred a chunk of money out of our savings account. It turns out that the poor guy who did it thought that he was transferring money out of his girlfriend’s cousin’s account to help her get into Canada. NOPE!

It seems that his “girlfriend” was a scam artist who was able to access one of our computers with malware and convinced this poor soul to do an email money transfer (since they were outside of Canada they needed someone within the Country to physically do it). I actually felt really sad for the guy, he had his heart broken and found out that he was complicit in a crime all in the span of about 10 minutes.

Fortunately, it’s all been sorted out and the money has been returned to us. AND we learned a valuable lesson about computer security (I thought we were pretty safe already, but clearly not careful enough).

Photo credit: CyberHades via Foter.com / CC BY-NC

 

So, these are some of my excuses reasons for being out of touch lately, I’ve had a lot of personal and professional stuff happening and something, somewhere had to give – that ended up being my little blog. 😦
But I’ve missed sharing and chatting with my camp pals, so now that things are starting to settle a little (which is a HILARIOUS thing to say at the beginning of camp season, and is a pretty good indicator of how hectic things have felt lately!)  I’m going to start posting regularly again.

I have LOTS of half finished posts and new ideas that I’m excited to share with you guys, and for the sake of consistency (and my sanity) I’m going to post once a week on Mondays for a while.

So that’s it, I’m glad to be back ‘in the swing of things’ and I’d LOVE to hear about the things that are taking up your time lately. How’s staff hiring going? Are you all set for staff development week? How are your registration numbers going? Tell me all about it in the comment section below!