Day Camp 2011 Day 5

Well, this is the end of, the end of my story, story...

Day 5 seemed to fly past. Wally and Captain Sook finished their quest finally!  

We then took a trip to the gunyahs to clean up the area and dismantle them.  Our tyres had been pilfered, but I was very much unsurprised by that. My kids finally got some swing joy courtesy of a vine swing that lasted about 2 minutes before it fell down.

Back to the main camp and the teams embarked on a treasure hunt.  Each team went through a series of bible verse clues to find a particular item around the camp.  Upon completion of each clue a puzzle piece was obtained.  At the end of the quest, your puzzle solution was used to obtain the treasure.. I wonder what it could be?

We retrieved the much vaunted treasure boxes from the craft area and returned to assembly to find out what the treasure might be.  The kids were not convinced when I suggested it could be chocolates, or possibly even bricks!  In a surprising development, the treasure turned out to be a bible for each of the children.  It was great to see that one of my team members started reading it at assembly!

Lunch was then served - hot dogs were provided and I believe some children managed to get up to fourths!

After lunch, the concert was held with the parent in attendance and while most teams recalled a song, there were a few more creative teams - My team did an old standard camp skit with a treasure theme craftily wrapped around it.

There were some awards given to the leaders and support staff and then all the parents took their little darlings home!

We took the bus back to Kingaroy and then started our own journey home to the Gold Coast.

I have had an excellent time at Day Camp and I hope that my team members had a good time too. I have every intention of returning next year!

... Everything is honky, dory, dory.... 

Day Camp 2011 Day 4

The word for day for was rain. Rain and lots of it in the morning accompanied by its close friend bitter coldness. This meant that the much awaited water fight was off the menu, much to the disappointment of the campers.  BUT, it was still Stewsday and as soon as everyone arrived we split off into teams to prepare the stew.  There was not enough camp ovens for each team to be allocated one, so my team joined with another to create some awesome stew.

The rain really had thrown a spanner in the works as few leaders were prepared with rain activities.  After "team time" and practicing for our concert piece, there was not much left to do except craft.  Craft had never been so popular! Hats off to the craft ladies, who did an outstanding effort!

Hats off also to the "firemen", who normally sit around the fire drinking tea and putting the occasional damper in and out of the fire.  Today however, they needed to call upon their best fire skills as they fought the rain to ensure that all stews were cooked. Well done chaps!

After lunch there was a big void to fill and despite the rain stopping, gunyahs were still out of bounds so the kids were allowed in the the dorm rooms.  Unfortunately, the only activity on offer in the dorm rooms was mucking around and some shenanigans ensued.

The camp director finally had pity on the leaders inability to properly entertain rain-bound children and called the buses in an hour early.

The buses had an hour layover in Kingaroy and the kids watched a veggietales video in the church.  Unfortunately, I was called to the leaders meeting, so I missed out on watching it (I think I'd already seen the dvd in question).

Which brings us to tomorrow's conclusion - gunyah site cleansing,

Day Camp 2011 Day 3

This brings us to day 3 - which I was trying to promote as "Hump Day", except none of the Gen Ys actually understood that concept...

Again we were guests on the much more peaceful Murgon/Wondai bus and arrived to the same morning routine with "lovely" singing followed by Captain Sook and Walter. We were then briefed on the morning entertainment - "Pieces of Eight". 

It was a team-based collecting game, where items of different colours needed to be collected from around the campsite. Of course no game is complete without antagonists and this was provided in spades by the gophers who as pirates were wounding and pillaging.  The kids all seemed to enjoy themselves, and apart from a few leaders who were disproportionately targeted by the pirates, a good time was had by all.

After the game my team had the best "team time" of the week so far and dare I say some there was even some bonding occurring! We shall see if that holds over to tomorrow.

Now lunch was a sight to behold. The bring your own food day has turned into something of an arms race. There was nachos, hot chips, a lot of pizzas and most of them were cooked in the oven! I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if it's not cooked in the fire, it isn't day camp.  What's next?  A catering van showing up and dishing out food to the kids?  I challenge all leaders out there to remember the core principles of day camp and let the kids enjoy burnt food!

After lunch, I finally acceded to my teams tyre-lust and went out on a tyre-hike.  We captured three fine specimens from the Australian bush and hauled them back to our gunyah for a ceremonial display. I'm pretty sure that they will have all been stolen by the time we get back to our gunyah tomorrow!

Quite amazingly for children who displayed little interest in art, they spent nearly an hour decorating their treasure boxes. This was a welcome respite from chasing them around.

Tomorrow is stewsday, water-fight day and finally-start-practising-for-the-concert day!
See you then!

Day Camp 2011 Day 2

Day 2 began with the usual very loud bus trip consisting of music that only God can love!

Upon arriving at camp, the usual morning routine with Captain Sook and Wally unfolded, and after that the team headed to the increasingly more distant and fairly functionless gunyah.  It seems that it is just a place that the kids want to temporarily store their bags, keep tyres (more about that later) and see what kind others have made.

We participated in "team time", which I hope the kids are deriving some value from and headed of to construct the now legendary treasure boxes.

The treasure boxes are quite a tricky thing to construct, and even with the cutting out and scoring pre-done by the wonderful craft ladies, it still takes some time. Still my team I think got a good result. To their delight/chagrin tomorrow, we'll spend some time decorating them.

After the treasure boxes, we returned to the gunyah to get our lunch and joined the very long queue for sausage cooking facilities.  After waiting for too long, we decided to make our damper, which today had added m&ms.  It was quite the opposite of mondays, with little charcoal on the outside, but a little bit of gooiness in the middle.  It was still yummy though.

Eventually, we cooked and ate our sausages, although we did not set any records for consumption.

We skipped the billy tea today, and no-one seemed to care (myself included).

After lunch and another trip back to the gunyah and back, we went for a hike with some other teams.

All was going normal until a huge cache of tyres were discovered. Now embedded in South Burnett Day Camp lore is the tyre. It is an object of desire, the ultimate status symbol with which to adorn your gunyah.  It is the target of theivery and requires great protection.  Naturally, the children were overjoyed at discovering such a large stash of unguarded tyres.  And they rolled them along with them on the hike and I discovered that stopping a rolling tyre that is coming towards you is better left unattempted.  I hadn't had a day camp injury from a tyre before today.  A few of the younger girls wanted a tyre, but didn't have the strength or patience to get it back to camp.  Therefore I ended up carrying two tyres back to camp like a challenge on some tv show.

The hike pretty much brought us up to the end of the day, where after the normal afternoon routine, we boarded the bus.  BUT not the normal Kingaroy bus, we were the guests on the Wondai/Murgon bus.  Let me say that they are a much more civilised bunch with a lot less singing which I appreciated after a long day.

Tomorrow is the "Pieces of Eight" game day and pizza pockets, let's see how that turns out.

Day Camp 2011 Day 1

Day Camp is a lot more tiring than I remember! That's the difference that 21 years makes I suppose!

Of course, we were transported by bus and the obligatory ear-splitting singing resulted. I'm sure God still loved it though!

We arrived in one piece, and swung into the morning routine. The assembly was welcomed and Captain Sook and Wally were the stars of the show.

As per usual, day one involved building of gunyahs and I think we did a pretty good job. Although the whole process has gone hi-tech with the mandatory requirement of ropes and tarps.  Disappointingly there was some widespread gunyah sabotage by nameless individuals.  I say they should walk the plank!

After the gunyah-build, we named our team the "Shiver My Timbers" and painted an appropriately awesome sign.

We prepared our damper, for which I was chided by Mr C for being a bit too wet, and submitted it to the charcoalisation process. We headed back to our gunyah, which by now, was altogether too far away, and hurriedly ate our lunch. We spent some quality "team-time" and headed back to base-camp to check on our damper.

Not unexpectedly, the damper had a healthy charcoal crust, but was actually really nice in the middle. The maltesers (lolly-enhanced damper is a new innovation for me) worked very well and there was nothing but charcoal crust left.

We prepared, drank (and mostly discarded) some billy tea.

The photo frames were done with the help of the very talented Christine and surpringly for year 5 boys a lot of effort was expended.

The day wound up with a few songs in the afternoon and a VERY noisy bus trip home. Bring on day two!

IIS: The source of my frustration

Can I recommend against hosting IIS websites straight out of your build folders? Today I had the case where in the end it seemed like IIS's shadow copying was failing to notice that some of my built dlls had changed and was serving up an old version of my dll.  VERY PERPLEXING.

Dotnet format strings

Quite counter intuitively as far as I am concerned the following code snippets produce wildly varying results.

DateTime.Now.ToString("M");
DateTime.Now.ToString("M ");

Now, you would expect that the second line has the same output as the first but with a space appended. However date formats that are exactly one character long are treated differently.  There is a set of pre-baked format strings that come into play in that case, and another set that are used for strings 2+ characters.

I don't like it. I think it would have been better to use a char in the first call or a separate method name.