Hokai, so, basically, tomorrow I'm going off to be a Boy Scout Camp counselor for 7 weeks, the first of them being a week of staff preparation.

As I am going to be a staffer at a Boy Scout camp, I need to be a positive role model for all the little morons who will swear like sailors, then rush off to tell their leaders when I say "piss" after smashing my finger. No, I'm not bitter.

But enough about that. Those little morons are the minority, and for the most part, it's really fun. I get to sit on my hard, uncomfortable wooden throne, and tell the boys to read stuff, and then ask them questions about it, and expand on what the book says so that (for many of them) I get to have the experience of seeing them understand what I was trying to teach.

It's bunches and bunches of fun, but before I get to teach the little blighters, I get to have a week where we make the camp presentable to all the people who will freak out and start killing people if there are branches that you might trip over if you had .25 inch² footprints and you were trying to hurt yourself.

I have a lot of stuff that I don't like about camp, but there seems to be enough that I do like that I'm going back to do it again.

A few of the good friends that I made there ended up not being employed this year, probably in part because the camp director is a most unpleasant Mormon woman who shows discrimination against people who are outspoken in not being Christian. One of the girls I worked with who wasn't in a position where she needed to talk to scouts a lot, and thus couldn't very easily offend them with the beliefs that she didn't talk about without prompting.

She was Wiccan, and one of the nicer people I met at Baldwin. However, she didn't take any crap from people who told her that her religion was inferior to the one that they espoused. One such person was the camp director. She didn't say it to "Jenny", but Jenny heard "Ashley" pretty much saying that people who aren't Christian are immoral, degenerate, etc, pretty much not worth the air it takes to let them keep breathing. That didn't make Jenny happy.

As I said, the camp structure and the people at it have some flaws. But there are people like Jenny who make it worth it.
Like my Wrangler buddies, who try to get me to come down to the corral, and I don't go, because I hate horses.
And my Nature buddy, who speaks with varying accents to throw people off.
And my Cook friend, who makes people do stuff so they need to wash their hands again. And again. And again. (Don't touch his back when he opens his arms for a hug! He's not going to hit you when he goes in for the sack-tap! Don't help him 'bother' people, PPP style!)
And my Archery buddy, who DMs for our D&D adventures.
And my Life-guard buddies, who try to throw me in when I go to the lake, because I used to be a life-guard.
And my Handicraft buddy, who tells the scouts not to finger-carve, even though thumb-carving sounds wa-a-a-a-a-y cooler.
And my Ranger-buddy, who used to be in the corral, but now gets to drive around, and carry a radio.
And my Commy buddies, who get pwned at ninja-water-pistol-fighting.
And my Gun buddies, who radio back when the lifeguards yell at them without a radio.
And my TP buddy, who gives me stuff to eat when I give her money.
And my Commissary buddies, who give the scouts I watch over food, so they don't come to my tent and beg. (sorry, my 'tree'

Then there's a few of the reasons I almost didn't come back: Mormon director's kids. She refuses to discipline them, and no one else wants to, because, you know, she's our boss, and if we piss her off my telling off her kids, we tend to catch hell a lot more often. So her kids are complete brats, and run around destroying our stuff, and then say sorry with smiles on their faces, and then do some more destruction.
So... Camp has some good things, and some bad, and I just hope that this year, probably the last year I'll work there, will have a lot more of the good than the bad. If not, then I won't need to worry about it getting any worse, because I'll have already written the camp off as a place that I'm never likely to work for again.


So, to anyone that watches this with regularity, feel free to spam, because I won't be here to tell you to stop. Just be sure to keep it to topics that I'll be able to read through without needing to conceal it from my dad, who doesn't like this site merely because of the first part of the compound word that is its name. He doesn't like unorthodoxy.