Capture the Flag or, Way to Go Timmy, Now People are Bleeding

So Wednesday is a special day, and not just because I'm sometimes dealing with digestional traffic jams on that day, but because Wednesday means Color Chaos, Water Carnival, and on this particular one, a camp-wide capture the flag game.  This one was special because, instead of camp-wide night activity, all of the groups were given extra long time just with their cabin.  At dinner the counselors started talking about what their cabins would do, and capture the flag came up.  In my head I immediately picture'd it as taking place on the whole camp grounds (the main area, not the trails, maybe not quite a square mile).  Apparently this is not how people usually do it, because of supervision issues and counselors going 'Nam on the 8 year olds.  The game got shifted to the field, which was cool.  Then I found out some of the little ones were going to be playing Red Rover and other things on the field and all of camp popped back into my head.  It was like destiny.  Plus we had like 60 kids and 10 adults playing, so we would've needed a bigger field anyway.  So I convinced people that a well-supervised game of capture the flag would be a good thing, and it would be under control.  And it worked.  Everyone understood what was expected and what the rules were and everything.  That last for maybe 20 seconds.  Then the fact that 70 people were playing capture the flag caught up with us and it all hit the fan.  Kids were arguing with kids about boundaries, kids were arguing with counselors about boundaries, kids falling on pavement; chaos, in a word.  After the game ended every single  supervisor who witnessed the game was walking towards me with a look of fear in their eyes.  I forget how deeply rooted to our primal instincts the game of capture the flag is.  We fight to protect our own and we lose ourselves in running and we laugh a little when other people fall down (depending on how many times they whine about going to bed the night before). So I learned an important lesson today.  Don't ever assume that a 70 person capture the flag will be tame.  And, if you ever have the chance, definitely play the game anyway, because it's awesome.

My Day in the Health Center

It was a Wednesday that started out like any other: my co-counselor's alarm went off at 6:00am, then at 6:30, a solid hour and a half before anybody needed to be up.  7 of the 10 kids in my cabin (group) were from Mexicali (Mexico) and half of them invested a lot of their time making sure they looked good before letting other people see them, so they pretended not to speak English when I told them to stop putting gel in their hair and go back to sleep because breakfast isn't until 8:30.  Duermense damnit.
One thing that was different about this Wednesday was that ever since about 9pm the night before my stomach was telling my pretty firmly that it wanted to poop, but then it would change its mind when push came to shove.  Because of that I didn't sleep very well, and possibly because not sleeping (or the constipation), I had some flu-like symptoms and spent a day in the Health Center at camp.  The Health Center is a big trailer at Camp Marston where, if you spent a whole day there, you see some crazy things that you would not expect to see.  My own health and energy fluctuated throughout the day, and too much of it was spent wrapped in a sleeping bag dozing.  When I felt ambitious I would venture out and see how my fellow patients were doing.  There was one girl who lost a good square foot of skin in various places after an epic mountain scooter accident.  She also had some infection on the healing wounds and that had to be scrubbed off.  She wasn't happy about that.  There was another boy who spent 20 minutes crying on the phone begging to be picked up (it was also when the infection scrubbing was going on, so things were loud in there).  Things quieted down for a while until the real nurse left for her night off and I was given the instructions, "If anyone comes in use the radio to get a coordinator here."  Easy enough.  Shortly after those instructions were given 6 children came in, 2 with headaches, 1 in need of allergy medicine, and some there just to play Operation (as far as I can tell).  One of the headaches projectile vomited after drinking glass of water which made everything kind of smell like salad with oranges in it.  The other headache didn't stop talking the entire time she was in the Health Center and didn't really slow down at all either which made me wonder how she could have a headache and does the buzzing noise in Operation really help the pain in your head and why are you deliberately touching the part of the game that makes the buzzing noise if your head hurts please leave so I can clean up this vomit now thank you.

These are just of the few of the anecdotes from that day, although, granted, all of the others involve me sleeping, reading, or failing to poop and so I won't go into too much detail.  I think the internet at Camp is starting to cooperate so these little stories should come with much more regularity.  Anybody still reading this gets a gold star and is encouraged to inquire about being able to see pictures of me, the camp, and the camps activities.  That is all for now, enjoy your pooping (if you're lucky enough to be able to go)

Timmy