Monday, June 30, 2008

SC@T 2008

This year our whole stake went to the same camp: Camp Tahuaya. It was indeed a quite enjoyable experience. The canoeing was particularly pleasing for the reason that the two sessions of this class were two hours and forty-five minutes long each. I participated in proceeding to fulfill the requierements with another boy in my ward named Paul Romer. I have several bruises on my legs and arms from playing a game much like basketball in the watercraft. The objective of this recreational exertion was to place a rather over-sized beach ball where it is touching the inner section of a life preserver which was dragged to and fro by the merit badge counselors. My second most enjoyed class was the rifle shooting merit badge. In this course I was required to shoot three bullet in the area of a quarter... five times. I did so. Next, I had to shoot five bullets in the same amount of space... five times. I did so. My other two classes, bird study and wilderness, were not as filled with such interesting things. In bird study there were only two other boys, one of which was in my troop, so the counselor would have been very bored if not for Nathanael and me. I know, we did make a great sacrifice, but we saved this poor woman from having to teach one singular boy. It was boring. Wilderness survival was not boring, but it was very loud. It had many participants and the counselor had a hard time controlling the class. We, four other scouts in my troop and I, satisified many, if not all, requirements for the wilderness survival merit badge in the sessions of this class. One of the requirements for this badge is to make a shelter in the "wild" and sleep in it one night. The scouts in our troop finshed their shelters quite quickly and we were dismissed to return to our campsite. We were to rendezvous at 8:30 central daylight time where we had met the previous day. We asked if in the stead of meeting there we could just go to where we were sleeping that night. We were granted permission to do so. Without our knowing, the meeting time was moved from 8:30 central daylight time to 9:00 central daylight time. We met at the sleeping area at the prescribed time and proceeded to wait... and wait... and wait. In fact, there was so much waiting going on that we stayed at the sleeping area long enough to begin to come unto anger toward our counselor. We eventually decided to desert our post and see why the others in the class were not there. We went to the meeting place where our counselor had wanted to meet, but lo and behold he and the other scouts were not there. We began to be even more angered. We further tried to locate our counselor by asking one of his associates to call him on his cellular phone. Our counselor recieved the call and spirited us away to the sleeping grounds. Our counselor explained that he had changed the meeting time to 9:00 central daylight time and that scouts attending the class were still showing up at the meeting place until around 9:40 central daylight time, around the time that we went to the meeting place, so we barely missed them. We ceased being angered toward him soon after and we slept through the night well. There were many activities other than classes that we participated in. They were mainly swimming and fishing. Swimming was fun but scout leaders were a rare sight at the pool. There was much fishing, but not much catching. The troop also participated in builiding and racing a raft. We were allowed three barrels and many logs to build this raft, and three paddles to propel the raft. I designed the raft and did much of the knot tying and lashing on it. We came in second in our heat, thus proceeding to the finals. Sadly, we basically came in last in the finals, but oh well, it was fun. I must say taking the raft apart was much harder than putting it together for two reasons: we are very good at tying knots, and the water caused the ropes to tighten on the poles. Much of the rope untying was easy except of a rather long piece of hemp rope. Much of the untying time was spent using the screwdriver on H.'s pocket knife to get under the rope and pull in order to loosen the knots. After that it was easy. There was also a fireside at which President Christensen spoke to us about heroes in the Book of Mormon who would have been great scouts and encouraged us in our efforts. This is my report. Au revoir.

-Signed
Eric Vance

P.S. SC@T stands for Scout Camp at Tahauya
P.P.S. I like pi(e)
P.P.P.S. ~3.141592654
P.P.P.P.S. And thusly the reciprocal of the hypotenuse must equal the square root of the sin (pronounced as is sign) of pi times the opposite of b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac divided by 2a plus pi over pi radians.
P.P.P.P.P.S. I did not talk in third person in this post.

5 comments:

  1. One of my pet peeves is the lack of grammar respect by persons that make run-on paragraphs with no breaks in ideas or separation of coherent or logical sections of the presentation for the entire discourse that just runs on and on forever.

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  2. I'm glad to see your recount of the wilderness survival is similar to Paul's. You didn't mention anything about the horseplay and shenanigans at 1am, though.

    Sorry about the boring bird watching, but really, what were you excepting? It's bird watching...

    Lastly, congratulations on the raft. It sounds like the other boys would have been lost without you. Thanks for taking the lead...and showing the way.

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  3. 1 am shenanigans? Oh yeah! The rock fly! There were some "scouts" from troop 2008 who were supposedly throwing rocks at us, and the other wilderness survival "scouts" were retaliating.

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