It seems weird to be writing about my summer two days before Thanksgiving, but perhaps its fitting as I had an amazing summer with a lot to be thankful for.
Philmont Scout Ranch
As I wrote in my last post (far too long ago) I traveled to Philmont Scout Ranch near Raton, New Mexico with eight scouts and three other adult leaders from my troop (Troop 154, from Sterling Heights, MI). We had an enjoyable train ride from Detroit to Raton. It was a bit eventful as our train was held up for a storm on the east side of the Mississippi due to high winds and stormy conditions.
Our trek was great with many amazing sights including:

-seeing three bears in the wild (all of our group saw one bear as we were about to start on the trail, about eight of us saw two bears and I was the only one to see all three)
-seeing a rattlesnake up close (but not too personal)
-seeing the world’s only T-Rex print
-backpacking in God’s Country for ten days and about 55-60 miles
-sunrise on our last day on the trail at the Tooth of Time

We all made it safely without much more than sore feet and a bloody nose.
I took many pictures (about 5 GB worth) but unfortunately my two, 2GB cards became corrupt and the pictures were lost. I tried every piece of photo recovery software and sent one of the cards out for service without any luck.

My pictures can be seen here: Philmont Photos on PICASA.

I also took along a Flip Video camera and shot some video along the way. I was impressed with how it came out. It also did not burn through batteries as bad as my camera did.

Check out the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPdTKRiquR0

Here’s a picture from The Tooth of Time on the morning of July 5th.

Overall Philmont was an amazing place to visit and “I’m going to go back there, someday…”

Lost Lake Scout Reservation 2009
This summer marked by 20th summer at Lost Lake and my ninth (or tenth, I lose count) as Commissioner. I enjoyed camp but decided during the summer I needed a change. This was my last year as commissioner. In 2010, I will be teaching Photography Merit Badge and starting our camp’s Cinematography Merit Badge program. I look forward to 2010.

The Adventures of Robin Hood

When I came back from summer camp in early August I was anticipating having two-three weeks of lazy, nothing to do summer vacation. That lasted for about four days. I belong to the Stage Combat and Theatre Repertory Company Knights of Iron and have helped out for many years behind the scenes. I even have/had the nickname “Sir Not Appearing In This Film” from Monty Python because of helping out but not being on cast. This season would be different.

With ten days before opening day at the Michigan Renaissance Festival one of our cast members had to pull out of the show. I was selected to replace him in the role of James the Guard in our Adventures of Robin Hood show. The Adventures of Robin takes place in five scenes throughout the day and festival grounds. It finishes with a Human Combat Chess match. This is no small project. For me this required learning the script (Scene I, which was almost all of my speaking parts, was 9 pages alone) and learning three different sets of fight choreography. With the two other guards we fought Will Scarlet and Robin Hood in Scene I and I fought Little John in the Human Combat Chess Match at the end of the day. It was mentally challenging to learn the show in the ten days I had to learn the script.

The show opened on August 23 and ran on weekends through the first weekend in October. By the end of the run over 16,000 people had seen our show.
Here are some pictures from the show.

The first picture shows Little John tripping me during our fight in the Chess Match at the end of the day.The second picture shows us at the end of each day when we would greet the patrons as they left for the day. Many times we were asked to pose for pictures, to make things fun we had twelve poses, with three special poses. Prince John would choose a number and we would make that pose. We also had a Power Rangers, Charlie’s Angels and The Travolta pose. It was a fun way to make sure the patrons had a good time. In this picture I am on the far left. Also in the picture are Sir Guy of Gisbourne, The Sherrif of Nottingham, Prince John, Paul and Max. The last picture shows another scene from my fight with Little John. In this scene Little John is throwing me around the chess board with his staff.

Backpack the Cat
That sounds like the title for a children’s story and it could very well turn into one. One of my students found two kittens on her way to school. She put them in her backpack and left them outside for the morning. Someone found her backpack and brought it into the school where it was returned to her. She hung it up on our coat rack and kept quiet about it. The kittens cooperated by keeping quiet as well. Near the end of the day I notice three girls hanging around by the coat rack. I told them to go back to their seats and get to work. Just a few minutes later, they were back by the coat rack. So I walked over to send them back to their seats and find out what was so interesting. When I got to the coat rack, I noticed the backpack was moving, I asked who’s backpack this was and the student owned up saying “There’s a cat inside…” So we walked down to the Principal’s office. While at the Principal’s office, I removed the kitten from the backpack and was holding it, when I heard the backpack meow. So I opened the backpack and discovered the second kitten.
After determining that these kittens were not pets and were strays. I decided to adopt one of them, the fourth grade teacher adopted the other. So I have a new family member…to go with my fish tank. She was promptly named Backpack after where she was found.

Interesting note: One of her favorite places to sit is… on top of the computer backpack that I take to school every day.

So it has been an amazing summer. Some of the hardest work and most fun I have had in my life all at the same time.

The picture below is a Wordle from my Delicious bookmarks. A wordle looks at a groups of words and highlights the words that appear most frequently. It could be used on a selection of text or as I have done my tags from delicious.
You can check my bookmarks here: http://delicious.com/techicebreaker

Here’s an important tool for photographers and teacher to have in their tool box. Art Plus Digital Photography Recovery is a free program that recovers pictures off of memory cards that have been corrupted or even formatted. I found that my 1 Gb memory card had become corrupt and I had not removed some pictures from the Tiger games I went to this week. The download and installation was very easy and the instructions were easy to follow. I was able to recover all of my images from this week plus many others that had been erased a long time ago. This program is useful for teachers using digital cameras in their classroom as well as for personal use.

http://www.artplus.hr/adapps/eng/dpr.htm

My troop was camping this past weekend at Cole Canoe Base in Northern Michigan. At our evening campfire I was playing with my camera and I had some scouts play around with flashlights while I took pictures. Here are two of the best results.