Woa, thanks Hanna for making me get my ass into gear. I should really have written this right after camp, instead of two or three weeks afterwards. Now amongst daily distractions, and noises which never cease to banter me (In the form of parents) I shall now attempt to write a brief little thingy about camp. Hokay, so let’s start with incident number one.
Queue the crew from LRBC piling into the van and heading down the road. Zara gets wide eyes and goes, “I think I forgot my hand bag.” Me and Robert, noticing that she isn’t decisive enough to say that we should turn around to get it, tell Michael to turn around and go back to church. Shortly after this I get a phone call, before I pick it up Robert says “Wouldn’t it be funny if it was the people at church telling us that Zara left her bag behind.”
Dad (Over the Phone): “Zara Left her Bag behind.”

Half way there I get a text from Nicolian (Nicole), “Hey we’re here, should we start the meeting without you?” Well it was 10 o clock, or there abouts, and me and Robert decided she was joking. Cause for them to get there so quickly they would have had to have left at like 3 or 4 AM.

We get to camp and the mockumentary begins, Robby brought his camera (Which over the week will film kids desperately trying to get into shots, even if it means putting a hand (Or other limb) extremely close in front of the lens. If they were smart enough they would have wrote their name on their palm or something, but no.)

After tackling various people I haven’t seen for an entire year I ask Nicolian If she was serious about the text. Turns out they left at about 4 in the morning. I pity the fools. (Like mister T.)

Kids arrive: This years batch is missing quite a few of the regular familiars, but that’s cool, because it’s full of new ones. I get the older trouble makers. Woot. Unfortunately I don’t bond with these guys as much as I usually do. I guess its cause normally I get the ones with no friends, when camp starts, and all become friends with me, then each other, as the week goes on. Oh well. Sigh. Sucks a little.

Oh. MY. GOSH. Guys toilets now don’t look like the inside of a particularly stony hard kidney. Also the showers now have DOORS. Jeeze. Finally in the 21st century in that department. Shower curtains are not the way to go in a public place. Or maybe I’m just embarrassed and paranoid.

Other new renovations include a leader’s room, where we can hang out when we want (But I rarely do.)

After the meeting I help Tracey with the memory verses. The theme of the camp is about running the race. So we decide to pick very competitive games for the memory verses.
Let’s go through what we did.
Day 1: We did the spiny game, which involves a broom for each person. You look up at the broom, spin around a set number of times, put the broom down and jump over it three times, and then dive for the candy in the middle. It tends to make people go in the wrong direction and in general act like the village drunk trying to play hop scotch.
Day 2: Fear factor. THANK YOU SO MUCH random butchery up the road by four square, for giving us the lambs heart, cows kidney, and sweat meats, completely free of charge. God bless. You guys rock. Also thank you four square for making us have to buy the whole sushi kit just to get at the little jar of wassabi.
All those ingredients (Including a can of sardines) were fed to 2 lucky kids from each team. The Lambs heart team one. My god, I wish I gave a consolation prize to the wassabi kids, they were OWNED by that stuff. I myself tried each of the fear factor things to find out what they tasted like, and I have to say, wassabi SUCKS. One cracker with it on gave me a mighty kick. Two got me on the ground and made me almost throw; it felt like I just drank turpentine.
Day 3: (Or third day Adventist as I would say giggling, though no one else got it.) We did a game where as a team, they had to drink 4 litres of water, then run into the hall and put together a puzzle of the verse. Some dumb team did theirs outside, which must have been pretty hard since, grappling hands, small bits of flimsy paper, and most importantly, wind, never go together well. By the beginning of this day kids were getting excited about what we would be doing for the memory verse, because me and Tracey had grown a reputation for doing extreme and imaginative things for memory verses. Unfortunately I think we got lame from day 3 onward.
Day 4: We did a pictograph thing, where words are replaced by pictures. I told you we got lame. The leaders struggled getting it, but the kids were pretty switched on, FOILED, they were meant to be TIRED. Obviously I was the only one who was. Oh well, it got my drawing skills dusted down (As If drawing on kids arms and doing groovy patterns hadn’t already.)
This was also the time where I got an even more diabolical reputation when I said (As we were setting up) “Lets get this party rolling like a baby down a flight of stairs – waterman” This had mixed results of laughter, and people looking around with facials that said “Can he say that? In a church??” Then someone’s like, “You knows there’s a baby at the back right?” “Oh sorry,” I said into the mic, “I didn’t mean YOU personally.” To the baby.
Just as I was about to rub out the fairy (-ry, +th), A little girl screamed out “Don’t rub out the FaairRy!” I lol’d, took it as a complement, and then ruthlessly rubbed that pixy out of existence.
Day 5: We got lazy, nothing to see here.

Ok, other events, I made new friends! Yay! Izak, the home schooled, presumably social retard made friends. Hanna, who is quiet by nature, but groovy. How can being Scottish, and wanting to go to Peru (I’m sorry if it’s the wrong country) NOT be groovy!? Ha, first meeting
Izak: Hi, you must be our new junior leader. I’m Izak.
Hanna: Hi, yea, I’m Hanna.
Random girl: SHES TAKEN.
Izak: Oh. *gets distracted and runs off*
A whole bunch of other chicks, whose names escape me now, (huh, that’s what you get for not texting me constantly) But still with great personalities. Two who had hunger pains all week, and didn’t know it. One of these specimens of anorexia was 12, but I SWEAR looked 15, lol. Oh dear. She slept with my jumper one night, which was rather odd. Odder still was when I put it on next at the guy’s overnighter and got the overwhelming whiff of female. There wasn’t one of those for miles! How can it BE?!? Enough talk of fan girls now.
Oh yea, I got to know Teddy A lot better this camp, big Samoan guy, who does a great accent. He’s a barrel of laughs. So cool.

Ok, let’s go back to the first night, me, Robby and Chris are in the mouse house. A small room near the back of the camp. This is the basic setup

So as you can see from my marvelously made diagram created in 5 seconds, that me and Robby are in one half of the room and that Chris is in the other, there’s a curtain or something in the inner door. The other two doors open out into the dead of the scary night. Now me and Robby are talking, and the security light keeps turning on, I tell Robert to lye still damn it. We get talking about how it would be freaky if someone walked past the door and how much we would freak out (We are so manly.)
The I was like, “Dude, what if someone broke into Chris’s side of the room, and started beating the crap out of him and started stealing his stuff… We should totally just pick up our junk, and quietly go out our backdoor and leave him to it. No sense in all of us getting beaten up. We’ll just grab our sleeping bags and wallets, and go sleep in the main cabin. It’ll be like we were never there. Just ignore the problem and it’ll eventually go away… Along with a bunch of Chris’s stuff.”
We cracked up, you wouldn’t believe. Afterwards we were like, if we tried telling that story ever again… It would be so lame. We did, and it was.

Talking about lame, a repeat of last year happened with the skits. I’m pretty sure I’m cursed in that department. Now if it was me by myself I could pull off anything, but when it comes to a bunch of kids, where 90% of the boys don’t want to do it, things get a little tough. Our practices were pretty much spent making up jokes, and me quoting “Wayne’s World.”
As it happened, just like last year, we made it up while everyone else did their skits. Me and Hanna Ended up Selling weed to some northlanders, Nicolian was our Indian presenter, Fairies failed to materialize, Boys got a reason to beat up the little guy and put him in a fridge (Off stage of course, totally not part of the skit, but the “Get him out of the fridge!” Which was shouted got the most laughs.), a painter… I don’t know what was up with him to begin with… and I picture was taken, (which I failed to run out and take in time), All in all it was a painful experience, but a hilarious memory.
And anyway, the awesome cave man skit done at the end was so awesome; you can’t be on a downer after that.
On one of the later nights we were at camp I hit my low. Its something that happens at almost every camp I go to, at some point Ill just crash in a fiery emotional ball of twisted… emotion. It hasn’t happened at cooper’s beach camp before, or not so I recall anyway. I think it had something to do with my set of kids, and some one else’s (no pointing fingers), getting on my nerves and never taking the hint. So I decided it was high time to ditch this Popsicle stand and get some me time… I didn’t get that till about 1 in the morning. So I plug my MP3 in, pump out the Reel Big Fish, which is upbeat enough to get me happy, and hateful enough to get out the angst. I’m trudging along the beach and boy, all those beautiful stars don’t help much it seems, I can barely see a thing and I have never seen the tide so high. So I’m playing tag with the waves, not wanting to get my shoes wet. I get all the way down to the very end of the beach, where the last set of lights of houses shine. I climb some stairs which leads up off the sand onto a lawn of grass. I’m on the lawn of two really plush houses. I take the path of least resistance through a Japanese garden thing and down the side of the house. Lights are on in the living room, and I’m pretty sure I can hear people talking in there. I get out onto their drive way and the garage security light flicks on and blinds me. It freaks me out a little but I just keep going. I get out onto the bottom of a little cultisak. I keep walking and end up on the main road, I keep walking away from camp till I get to the sign welcoming people to Coopers beach. No more lights are down the road and I decide that’s as good a place as any to make the long walk back. When I do eventually get back (at like 3 in the morning) a few of the guys are still awake. Teddy is cuddling this little kitten. Apparently three had been dumped around the camp while I was gone. One had found its way into the girl’s cabin at one point apparently. The kitten chills with us through the night. And in the morning I take care of it for a bit, cause it wont shut up, stupid hungry little thing. We locked it in the “Haunted” chicken coop so it couldn’t get at us.

Oh yea, Cameron Got his arm popped out by Clem. Nice one Clem =D. It was rather dramatic, and then we got to play the worst version of go home stay home I have ever played. Take over 80 kids. Tell them they have to get to one point without being caught, tell them to hide. They all hide really close to the Zone. Now put out about 5 leaders to do the catching. Stir well… what do you get? Ha ha… IT SUCKED. But I’m just a pessimist, and it’s starting to get late as I write this.

Coopers, you have given me many happy memories over the years. This year has been No exception, I’m sure Ill remember some more of this camp at some point or another and come back and write it in. But for now, that is all I can chronicle. Thank you everyone, for the good times, and the convenient times. The bad times, and the “Brain thing” times. The in jokes, and the out jokes. The sun burnt feet, and the “BL” T-shirt which I will always wear, even if people think their smart by saying “Haha, Big Looser.”. Thank you for the Haunted Chicken coop with the body behind it, and the kid who broke his leg. Thank you for, Kids and tires, for which I roll over them with. Thank you for a giant hill which I have used to rip my heels and bruise my body with. Thank you for the opportunity to meet some awesome people. But most of all, thank you for the chance to learn more about God. That one conversation was worth it.