Things change, they stay the same-- grab your earplugs and brave the rain.

Today.  Today is the first official day of camp.  The young men who have chosen, or were chosen, to spend the next 7 weeks here started arriving last night.  The very first white van, driven by the incredibly beautiful Mrs. Welch, pulled into camp towards the end of the annual "New staff/counselors vs. Veteran staff/counselors" softball game.  Which was officiated by yours truly.  (More on that later)

This softball game is one of my favorite yearly traditions.. it follows a BBQ cookout over at the girl's camp, and then... having gorged ourselves on ribs and/or chicken, baked potatoes, and strawberry shortcake, we go play softball.  As it turned out last night, in 110% humidity.   (Mr. Vaughn... I know that's not possible.  But it felt like it).   This year's version was one of the best games I can remember, won by the veterans with a 1-run margin on a walk-off triple.   The "News" often struggle with the game, as many are counselors from other countries, especially one island nation where the last thing that resembles softball was called "rounders"... and now they play cricket, among other sports.

But this crew of New Ones did themselves proud... they had plenty of folks who knew the game and knew it well... and a couple of the cricket players beat the ever-lasting snot out of the ball.  Just crushed it.  It really was a good game, and it was fun to participate in it.

About that... for the second straight year, I was requested/volunteered to provide umpiring services in the field.  (Batters batted until they put it in play).   I've been an umpire for a very long time, but we all know how much that counts.  After a few controversial calls, I think there are about 2-3 counselors who are probably planning a midnight raid on our cabin, to beat me thoroughly about the neck and head with pool noodles....  but there was one "New" guy who said at one point "Are you actually an umpire?"... guess some kind of skill showed through, huh?

Oh, and that white van?  Upon arrival, it disgorged a gaggle of boys from Israel, and camp is now officially camp.   Up to now, it's been all preparation, staff bonding, and the calm before the storm... but this place doesn't really come alive until the kiddos arrive.  They are, after all, the raison d'etre for this place.

A small group settled in last night, but today the big coach buses, and more vans continued to arrive, accompanied by the occasional family who lives close enough to drive their son up here personally.   And then... remember that humidity?  It ran head-on into gravity.  After 7 gorgeous days here in Maine, the rains arrived about the same time the campers did.   Go figure.

Don't get me wrong... it is beautiful here when it rains, and I love rain.  Love walking in it.. (I swear I am going to have a hooded cloak some day... they need to come back in style).  Love listening to it.  But it does put a damper on the sports and other outdoor activities that permeate this camp.

So, tonight... I am going to go lie down in bed, and read... and listen to the rain.  Listen to it pattering on the cabin roof.  And sleep, knowing that, at long last... camp has begun.

 

What's that you say?  Why the earplugs in the title?   100+ young men and a bunch of twenty-something male counselors, in a dining hall, with a full repertoire of camp songs, chants, conga lines, feet stomping, and table banging to draw from.... and the vim and vigor of youth begets volume.... and lots of it.

Greatness.

 

You were there, now you are here; the Old Blood sings!

Tonight, at camp, the evening activities highlighted both where we have been and where we are now.  The evening meal had a theme-- counselors, staff and associated families were grouped by the state/country from whence they hail, and were requested to dress up in clothes indicative of said region, and/or make a skit or presentation touting such areas, sometimes at the gentle expense of the rival regions or countries.  (The Ohio vs. Michigan one was particularly good)

Since the camp photographer is now here with us, there is a good degree of possibility that a certain Texan was photographed while wearing an entirely-too-small red cowgirl hat, a la Jessie from "Toy Story".  I shall have to hack his files and make sure those do not see the light of day....

Other than showing once again that we have almost as many Brits here at this camp as we do Yanks, it was fun to see the various groups showing their colors, or their native duds, or the completely-made-up-citizenship approach (I'm talking to you, Mr. Holcomb from Sveeden).  Once again, the Brits shone with a proliferation of Union Jacks, football kits, and a sign held by the lead person asking for an "orderly queue" to be formed.

After the meal, we moved to the campfire grounds, and the night transitioned.   It was no longer about where we came from... this is about where we are.  Right now.   For these two months.

For me, as I am sure it is for many others, the true start of camp begins with this first campfire.   Allow me to set the stage for you:

[caption id="attachment_318" align="alignleft" width="300"] Sunset gleaming on the Saco River[/caption]

This view is the heart and soul of Indian Acres.

[caption id="attachment_320" align="alignright" width="300"] A little fire, friends, family, and fun....[/caption]

As the giant bonfire is lit, we see many of the usual suspects wander out to regale their wares of stories, songs, and presentations:   the SNL-inspired IA Update, wonderful music by our many talented musicians, testimonies and silly skits.  We even learned how to say "I love camp" in Hungarian.

And, in what I am pretty sure is a first for campfire, even over all these years... there was a power paraglider who flew right down the Saco, just a few feet over the surface of the water, his engine overpowering the first musical act.  I was too slow to pull the phone out to record it for posterity, alas.

At times, several folks talked about the long history of this little place, as we sat on the (literal) roots of the pine trees and the (figurative) roots of the many people who have sat here before.    References such as these can often be trite, unless they are really true.  And I swear you can sit here and feel the old blood of this camp flowing through this little glen where we light a bonfire, sing songs, and make gentle fun of ourselves and each other.

[caption id="attachment_319" align="aligncenter" width="300"] One the many talented permutations of musicians here. The man on the left is a remarkable Liverpudlian... I don't think they've invented the instrument he can't play....[/caption]

In the "Wheel of Time" series of fantasy novels by Robert Jordan (and Brandon Sanderson), one of the highest honors that can be granted to someone is for another person to proclaim "Tai'shar" followed by the region they come from... in the made-up language of the books, it means "True Blood"... a character will say this when someone has fought valiantly or shown great honor or respect to duty.   Anyone who has read these books would recognize the term instantly.   It is based on the idea that the truest blood of the old blood runs strong in this individual.

The old blood sings in this place, and in these people.   Many of them are IA/FA, blood and soul.

Tai'shar Indian Acres!   Tai'shar Forest Acres!

Goodnight.... and safely rest.

Mama, I'm home... (kinda sorta)

At a little after 3:00 pm EDT, the Welch family came home from a 5-day car trip.  Yes, we came home...to our summer home.  It might sound a tad high-falutin' to say "the Welch family summers in Maine".... but that's exactly what we do.   And, 3 years in, this is a tradition that has started to settle into our blood.  When I saw these today....

[caption id="attachment_315" align="alignleft" width="300"] I-A... I-A... I-N-D-I-A-N-A-C-R-E-S.... Indian Acres!!! Indian Acres!!![/caption]

I felt like I was at home.

Because I was.

 

And the feeling only got stronger as the first afternoon progressed.   From the random greetings until the meet-n-greet event just prior to the first dinner, and then dinner itself, the re-connecting with friends seen (usually) exclusively during the summer only furthered the sense of return.

I'm home for the summer, folks.  And there's a whole bunch of friends and family to share it with.

 

3 years ago, I blogged about camp here in Maine.   This year, I've decided to take another run at it.  Hopefully I'll come up with enough new material to make it interesting to the 1.5 people who actually read my ramblings.   One thing is already divergent--this time, we reside at the boy's camp, so the experience is a bit different.   Rampant testosterone has a way of altering any experience, methinks.

I'm excited to be back, and excited to be logging my thoughts and memories here again.  As I sit at my work desk, with only a small fan in the window to blow the cool Maine night in my face, slapping the occasional skeeter away from feasting on my blood, and listening to the utter quiet of the campground (before the campers actually get here, mind you)... I know, deep, deep down....

I'm home.  Gonna be a great 2 months.  Let it begin.

The joy of the music recital (no, seriously!)

Yesterday, I had the occasion to attend a "Coffeehouse Concert" at the music conservatory where one of my sons is learning to play the drums. This is a highly elegant name for what is, in effect, a mini-recital in the middle of the season.

Signing up for this coffeehouse has been very good for my son... his desire for playing the drums, and subsequent practice habits, had flagged somewhat of late, and the goal of getting prepared for the gig has spurred him back into it with a gusto.

But it's still a recital. And those things carry some bad juju in the parenting world... the jokes abound about the suffering and misery of the recital (except, of course, for when your own little darling is up...)

And yes, I concede that some of the performances have all the surface appeal of listening to Wolverine walking through a chalkboard store.   And it is patently obvious that a certain percentage of the young folks seem to be participating solely because someone is forcing them to...

But then.   But then, there are those.  Those young people whose faces radiate their feelings as they play their favorite instruments.  Effused with a true love of music, they brave their performance anxiety in order to learn the crucial element of being able to ply this craft in front of an audience.  It is easy to pick out the ones who are still taking these lessons because they love music and they love to make music.

And I realized yesterday that there are few things as powerful as watching a young boy or girl, a young man or woman, play a musical instrument with joy and happiness, realizing that you are seeing the next link in a chain of musical legacy that stretches back over the centuries of human existence.  Whether it's drums played to the Clash, acoustical guitar covers of The Police, or piano versions of Greensleeves and Ode to Joy, music is a gift from God, and it is truly a blessing to see young people who are infected with a love of it, and a love of the very difficult craft of playing it and carrying on that tremendous tradition.

So, the next time you have to "suffer" through a recital, listen for those nuggets.... revel in those young men and women who are so obviously reveling in their music.   And count yourself lucky to be part of the great symphony/oratorio/opera/gig that is Life.

A truly Super Sunday...

One of my most beloved friends lives in Arlington with his wife (also a long-time friend) and their three lovely daughters.  This man, along with his brother, have one of the best relationships with their parents that I have ever seen, especially with their father.  Although I am sure there were some teenage growing pains, since that family is comprised of human beings, these men have a tight-knit bond with their Dad and their lovely Mom.  I have told the patriarch of this family (who I leave unnamed out of respect for their privacy... this isn't their blog) that one of my life goals is to have a relationship with my sons like he has with these two fine, God-fearing men.   As far as I'm concerned, Mr. X is a benchmark for a father.

So.... how in the world does that apply to a Super Sunday?

Yesterday morning, I had the immense privilege of baptizing my youngest two sons.  Our church allows someone undergoing this solemn ordinance to choose who shall dunk them, and I served in that role for Logan and Ryan.   It was a very special start to this Sunday, and from what I have gathered from my friends in the audience, I wasn't the only one deeply moved by it.

And yet, the event itself is not the connection to Mr. X.  That occurred several days prior, when Allison needed to tell the minister who would be performing the baptisms.  She asked my boys, and they declared, without hesitation, that they wished to be baptized by their Dad.  That simple action warmed my heart almost more than the actual event, and is what made me think of Mr. X and his sons.

There is a lot of time to be played yet... I'm still in the first quarter of this Fatherhood Football Game, and there is still much work to do in order to emulate the baseline of Mr. X.  That said, this little vignette from our family life this week made me feel that I'm on the right track.  I am blessed to have close, wonderful relationships with all four of my sons, and I would not trade that for any currency, of any form, in all the world.   I love my sons.

Mr. X:  thank you for the great example.

The Armchair Economist, Purple Car Syndrome, and the new LEI that isn't quite so Nobel

Lately, as I've been driving around the metroplex, I've begun to notice that there are a lot of businesses that have malfunctioning signs, where some of the letters or a portion of the sign is not lit.  Not a big deal, except that many of them are not getting fixed on a timely basis.  For example, the Spring Creek BBQ on Preston Road in Frisco has been "reek BBQ" for awhile.  

I love "Spring Creek BBQ".... not quite so sure about "reek BBQ"....

After noticing that one months ago, I've begun to notice what seems like a LOT of this.  Now, this might be what I call "Purple Car Syndrome":  once you notice a purple car, you tend to start noticing all the purple cars, which makes you think there is a trend toward purple cars.  Observational data-gathering while just driving around is not necessarily empirical nor impartial.   But the number and/or percentage of malfunctioning signs isn't what intrigues me... it's that they are not getting fixed.  And that I can confirm from memory as I keep seeing the same ones over and over.

If I were a business owner, I would think this is something one would want to fix fairly soon.  Your name is your brand, and it's out there in glorious neon for all to see.   And that leads to my new LEI (Leading Economic Indicator).. alert the media and those folks in D.C. take note here....

(Full disclosure:  I have **no** chops as an economist.  Despite all the things I have learned in life, the interests I have, and the subjects I've studied, I've never put any cycles into economics.  Which is pretty funny since that field is often tied closely to mathematics.  Most people don't realize there is no Nobel prize in math... so if a mathematician ever hopes to get a Nobel, it will be in economics.  As for me?  The sum total of my knowledge in economics comes from the bartering systems of various role-playing video games I enjoy.   "I got meat.  You want wheat?")

And so, the new LEI that isn't quite so Nobel:   I can't help but wonder if... the preponderance of half-lit signs I'm seeing isn't indicative of what ails our economy at the present moment.   Things aren't horrible, but they aren't great either.. and maybe the business owners are having to really watch the coin.   In situations such as that, it might just be the case they don't feel they can put some funds in the "fix the sign" bucket.   Sort of like us, our house and the fence.  I would love to completely replace our fence for aesthetic's sake, but given the size of our yard and the cost of doing so, it's something that must be saved for and designated for the future.

But... I'm not trying to attract folks to my house with my fence.   These businesses depend on their signage to catch the consumer's eye, and right now many of them are doing so for the wrong, yet often hilarious, reasons.  And the armchair economist in me can't help but wonder if that's not significant.

P versus NP on the way to FBC

Our place of worship, Frisco Bible Church, is about an 11-minute drive from our home; on this morning all three of my boys were riding with me in my vehicle, and I had one of the most eclectic 10 minute conversations I could have possibly imagined.

It started innocuously enough:  Matthew piped up and mentioned how much he is into puzzles right now, and he mentioned that he has figured out most of mathematics is like a puzzle to solve.  Which it is. (My degree was in mathematics, which has served us well as we homeschool our boys).   I then told them about one of my favorite stories from math, about how Gauss developed the formula for summing a sequence of consecutive positive integers.

If you don't know the story, Gauss was, like most geniuses, not doing very well in primary school, and was assigned by the master to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100 as a form of punishment.  (It is the mathematical equivalent of writing lines, and it should take a good while to complete when done manually).  The young Gauss, however, solved it as a puzzle and returned with the correct answer in a matter of minutes.  And his formula is still used today... 

After that little foray into math history, the conversation then turned to the great unsolved conjecture from computational theory, P versus NP.  Yes, it really did.  Just a few days before, I had been watching an episode of "Numb3rs" with my boys, and the mathematician in the series, Charlie, had retreated to his garage during a time of emotional duress and worked on the PvNP problem as a way of holding his emotions at bay.

And so now, Matthew wanted to know what it was all about.  Talk about opening a can of worms:  I only have a B.S. in Math, and I'm not Charlie Epps... or Gauss.

So, with only my basic understanding of what the PvNP problem even entails, I endeavored to explain it to my sons. (In a nutshell, the idea is to prove that if a computer can be used to verify a solution to problem, then the computer ought to be able to be programmed to find a solution as well;  if this thing is ever proven {you can win $1,000,000 if you do}, it will have a huge impact on the computer sciences).

Obviously, this wasn't making sense to them (did it make sense to you?), so I struggled to find an analogy that would help them understand the difficulty often faced when creating algorithms that can be used in computer programming to solve problems.  Even the simplest things that humans can do without much effort or thought (such as sorting items) require an algorithm and multiple lines of code... all to teach the computer how to do these things, so the computer can do them very, very fast.

Then I remembered an old motivational demonstration I had heard about, designed to teach people about improving their communication techniques:  making a PB&J sandwich.  I told them I had a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly, and a knife.  I asked them to tell me how to make a PB&J sandwich.  (Most people will immediately start with 'put the peanut butter on the bread', so you put the jar of PB on top of the loaf of bread.... you get the idea).  The creation of the 'algorithm' is the outlining of the very specific steps to get the 'computer' to properly assemble the sandwich.

Since, in this instance, my audience is made up of pre-teen and teenage boys, moments of hilarity ensued and filled out the remainder of our drive.  "I'm spreading the jelly all over the plastic bag of the bread loaf!"

It was a very packed and interesting 10 minutes.

So......

 

What's the point of this otherwise-incredibly-nerdy-post-that-will-bewilder-most-folks?

Far too often, when my sons try to engage me in conversation, I do not give it the effort I really should.  You know what I mean, the 'uh huh' syndrome... or the 'I haven't got time to get into that right now', or 'Dad would like a few minutes of no questions'.   Guilty on all counts, plenty of times.  Especially since I tend toward the curmudgeonly, a card-carrying G.O.B.

This morning, for some reason, I didn't.  And it was a wonderful time... and will be a lasting, precious memory for me.

Every now and then, really listen to your kid's questions, no matter what your mood or the situation.  Whether it's unsolvable math problems, sports, the dating habits of their favorite musician, or the intricacies of Spongebob.   They asked, so it's something that interests them.  Discuss it with them and they will feel special.

And you might find out that you do too.....