Murphy's Law: What can go wrong, will go wrong.

Day 5-6: Camp Cheerful @ Strongsville, OH

Our first full day at camp was great. I'm still getting used to the early mornings but I think most my teammates are in the same boat. It started by sending small groups of the boys to the different projects around the camp. My buddy Schenck and I did the take-off of one of the other shades that we're supposed to replicate (which gave me horrible memories of my estimating class). Then we went to the high ropes and started busting ground with a mattux however the dirt didn't agree with us; we were in solid clay. In the five hours that I and the seven guys were out at the course, we may have had only 20ft of 4ft wide path dug out (sadly it was only 3inches deep into the ground). This was depressing because of the remain 2-300ft of path we still needed dug around the structure. Thus, we had the camp rent a skid loader to ease the pain. We sent our boy Dave from Iowa to run it while Bryan and I went to work on different projects. Now Push America provides the team with four radios and and hour or too into it I hear that Dave had managed to put the bobcat into the ditch. The is actually a more amazing feat than it sounds b/c of how hard the ground is around the high ropes course and the creek is right next to it. So hard in fact that when Dave had earlier ran the tractor forward with the bucket tilted that it not only didn't pull up any ground - the grass didn't even rip up. But all Dave was doing was turning around on the part of the future gravel pathway that runs near the ditch/creek and part of the side of it collapsed. A truck pulled it out quickly though.

That evening we got to do a dance with the campers and I think they really enjoyed. Andy and I grabbed these two old ladies in wheel chairs and pushed them around in circles. I got my partner carolyn to yell and she was just having a ball. The damned of it is now shes doing it at lunch, at dinner, well anytime random really. Too bad for the counselors.

At night couple guys and I ordered some pizza that night to tie us over from the rice'n'chicken the camp provided (the good food anywhere rule doesn't apply since we left the south).

The next day a group of a guys and myself began the horse shade structure which was built like a bomb shelter for a couple Clydesdale beasts. Basically it consists of seven 6x6 posts that make a three sided box with a slant roof (and it's small: only 11ft by 12ft). Bryan and I had given our take-off to the maintenance guy Nick and all the lumber was there in the morning. We also rented an auger to dig the holes. I took a small group of guys out to the pasture where the future shade was going to be erected and we staked out the post holes; easy enough. Then we began to dig; easy enough - no. It was only Andy and I on the two man machine, but the labels on the side don't say anything about being large enough to operate it (at least in this ohio concrete they call ground). At lunch we got a couple of large midwestern boys to man the digger and we started with some success; until we found what was under the ground. Like christmas we found all sorts of goodies under only little bit of covering: utility lines, concrete, rocks, pvc pipe, steel pipe and horse stirrups just under our feet. We tried to get a couple more holes going but we had the same discovery. This is where we moved our plot and asked the stables manager. It would have been nice of her to inform anyone that there used to be a barn and a road where there is now a horse pasture which we were cutting up.

To our fortune, it could have been much worse. Those could have been live utility lines like gas or power and we would have turned into camper at camp cheerful pretty quick (if we where lucky). We were told that nothing in the pasture is live anywhere but next time we'll make sure that the camps we attend get all the lines marked by the city if we are doing any serious digging.

We had to work past dinner tonight b/c we had to get the post set in concrete so they would cure overnight. At nine we were done; thank god. A longggg shower was definitely in order; I have to wait on the beer and deep dish pizza until we get into Chicago this weekend.