Summer Ends, At Least In Spirit

The final week of summer camp is always a bit sad, with people standing around in confusion, wondering where the summer has gone. Now that it's over, I've seen at least a couple of people on Facebook already starting the countdown until next summer. Ha. As for me, it was a pretty easy week. I had a younger group than I usually do, but along with the 21 3rd graders there came 7 counselors, which is 3 more than I think I've ever had before. Alex and Nathan were both up at camp as counselors too, and Willow, Jeanine, and Eva all made it up for the final campfire program of the season.

I led my usual activities in the afternoons. 35 kids followed me down to the pond, and around 15 of them followed me into the pond. Since they County Park people are slowly draining the water out so they can make repairs, it was shallow enough for the kids to get to parts of the pond that were once too deep for them to wade in. Two counselors even came in, which is something counselors rarely do. It's often hard to get teenage girls to do things like that, but these two did it with smiles on their faces. On the last critter hunt of the season, around 30 kids ended up going. We didn't find any snakes (the snakes have been keeping a low profile this summer, and I only saw one the whole week - it escaped into a thorn bush and when I grabbed for it, and I ended up with around a half inch of thorn in my palm instead of a snake), but we did find a Northern Alligator Lizard and some good invertebrates, including a freshly molted Calisoga Spider, a Praying Mantis, a Forest Scorpion, and a Jerusalem Cricket.

On Thursday, in the middle of the campfire program, I got a haircut. Early in the week, I'd challenged my group to achieve a blackout on the nature bingo game we were playing, telling them that if they succeeded, I'd cut off my ponytail and donate it to Locks of Love. The succeeded, and one of the kids came up with an idea for a barber shop skit, to be performed during the campfire. We went with it. They had trouble cutting through my ponytail with the trimmers I'd provided, so scissors were retrieved to finish the job. Below are some before and after photos. At least two people (one of them was Willow) got the event on video as well. Yes, it looks like my hair was cut by an eight year old. I'm not sure if I'll finish the job properly or just leave it the way it is. One counselor said I looked like Brad Pitt, and another said I looked like Ned Stark (actually Sean Bean, I guess). They're too kind.

On Willow's last weekend before school started (her first day was today), we did some back-to-school shopping and went to San Francisco with Jeannine, Eva, and Eva's friend Alonzo. At the end of the day, on a whim, we drove west until we hit the beach. It was nice. There was even a raven on the sand, looking cold.

Yesterday, when it seemed like most people were back in school already, I took her and a friend to a movie. Now, the school year has truly begun. I still have nearly two weeks off before the green gears of science camp start turning. What to do? Some work and some play, or that's the plan, anyway.