This is a long and image laden post which ought to cover the rest of my B-WISER week. So I’ve decided to put it all under an LJ cut. Perhaps someday I’ll put together a webpage of B-WISER trips. This could well be a good start to it.

It all began as it usually does with us teachers and counselors arriving the day before the girls. Dinner at the Barn Restaurant – all you can eat buffet and heavenly desserts. It’s all thanks to Lois that we eat there every year. At the farm where the Barn is, there is a string of shops. The one we all visit (and spend lots of money at) is the toy store. I bought some Frigits, a couple of rockets, a pull-back racing rat for Leo, and a few other toys.

Sunday’s the day when the girls arrive. It’s usually the day when we teachers get our rooms ready, but since we met at Severance (the Chemistry building) when we checked in the day before, Dee and I were able to set up our room the day of our arrival. So, that morning, Carolyn, Becky, and I did that long two hour walk that I’d talked about in a previous post. The afternoon was time for goofing off. At quarter til 5, everyone gathered at the Douglass Lounge and the girls all did their skits that they’d been working on since 4:15 and then we introduced all the teachers. And then it was supper time!

Monday was our first day of classes and it was rather uneventful. The evening activity was Dr. Helen Free. And eventually it was time for bed. Ah, Monday night… A night that shall rattle along in my memory for a good long time.

We had a major storm that night. Shake the rafters-style storm. There was even the flash/boom of a nearby hit. But that wasn’t anything to write home about. The power must have gone out, but I didn’t really notice it. I think I actually fell asleep as the storm died away around 2am. At 3:30am, however, the most incredible noise started up and woke me. It was loud – a rumbling that was phenomenal. I figured it was the trash man and looked out sans glasses. I saw what I figured was a shape in front of the trash dumpster and told Carolyn it was the trash guys. Well, many minutes passed and the noise continued. So I got up again and this time put on my glasses. No, that wasn’t a shape, that was just the driveway I saw. Then it finally dawned on me – the fan wasn’t going anymore. But the hallway lights were on. Ah! A generator. The Generator from Hell, in fact. Carolyn and I had to shout to hear each other. And what was worse, the beds vibrated from the sound. I must have dozed off despite the loud rumbling, but the vibrations made poor Carolyn ill.

A little before 6am (I was awake again and had been for awhile) I noticed the fan was running again. However, the generator was still going. Thankfully, it ended a bit after 6 (then started again before finally turning off for good). Bleh – a very unpleasant night. (Worse for Carolyn, poor dear.) When we asked the others at our end of the hall, turns out no one else heard the Generator from Hell. Ah, guess it’s under our room. Bleh!

Tuesday was Work and Power day for Dee and I. We had the girls play with balloon cars, Alka Seltzer Canons (using film canisters), and running up the stairs to calculate their work and power. Tuesday evening was the teacher’s first real night off. Joyce, Dee, Carolyn and I went off to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Yes, I’d seen it already with judiang, but I liked it enough to see it again. At one point in the flick, Joyce and Dee were startled by something on the screen, and that managed to wake Carolyn up so that she could see the rest of the film.

After the movie, Joyce called Bill and Dennis, the token men of the camp, and told them we were heading for The Olde Jaol. All of the outdoor tables were taken by the time we arrived, so we sat indoors. I had an Amaretto Sour (no surprise there) and later a strawberry smoothie (no alcohol) and munched on the appetizers that were going around the table. We talked and laughed and listened to Carolyn’s stories and laughed even more. Bill has yet to learn his lesson – Carolyn more or less treats him as a straight man and usually gets some zingers in at his expense.

Tuesday night was, thankfully, uneventful, storm-wise. And Wednesday is usually one of my favorites. Flight day! We had the girls inside playing with flight toys and outside playing with water rockets and stomp rockets. And now I can finally put in some photos.

A girl, midair, jumping on a Stomp Rocket.

A water rocket going off.

We do Flight Day on Wednesdays, because the evening program is Gary Broadbent, America’s number one boomeranger. He’s a great motivational speaker and he loves science. He’s come to B-WISER for several years now and I never tire of seeing him. The poor guy is a bit OCD (OK, so maybe “a bit” it a bit too mild a description) and has the world’s largest boomerang collection. His house is even in the shape of a boomerang. He was doing trick catches and while he tried to do the mouth catch, it took 42 tries before he got it. (See, I told you “a bit” was too mild.) He usually gets it in 2 tries. (I think he was distracted – when he was talking about his oldest daughter, who suffers from Cystic Fibrosis, he said he’d taken her to the children’s hospital the day before and she was down to 50% lung capacity. This is a man who lives for his kids first and boomerangs second.) Still, he kept the girls entertained for two hours, showing off his boomerangs (no, they’re not all V-shaped sticks) and throwing many of them and catching them.

Gary Broadbent and the Colossal Comeback. This is a boomerang with a 4-foot diameter. He threw it and caught it a couple of times that night.

Some of his cool boomerang designs. A bat, a snake, and even Tigger!

A toucan!

Boomwatch:2004. Derek (the young man who was our go-fer this year), Carolyn, Joyce, Lois, and Bill.

Lois’s birthday cake. Her 80th birthday was the day before, but we had the cake on Wednesday night. And since there are so many girls, we had two cakes…

The Periodic Table Cake. My kind of cake! (Actually, the first cake was white cake, and I had some of it. The second cake was chocolate, but I passed on that.)

I think I’ll tackle Thursday and Friday tomorrow night. I pretty much wore myself out just writing about the start of the week. Heh!