Hot and humid and unable to sleep. Such is life in the New Hampshire woods. We are in the middle of green and white at the moment. Competition is rife and everything has been turned on its ear. The camp is divided into White Pirates and Green Gladiators: emotions are running high. So far I have competed in the swim meet, volleyball, the spelling bee (disqualified on a technicality: not saying the word first!!!) and staff soccer.

Apparently I am set for a kayak regatta tomorrow, should be interesting! At the track meet this morning I gathered a lovely collection of mid-sprint facial expression shots to be posted soon. Billiant.

The competition is pretty intense. Americans live for this stuff, they feed off it. It's quite incredible to watch; the passion, the fury. You begin to see rifts in the social structures and cattiness rears its head. Step up or step aside. Injuries are many and sympathy is rare. I love it but the end of this week will be warmly welcomed. Along with a well deserved ale or two...

a lot has happen since i last logged in here, and yet nothing has happened at all. my day off in conway was nice, it was completely relaxed, i stayed in a nice hotel, bought lots of junk from walmart and ate some good food in a couple of restaurants. it was a good break from camp life. the rest of the week went along smoothly the weather has been nice and warm and driving on the lake couldn't be better.

since then i had another day off. a bunch of us hired a pontoon boat and went out on the lake with far too much alcohol. it was a great day, drinking, music and diving into the lake at our leisure. keeping in true camp form we did a post-swim count off each time because safety comes first. and thats how we keep it here at camp robin hood.

towards the end of the trip things got a bit dangerous though, i was later informed that i refused to give up the helm and took the pontoon back to the marina. leigh tells me that i could barely walk and yet i pulled up to the dock flawlessly. go figure. i got back to camp a little leathered and didnt really feel like hiding away from... well everyone, i am kinda lucky to still be here to tell the truth, between playing 1 on 1 soccer with 12 year olds and singing very badly with a guitar i couldn't be much more fortunate not to have had a catastrophic encounter with a senior staff memeber, big thanks to my saxon boys and scribe girls for essentially keeping me out of trouble there. i shall forever remain grateful for that. i woke up the next day with many cuts, grazes and bruises from trying (poorly) wrestle my kids (some of them are pretty solid 16 year olds),

parents day was on saturday, we had been warned that we would have our craziest day of the summer, having more children, less time, and having to drop parents off at the dock each time we take them out. the morning was insane. so many kids, so many parents, such chaos. i was half relieved and half disappointed when the afternoon sessions were rained out. im sure the parents wanted nothing more than to see their kids shine on the lake.


roger (still here) and sonia (gone) tell me this girl doesn't look exactly like penelope cruz. go on. tell me.

today is a pretty solemn day in camp. some of the best campers and a few of the staff left at the half way mark, i am especially gutted as some of my favorite kids are now on their way home. there was a spanish contingency at camp and they brought such an amazing energy to this place that i can see already missing from robin hood. andreas bernar all the way from madrid was one of the most energetic kids in our bunk. always smiling, doing backflips off the dive tower and screaming out crazy spanglish sayings.

between the spanish kids and the staff who left, i feel like i have lost some people i had grown very close to.
andreas in the dining hall.

things are going to be very different here on in.

just in case you thought i made up the story about being a waterski instructor. here is me doing some wakeboarding at camp. such a nice day...

rainy day here on a thursday. just sitting here dealing with a few emails before breakfast ony my day off. plan is to head into conway and get a hotel: nice comfortable bed, a solid shower and go out for some good food. can't wait.

yesterday was a bit stormy so work was a bit stop/start. im still one of two with a driver's licence which is getting rediculous. we are supposed to be rotating between driving and shore assistant but cant really do that just now. be good to mix it up. even though i love it, its the best job in camp: too much of anything is a bad thing.

played team handball for the first time yesterday. i had never heard of it before but its basically like international rules football. for those of you who know me will also know that contact sports aren't exactly my forte. in fact i have never played a contact sport in my life so this was an interesting experience. it was good though, i sucked at first not knowing what the hell was going on but i got into it a bit more eventually and put up a few respectable plays. can't wait to play again. today i am so sore. not to mention it probably wasnt the best idea for my finger to play volleyball everyday for a week and then get stuck into some pretty agressive handball.

ok, im going to be late for breakfast, all of you keep up the news updates from around the world.

later kiddlets.

Campiness

Sunday night after the staff meeting (complete waste of time) we played a hell of a lot of volleyball, I’m getting quite into that sport. Its good fun and you can do some impressive stuff with it. Our last game was pretty intense and we didn’t finish up until almost 2am. What devotion. Earlier in the day I had been playing some 1 on 1 basketball with Roger Guesswein: for a 15 year old kid he is pretty incredible, probably the best in camp. He’s 5’11” and can shoot over my defense pretty much every time. I asked him to teach me to play and just a few small tips and I improved dramatically. The game score was 14-21 in the end and I was completely knackered, I think he went a bit easy on me, but only a little. I think I’m going to keep at it over the summer and maybe even be a respectable player over the next 6 weeks. I can’t believe its been over 3 weeks here and 2 with the kids already. Yesterday was photo day: group photos, photos with the specialty staff etc. They will be put up on the camprobinhood.com website eventually but I think you need a password to access them. I will work on getting them downloaded and stuff, should be some good pictures of the kids/other staff and me.

Right now I’m on duty with the lancers (13 year olds) which means I have to make sure they all go to bed, lights out and stay quite. I’m here from 9:15-12:15 and it can get a little boring… iPod, laptop and a lot of bug spray seem to help. I can see the yeomen (11 year olds) bunk from here and I thank the powers that be that I am not over there. They are all devil children I swear. Running around, sprinting out of their bunks, screaming, starting wars between the other side of the cabin, deodorant bombs, you name it. The guys on duty there sound like they are going crazy trying to settle them down. This is yet another reason I feel like the luckiest person on camp. Aside from a couple of guys who harass me to let them sneak out to get some ‘guaranteed poon’ my kids here are pretty quiet and well behaved. After about 10:45 they are all out and quiet. Life is good. Having said that, these kids are so horny. All the want to talk about is sex. Was I like that ten years ago? Probably a bit, but not quite that much.

Today was beach day. This may sound relatively straightforward but the logistics of moving 350 kids and 120 staff 2.5 hours to Ubunquit, Maine for a day on the beach boggles the mind. It’s crazy. The staff are divided into duty groups to spend 30mins in the water monitoring the kids. Sound simple? The water is cold. In fact, cold doesn’t really capture the temperature of this water. It is fucking icy cold daemon spawn reproductive system destroying mucho frio death water. My toes took about 10 minutes to regain feeling after I got out. That kind of endurance cannot be good for you at all. The kids ran in and screamed and ran out again lasting all of about 2minutes. I hope it was all worth it. Aside from the water the day was very nice, sun was shining, sand was nice, I got a bit of a nap in, bit of beach gridiron. Fun all round. My tan is getting a bit ridiculous these days, all the hairs on my body are completely blond, my skin is a really really dark red, everyone thinks that I am burnt everyday but that’s just the way I am, thanks for the Scottish blood pappa. Sad that I am going to be in Canada for a year after this: I’ll be a whitey again in no time. What a waste.

Between yesterday’s basketball/volleyball and today’s football/volleyball I’m damn sore. As most people know I’m not exactly the most athletic person around and I have really dived in the deep end here. Burning the exercise candle at both ends. I love it though, it’s going to take some work but I plan on having a fundamental level of hand eye co-ordination before I leave this place. My finger’s improvement has slowed a little, I should probably not be playing basketball and volleyball until it is completely healed but things would get very boring and I would be

A couple of photos were taken today but I was too scared to take my camera into that seething pit of hyperactive, wet, sandy children. Would have been good to get some more, I will try to get copies off Leigh and Maria, they took a couple of good ones.

That’s enough for today. No major events coming up any time soon that I’m aware off, back to work as usual tomorrow

cant always be smiles und sunshine. things have taken a turn for the worse. yesterday was my day off and i went into boston, more of that in a bit. in the evening we got a call from camp. some of our kids got caught smoking on camp. not good. 5 kids are being kicked out. its their last year as campers and this is kind of a big deal. the atmosphere here is pretty solemn, much like a funeral, hugs and crying all round. i feel bad for them but they were very stupid to be so careless. this is going to have a big effect on the rest of camp. they are missing out on the whole summer just as it is beginning.

this place is strange for me, it is my entire world. aside from the occaisional email from home, my contact with the outside world is 0. good, but strange.

my finger is improving slowly, still not cured but im doing well. happy about that.

yesterday was pretty excellent. got in the car after breakfast and headed for boston, about 2.5 hours later arrived at bush's house. fantastic place: huge mansion with an amazing yard. beautiful day. it was incredible. his basement was full of pool tables, ping pong and air hockey, i will always remember that place as where i first played the greatest game ever invented: beerpong.

very hard to explain so ask me to show you next time im around, basically you play ping pong with beer cups on the table that need to be hit or sunk into. very fun, competitive, athletic and gets you completely inebriated. games get very heated and people can make some amazing comebacks. coming back to camp was rough, had to get up at like 5:30am and drive a long way. a quick stop for coffee was esstenial and get i still could barely keep my eyes open. today is going to be a long day as well, need more sleep but cant just yet, got to get back to work.

hope you kids are enjoying the updates, keep in mind this is mainly to keep track of what i've been doing for myself. i have the memory of a goldfish.

peace out

life down on the water is pretty tough, there are days when we are busy, but there is a lot of time lounging so far. i think it will get busier but so far im coping. here are a few of my neighbours (sailing/waterfront staff) hard at work. life sucks dont it?

still camp goodness. not a huge amount of new stuff. camp is still good, waterskiing is still good. my broken finger doesn't actually seem to be broken, or at least its healing really well considering. i have about 70% functionality back already, in just one week! yesterday i went wakeboarding and didnt hurt myself. how good am i?

geoff's birthday was crazy, took up a whole restaurant with camp staff and got well roasted. no one more so than geoff himself. (pictured)

i took my day off on thursday and we drove to portland, maine. took us a bit longer than it should have: but not bad considering we had no idea where we were going, it was my first time driving on the right and we got caught in an amazing storm that reduced visability to nothing, not a damn thing, we all feared for our lives.

thats all for today. peace out.