Camp Wightman, Camp Wightman, our dear summer home...

As of yesterday, I am home from camp!

What a fun week! Of course, it's impossible to talk about EVERYTHING that happened in just one blog post, so I'm gonna try to hit the highlights.

Sunday: The first night there was a blast! Some kids brought their iPods (blatantly against the rules, but our coordinator, Harlan, didn't care. He mostly just let us do what we wanted), so we stuck them in an iHome and had a random dance party, which was fun. Then we found a bunch of New Year's Eve noise-makers, which we played loudly and obnoxiously until Harlan said "That's it! If you guys are gonna play those things, you're gonna play them along to something." He then put in "Don't Stop Believing" and we kazoo-ed along to it. Which was freaking amazing.

Monday: Since this is a Baptist camp, we had Bible study with Pastor Greg, who is pretty darn awesome. He went around asking our names and what church we were from. Since I'm a Pagan, I replied "I'm not affiliated with any church. Nature is my church!" He grinned and said "Ok, so First Baptist of Leaf." It was so funny! I then impressed him with my knowledge of the Old Testament, leading him to dub me "The Leaf-Worshipping Bible Queen". I bear this title with pride. Another fun thing about Monday was the ropes course. Mo and Mel, the girls who run the ropes course, taught us the rules by having us raise our hands and explaining that each finger represented a quality you needed for ropes. Ironically, the middle finger was the "Positivity Finger". We all got a good laugh out of that, and for the rest of the week yelled "Positivity Finger!" at one another in lieu of flipping each other off.

Tuesday: Near the lake, we have these huge rocks that form some interesting caves. A bunch of us went spelunking. That's a fun word, spelunking... Anywho. It took some difficult climbing over big rocks and crawling through small spaces and running into spider webs, but it was still a lot of fun. The caves are amazing! Two guys even saw a bobcat in one of them! Also for xkcd readers, the caves provided something VERY funny: I heard one kid yell in the caves "I almost fell down the big-ass hole!" :D Other things that happened on Tuesday was playing volleyball on the beach to Beatles' tunes and making tie-dye shirts. One guy, Texas (his real name's Tim, but he's from Texas) couldn't find a white shirt big enough, so he just tie-dyed a tank top that came out looking so gay it was hilarious, but Texas wore it well and proudly.

Wednesday: We had a cook-out on this day and played a game of "Wax Museum". This game involves all of the "statues" to assume various poses and try to move when the "curator" isn't looking. If the curator sees you, you're out. While playing, two girls who'd seen the Doctor Who episode "Blink" decided to be Weeping Angels. Unfortunately, I was the curator this game, and the entire group decided to slowly converge on me, reaching out with their arms Weeping Angel-style and frightening the hell out of me. Fun, but scary.

Thursday: Two days before, Pastor Greg asked me to write and perform a monologue about the Biblical figure of Sarah, Abraham's wife who was told she would have a baby at 75. So Thursday morning at chapel, I got up, nervous as hell, in front of the whole camp and performed the monologue I'd written. It actually came out really good. No one really cared about it, but the camp director, Greg, and Greg's wife all said that I did really amazingly. So that made me happy. It is a camp tradition to always have a square dance on Thursday. The square dance is basically an excuse to dress up as crazily as possible, and do fun line dances like the Cotton-Eyed Joe, the Macarena, Montego Bay, and the Camp Wightman dance. Since I always forget to bring crazy clothes, I just put on a black t-shirt and shorts, put a blue skirt over it, wore my sarong like a cape, rested my sunglasses on my forehead, wore a bunch of blue eyeshadow and drew swirly lines on my face with eyeliner. I asked my Doctor Who-obsessed roommate how I looked and her immediate response was "Time Lord. You look just crazy and mystical enough to be a Time Lord." It was the best compliment I ever recieved! After the square dance, we built a campfire and made banana boats, which involves stuffing marshmellows and chocolate chips into bananas, wrapping them in foil, and cooking them over the coals. Best. Dessert. Ever.

Friday: The last real day at camp involved a luau (We heart Hawaii). While helping set up, my friend Zac and I were carrying a big thing of whipped cream down to the beach. I tried to take it from him, and he wouldn't me. I said to him "What do you think I'll do? Run out into the woods with it and eat it all myself?" He replyed "I wouldn't put it past you." My indignant response was "I wouldn't do that.... often!' Thus an inside joke was born....

Saturday: On Saturday, we cleaned up our cabins, got packed, and prepared to be picked up. My Dad brought one of my best friend's Kevin/Kelsey (who I hadn't seen in years, she lives in Washington) to pick me up. Kevin/Kelsey is a male-to-female transexual and is thus extremely feminine. When I saw her, she had long hair, pierced ears, and a hat and glasses covering part of her face. One of the stupider kids at camp mistook her for my mother. We had a good laugh about that... Anywho, Dad brought us home and me and Kevin/Kelsey spent some time catching up, hung out, went to Paul's Pasta, and she set up Skype for me, so now I can chat with people via webcam. Which I broke in with a two hour conversation with Katherine from midnight to 2 in the morning.

Wow. All in all, it's been an amazing week. Camp was great and so was seeing Kevin/Kelsey and talking to Katherine. I can't wait to see the rest of my friends, I've missed them!

~Laura