I was tiring of Blogger and was about to abandon my faithful blogspot. Then I came to tell you I was moving and discovered that it was updated. I am now using Blogger beta, and it is so cool. I can goof around with my template so easily now--it's a lot of fun. Much, much easier to edit templates and links.

But in case you're wondering, I am posting more often on my Xanga, which you can also get to through the link in my sidebar. If you don't have a Xanga account, I will usually copy those posts onto my Freewebs blog so you can comment there if you want. The link to my Freewebs site is also in the sidebar.

Go to Eric's blog for a funny joke. :)

What I've Been Working On...

Still in progress.

Much thanks to Austin for all his work (he really did most of it :) and everybody else who offered their advice. It is still under construction and will take a while to get much up there. Thank you for your patience, and I hope you enjoy it.

A Very Late Description of Horse Creek

This is about a month after the fact, but today I talked about church camp in church this afternoon. This is what I intended to say in my talk, but naturally it didn't go quite so smoothly. :)

I had a slightly unique experience at Horse Creek this year. Instead of sleeping with the profusion of senior gals down the hall, Joanna and I partnered up and co-counseled the junior girls. We had five girls in our room, but only two were juniors. The other three were in junior high and couldn't fit in the senior cabin. Mrs. Mann, the speaker for the juniors in the morning, came up to our room in the evenings and led devotions, so Joanna and I had a pretty easy time.

Pastor Mann was the speaker for the older group, and his topic was wisdom from the book of Proverbs. In his first study, we learned there were five purposes for Proverbs: attaining wisdom and discipline, understanding words of insight, acquiring a desciplined and prudent life, helping people on all levels of life (that is, for the simple, young, or wise), and to sharpen the mind. Study 2 was about God and man and why we should fear and trust the Lord. Study three spoke on friendship and what it takes to be a good friend. This carried over to Study four, which was about proper speech. In order to be a good friend, we must guard our tongues and use discretion. Things like gossip and slander can easily ruin a friendship. Pastor Mann spoke in Study five about sexual purity and used Proverbs 7 as an illustration how to not live.

As for recreation, Lydia and I ended up on the same team: Deranged Pouncing Wombats. Unfortunately, our team lagged throughout the week. We lost the Bible quiz on Exodus, the kickball tournament, and the big relay race. It wasn't until Wednesday night when we recruited Andrew and Pastor Mann that our team offered any competition. As a bit of fun on the last night of Horse Creek, we played Capture the Flag in the dark with glowsticks. Despite having three other teams attacking simultaneously at one point, the Deranged Pouncing Wombats achieved second place in that game.

Tuesday and Wednesday we had about two hours of free time in the afternoon. I usually sat on the beach and lifeguarded about an hour. Wednesday afternoon, I offered my advice as Jacque judged the sandcastles. I also played a game of volleyball, but our team was so scattered that we didn't manage to play more than one game in the tournament. Julia and I competed in the canoe race and placed third with a time of 2:30. Andrew and Eric placed first, and Luke and Will came in second. Not telling who placed after us, but we were not last. :)

Despite the fact that camp was more than a day shorter than usual, I thought it went very well. Some adjustments had to be made in the schedule, but it turned out well enough. I'm interested to see what happens next year.