Say Hello To My Little Friends

If you've had the chance to look outside my office window (and honestly not that many of you have, and even if you could the window has been scored by years of salt water and air so it's hard to see out of), you know that there are a bunch of bushy flowery plants that have grown up outside the window since we cut down some dead bushes. I keep meaning to get around to cutting them down a bit, but every time I think about it, there is a butterfly flying around those plants and eating (or whatever they do) off of the flowers it has on it. So, the plant gets a reprieve and gets to live another day. This butterfly was outside my office window the other day, and I happened to have my camera in the office. The picture turned out pretty well, especially since every time I would move closer to it, it would move further away. It didn't leave, just get into a position where I couldn't take a very good picture. Oh well.
Also, my other little friend is my new ipod shuffle. If you look at the picture over on the side here, the big ancient looking mp3 player is the one I used to listen to when I kayak around the bay and exercise in the house. I got it as a free gift (it was selling for $99 at the time) when I bought Windows XP from Best Buy in 2001. It had 96MB of memory (adfter we added a 64MB card), which holds about 15-20 songs. Any time I went for a long kayak trip, I would actually listen through all the songs before I got back to the camp. Oh goody, I get to listen to them all... AGAIN! Annoying. So I've got a new ipod shuffle! It's small, it's sleek, and best of all, it has 512MB of memory, so even if I go kayaking for two-and-a-half hours, I don't have to hear the same songs over and over. Nice. Just a little look at where technology has gone in the last five years.
-Mac

Summer Camp, What fun

Wow, it's been a long time since i've written in my blog, now that it's on the Camp Dixie website, I'm going to have to try to be more attentive to it. So the biggest reason that i haven't written anything since last MAY, was because of summer camp. Summer camp is always a great time, and this year was no exception. We had a great senior staff, a wonderful junior staff, and some great campers. The final numbers came in, and we had about 220 campers this summer. Now, that's a bit fewer than we had at Camp Omega where I was Program Director most recently (we had around 1800 there during the summer) but it was great none-the-less. We had a lot of question marks this summer, not knowing if the aftermath of Katrina would affect our registration numbers. I'm also the third director that Camp Dixie has had in the past three years, so that could have been a stumbling block as well, we also weren't able to get the summer information out as quickly as we would have liked to. Suffice it to say, we feel blessed that every camper who came was able to come to camp this summer.
So, believe it or not, it's time for me (and hopefully some campers and parents too) to start thinking about summer camp 2007. We've gotten some camp session dates figured out and approved by the board of directors, and we even have a theme. The summer 2007 theme is going to be: "Grace Is Free." The theme verse is taken from John 1:16 "From the fullness of his grace, we all received one blessing after another." I'm really looking forward to next summer, there are quite a few things that we are going to change, improve, and hopefully we will reach even more campers with the Word of God.
I've also just finished the Summer 2006 Camp Dixie newsletter. It's in COLOR this time because a color laser printer was donated to camp! Hopefully this will get some people excited about camp. Hey it's in color! Camp Dixie must be cool!
That's about it for now, I have some email to return, some newsletters to fold and label, and I know there is some cleaning I could be doing somewhere around here. Thanks for reading everyone.
-Mac