nougat
Rereading my (spotty) recollection of our Europe adventure back in ’04, I closed my eyes and surprised myself with a sigh of audible relief: “I am so glad I recorded that.” How can I have such a visceral reaction when it comes to my memories? Do others have them? They truly are my most prized possessions. Come to think of it, if anything happened to this online journal where I lost all my data, I would be inconsolable. Devastated. Ripped asunder. I have got to back this up.
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Thinking about being a Den Leader for Luke’s Cub Scout den this fall. He’ll be in his second year, a Wolf Scout. It’s a fairly big commitment, having to attend all the meetings as well as planning activities for the boys twice a month, but…it would be a great opportunity for L to get socialized, and for us to make some friends in the pack.
Thinking about potential activities with the boys and how to keep their attention while talking got me thinking about incentives. Candy immediately popped into my head, which reminded me of the prodigious numbers of Werthers caramels my junior year Odyssey of the Mind team consumed as we brainstormed. “Brain food,” we called it, and downed bag after bag. We didn’t make it past third place during State Finals that year, and thus didn’t earn a slot at World Finals, but it was a good group nonetheless: Aaron, Greg Adams, Cara, myself and a few others whose names it kills me that I can’t recollect out of hand. The highlight of our final performance at States was an ad-libbed line by Greg, playing the bad guy, Mugsy. The car Aaron was driving as “Da Boss” (a nickname he still sports to this day) was supposed to trip a sequence of event that would cause a large-ish papier-mache boulder to roll down a ramp and accomplish something plot-significant. During the performance, Mugsy would yodel and “cause” the landslide, but during the actual skit, the mechanism jammed and we had trouble freeing it, and the performers had to stall for time while Aaron and I worked it out, allowing Greg to deliver the utterly improvised, brilliant line, “Hurry Boss! I think the rocks is building up an immunity!” The judges and audience all laughed, and the rest of the performers had trouble keeping straight faces during the remainder of the skit.