Staff week has come to a close, and it’s toward the end of our day off on Saturday. It was quite an eventful week.
First I learned that Bob Sr., the Mountain Man director, was going to leave on Wednesday if his passport came through. It did, and so now he’s on cruise to Alaska that his wife won from her company. This left me with the responsibility of finishing Mountain Man camp setup. Oh, and did I mention I’ve never been on Mountain Man before and know nothing of it? And to add insult to injury, Bob moved the camp to 3 miles outside of camp down the narrow, rocky green trail. Plus, the year is unusually wet, and so water has been flowing in the creek that the green trail crosses over all the time. It was pretty cool the first couple days, but it got old fast, having to go 3 miles to get to the campsite to even start working. And all that stuff is HEAVY; Mountain Man tech from the 1800s is heavy canvas and iron. So I’ve been right pissed at the old guy for the last few days. I don’t like being left in charge and responsible; not only am I not paid extra for it, but it’s alot of responsibility I’d rather not have. This is a vacation of sorts for me, or at least it’s supposed to be.
And then there’s the mules. I got to lead a mule pack train of three mules yesterday with most of our food for week 1. Irascible things, they’re like wayward children. Always trying to eat at the most inconvenient time, so we have to yank them along. It doubles our time to get to camp to 2 hours, but they carry about 100 lbs. or so each, so we have to put up with them. Blasted things almost stepped on my foot twice, and they actually managed to step on Manny’s, one of my helpers. Fortunately he didn’t break a toe.
Camp setup under my authority was quite a profane affair. I’m going to have to cut back on that next week when the campers show up, even if my staffers did appreciate it and we got on extremely well in very adverse conditions by cutting back on those restrictions. Bob won’t be back until after week 1, so I get to be in charge of everything until he does! I’ve effectively been promoted for a week. I’m mad about that, but supposedly a Scout exec will show up on Sunday to take over for the week, and I will hopefully foist it all on him. Our first week is supposed to be light as well, although the silly numbers keep changing.
I’ve been playing on BTSR’s internet, and have found out it is indeed a satellite provider. I’ve discovered what latency effectively does; when I request the Google homepage, for example, it takes several seconds, and then everything shows up all at once. I suppose that’s the latency at work; the request goes up the big pipe, and then it all comes back. I suppose you could say the pipeline between here and there is big, but quite long. For the curiosity of the nerdy:
Pinging pugsplaza.net [64.111.115.182] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 64.111.115.182: bytes=32 time=614ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.111.115.182: bytes=32 time=671ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.111.115.182: bytes=32 time=598ms TTL=52
Reply from 64.111.115.182: bytes=32 time=685ms TTL=52
Ping statistics for 64.111.115.182:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 598ms, Maximum = 685ms, Average = 642ms
And Google:
Pinging www.google.com [72.14.209.99] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 72.14.209.99: bytes=32 time=727ms TTL=241
Reply from 72.14.209.99: bytes=32 time=713ms TTL=241
Reply from 72.14.209.99: bytes=32 time=680ms TTL=241
Reply from 72.14.209.99: bytes=32 time=677ms TTL=241
Ping statistics for 72.14.209.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 677ms, Maximum = 727ms, Average = 699ms
They’re still a bunch to do with Mountain Man camp, but I’m feeling better about it all as time goes on. Perhaps I will be merely irritated at Bob when he get back, rather than mad.
The only other thing of note is I met the exchange staffer from Taiwan that I IMed with, and she seems alright. Doing quite well with her English considering where she’s from and given the short time frame. She seems to want to see more of the camp and backcountry areas of the camp; I noted on the signout sheet one morning that she’d wandered a bit on the Ranch Road leading into camp one morning as I was signing us out to go to Mountain Man camp again. You’ve got to be really bored to want to get out of camp just to walk on the Ranch Road in my opinion, so I offered to take her up the black trail which goes up a thousand feet and has some really nice views. Unfortunately, she was already set to go back home for the weekend with the Russels, who are hosting her for the duration of her stay. I hope they show her as much of America as can be found in Odessa; she won’t get to see much outside of camp because the BSA wants her to go back as soon as everything finished up here for the summer.
I managed to go up the Black today and found some of the peace I was looking for here. I got onto the lookout point at Whiskey Bottle Tanks and thought over all my options again, and again noted that there were no certain answers, and little guidance. I’ve asked one of the two computer tech guys how he got into the profession, and he’s taking a four year degree in the subject. Not what I’m looking for; I want the quick and dirty route to sysadmining. I’ll have to talk to the other guy and do some research on the topic. So far, research seems to be my top skill. *chuckles*
At any rate, it is now late, and I’ll have to scrounge some dinner from the kitchen. Supposedly there’s some kind of movie on later. Cheers!