Girls Camp 2008, 4th of July, Vegas and Various Other Items

So I know this is shamefully delayed but oh well. I think the main thing that has been keeping me from blogging is that I am so behind I feel like I am never going to catch up. So we'll whirlwind it.

The fourth of July was great. It really is one of my favorite holidays. I love too that we are so close to the stadium of fire. Its one of the things I love about Utah. Instead of spending lots of money to see Miley, we just camped out in our secret viewing spot in Helaman Halls. The view is spectacular and you are literally right under the fireworks. I still felt that totally childish feeling that they were going to drop on me. Thats how close we were. Steve and I got there early concerned about parking and that someone would have already staked out our spot. We got there too early so we decided to kill time with my camera and tripod. We're total goofballs but it was really fun. Then after what seemed like forever (apparently Miley was way late), the show started and it was all worth it.
Next up...Girls Camp.

So Girls Camp was both great and not so great. I felt pretty prepared. I did tons of cute little Asian themed handouts to go with our Olympics girls camp. Someone came up with the idea of "One Heart, One Mind, Different Voices" for the theme which of course was completely abandoned in any of the programs for camp.
(Girls being ninjas. Yes, their shirts say faith in chinese, they were the faith ninjas. Yes I looked the character faith up online, yes I had its accuracy checked. No, we never learned how to say it)

Our ward decided on Taiwan as our country, I would have personally never chosen this but I made it work. We had Chinese fans, chopsticks, fried rice and all the other cliche Asian accessories complete with ninja headbands and hand drawn fonts by me. See Pictures.
(Girls as stealth ninjas)
(This Picture is to illustrate two things: 1) the cute handwriting I did for the asian themed shirts 2) they made us play these olympic themed games and relays. This one was both dangerous-a girl sprained her ankle and had to go home-and a nightmare for any teenage girl self conscious about her weight. I would have cringed at doing this as a youth)(Our "kitchen" of sorts. Note the happy colorful banners stenciled with faith in chinese. I also discovered that I was the tallest person in our ward by hitting my head on the center of the tent every day, a couple of times a meal. I tried very hard not to swear and succeeded)

Overall I think the girls had a good time, they liked me most of the times. Times they didn't like me included: in the morning when I had to wake them up, when I had to take away contraband i-pods, when it came to cleaning the biffies. Can you believe there was a girl who had never cleaned a toilet before? Yeah they made a skit about me. The other leaders liked that I had a no nonsense drill sergeant of a personality. Whatever works, right? (The prettiness of the place blew my mind. I mean overall utah is pretty blah but this place was amazing. There were these awesome mountains, and the most beautiful weather and this pretty pond they called a lake. Also there were tons of deer. When I first got there, there was one in our campsite about 10 feet away)

(This was our cabin, pretty nice for roughing it. I slept on a plastic pool lounge chair and was very comfortable except when I had nightmares about mice and other rodents. Also one of the cabins had a bat problem. I was kind of disappointed in the other wards, no one decorated their sites at all. I guess thats what you get from a crafty camp leader-me. )

Overall it was good except for my incredibly uneven tan thanks to the long pants rule and my wacky sleeve tan. See my burned nose below.
The last night of course is the testimony meeting and then pranks. When the girls went out pranking, the leaders did a little pranking as well. We put lots of weird things in their sleeping bags and partied up their loft.