skyranch

Sky Ranch

This summer I had the privilege of working at this awesome camp. Summer 2004 was one of the best summers I have ever had. Here are just a few pictures from the many I have.

This is John Morgan, the Sky 3&4 leadership guy, telling about how he asked his wife to marry him. There were just a few people listening at first, but he tells a good story, so the crowd grew. I guess counselors, just like most kids, have trouble resisting a good story.

Here's me, Micah and Jade. We all like wearing green. I only got to hang out with Micah at staff training because he was a first half counselor and I was second half. He was really cool, though, and had awesome long hair. In fact, he is a hair model. Jade was one of the sweet counselors from the cabin Star Creek. That's a fun gal right there.

Usually once a week, our sister cabin would raid my cabin. The girl counselors inform us that they are going to raid us, but we don't tell the kids, we just lead them into the ambush. As we led our boys into the raid, I hung back thinking I wouldn't get anything on me. I was wrong. I got not only shaving cream on me, but toothpaste and perfume, and pretty much whatever the girls could find in their cabin. I used the flash on my camera to blind the girls for a second.

Here's Bill bringing the waterballoon over from the cabin next door.

One night, we had a huge water balloon, but didn't know how to throw it because it was so big. I figured we could put the balloon in a towel and two people could swing it and throw it. One worked out pretty well. The second one that Bill brought over was even bigger. We saw a counselor and a kid passing by, so we waited until we thought they were in range, and chucked the balloon at them. I splattered right in front of them and got them a little wet, not bad though. It probably would have hurt pretty bad had we actually hit them.

The second week I was at camp, we had Sky 3 kids. Every other week we have the younger Sky 2 kids. Anyway, the first night the kids started screaming about something coming out of the wall. The counselors had no idea what they were talking about until this thing started wiggling out. It looked like a skinny finger almost. I got duct tape and go the kids to tape up the wall, but the thing came through it and everyone started screaming again. Preston hit it off the wall and it fell on the pillow on the bottom bunk. I threw it off the pillow onto the floor, saw that it was a centipede, and stepped on it.

This is Cole. Cole has some of those really stretchy UnderArmor shorts. In fact, they were so stretchy, they could be pulled up around his neck, as shown.

At the weekly dance, I taught a couple of my kids how to dance the way I do. It made the dance a whole lot more fun that it was at first. In this picture Blake, Scott, and I are still dancing even though the real dance had ended. We don't even need any music!

The taller guy is Aaron, the senior counselor of my cabin Big House, and the shorter one is Jake, the senior counselor of the cabin next door. This is at the Sky 2 dance. I can't write a caption that would make this picture any better.

The bed in the foreground of this picture is Aaron's. The area on the other side of the door is mine and Joseph's area; his is the really messy part. We won this servant for an hour in some game. He came upstairs and cleaned up while we were having Bible study downstairs. I assumed he was going to clean up all of the upstairs, but apparently Joseph told him not to clean up his side. So all of Aaron's stuff got sorted and made perfect while mine and Joseph's stuff stayed messed up. Whatever, Joe...

This is all the luggage that the kids brought. Every Saturday, we had to have them pack it all up and then we brought it to the parking lot so the parents could drive through and pick it up. It's so much luggage. We had to be there at 6:30 AM to be ready to pack it. I did not like luggage duty except when we had a bad group of kids one week. Then it was pretty cool.

There's a Nalgene bottle stuck in the gutter on the roof. How do you get it off? Of course! You grab an umbrella from one of the nearby tables and try to scrape it down that way. Grant's the one attempting to get it down right now.

<-- my reflection in the glass

This is nasty Adventureland and the cesspool that surrounds it. This place was hated by most of the counselor, including me. They dyed the water blue, but as the summer progressed, it became more green. Blue plus what makes green?

This is the trapeze that is on Adventureland. You have to throw out a hook to catch it and pull it in. One day, while I was hooking it, I saw that I had it and was about to pull the rope in, but one of my kids said it fell off. I was like "how did it fall off, I hooked it." What the kid meant was that the hook had fallen off of the string into the 60 foot deep nasty water. In the picture here, they are using the not so good spare hook. It wasn't my fault it fell off, though. The thing that attached the hook to the string was messed up.

Each day we brought the kids to Cracker Barrel, which is what we call the place where they can come buy drinks, food, clothing and stuff. They can also just hang out and play some of the games that are there. Many counselors took this chance to kinda relax and hang out with one another, also known as herding, and we played our own games. Here I am playing Clue with the counselors from Star Creek.

Being a counselor is a pretty tiring job. James here has fallen asleep in the counselor lounge on his night off. I tucked him in with a towel I found and put a waterbottle in his hand that his fingers kinda wrapped around.He finally woke up about 10 minutes later, I think.

This kid had one of those sleep mask things on to block out the light or something. I had to take a picture. I always imagined them as something old women wear, not eleven year old kids.

The kids go to paintball once a week. The Sky 2 kids can't shoot each other, only the targets that are set up. Some counselors like to make it a little more fun by being human targets. Kyle here made some armer and I bought a sword, so he suited up for a picture. Joseph and Aaron are the guys behind him. Later, while being a human target, one of the paintballs tagged him between the legs. Needless to say, Kyle retired his armor and didn't volunteer to be a human target ever again.

This is the lake we came to a lot. We got the superslide in the foreground and the blob and boat dock in the background.

Lee and Kyle, the guys with their shorts rolled up, are making fun of Daniel's swimsuit. Daniel is the one in the back holding up the blue towel.

Here's my cabin Big House playing in the Sky 2 Nukem tournament. Nukem is like volleyball, except you catch the ball and try to throw it over to the other team where they will miss it. When they miss it, they lose a person. A team wins when all the players on the other team are gone. The last week I had kids, most of them didn't even know what Nukem was like the kids I had the weeks before. However, when they got to playing, they beat everyone, even the winners of the girls tourney.

These guys were wrestling during the Nukem Tourney. The one on top is Chris. The one on bottom is Daniel. I think they wrestled for about 30 minutes or so. Everytime I looked over there they were doing that. I got them to look up and smile for a picture, at least.

This is Hannah. Every time Hannah saw me, she would try and make me blink, usually by clapping in my face or something. This is us at the Nukem tourney having a made-you-blink face-off.

The red slide is the fastest, and when a big ole counselor gets on it, he can really fly. This is Thomas from the cabin Buzz Barn. This is pretty typical of how the other counselors come out of the slide.

One night I was hanging out with the counselors of Jo Lo, the cabin next door. A couple of them wanted to get waterguns and spray their kids, but their senior counselor wouldn't let them. So I said they could come on over to Big House and spray my kids. So I ran back to my cabin and grabbed my camera and got in position. Chad is the one you can see, but you can see Bill's watergun coming out of the hall in front of Chad. The kids got all riled up, so I went over to Jo Lo to "get them back." Yeah, right. My kids deserved it.

Campfire is usually a pretty solemn time where the kids talk about what they learned this week and how they learned about Jesus, or about how much fun it was. Every now and then, some counselors found it hard to stay serious.

The last week of camp, I went to campfire even though I wasn't a counselor. As I listened to the kids go up and talk about their week, one girl went up and said that she went to PineCove last summer and the counselors always talked about how much better it was than Sky Ranch. Those counselors "don't know how wrong they are."

This is Sunday afternoon of my last week at Sky Ranch. For the last week, I was not a counselor, I was on Sky 1&2 program staff. I wasn't too sure about what all that entailed, but if we are playing frisbee golf already, it can't be that bad. This week should be pretty awesome. I was mistaken. In this picture, Jenn is about to throw the frisbee and David is standing next to her.

This is a good example of what we did most of the week. We picked up trash around the whole camp. Daniel and I had the bright ideas to put nails on the ends of some sticks so we wouldn't have to break out backs bending over a few hundred times to pick up trash. In this picture we are cleaning out the trash behind the party barn. That trash smelled sooo nasty. Everyone almost wanted to throw up...except for Daniel. It didn't bother him so much. Among some of the nastiness in the trashcan were some chicken with some meat still on them that had been rotting for who knows how long.

One night as I was walking back to my cabin, I heard a lot of commotion coming from the deck of the cabin next door. I walked up and they are having a deck pillow fight. How awesome! I ran next door to my cabin, grabbed my pillow, came back and beat everybody with my pillow. I showed no mercy.

This is my old co-counselor during the last week. He stuffed something up the back of that shirt he's wearing and started ringing the bell that is there but the kids are not suppose to ring. He rang it continuously for about 40 minutes and yelled at people that passed by. And if you cannot figure out who he is immitating, it's the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

These are three of the Sky Ranch wranglers during luggage pick-up time. Jeremy, on the bottom, is a pretty strong feller.

I met Adrienne at staff training. On our off night we went to this restaurant called Chedders with a big group of people. During the course of the meal, we made this concoction of honey mustard, lemon, gravy, french fry, piece of chicken fried steak. She asked what someone would give her if she drank it. I said I would marry her. She drank it, so for the rest of camp, she was my future wife. Then she got a boyfriend, then she hardly talked to me anymore, then she left a week before I did and that's the end of that story. She was cool to hang out with, though, pre-boyfriend.

I took this picture so I could show my brother that ya'll is spelled with the apostrophe between the "a" and the "L," not the "y" and the "a." So I win that argument. Dang, I'm awesome.

That last picture was suppose to be the end, but I found some more I wanted to put up. This is a picture of Robby, my benchmark. The basis behind the benchmark program was for them to pour into the counselors as the counselors poured themselves into the kids. It was pretty cool to talk to him every week. This is a picture of us "talking," but really it was set up. And I just noticed that my shorts look a little too short. Those are some nice legs, though, eh?

This is me with my friend Amy standing behind me in Chili's in Tyler, Texas. She is wearing three necklaces in the pic. The top and the bottom ones are the coolest. I won't say who made them...okay if you can't guess, it was me. I made them.

I sometimes like to set up timed pictures when no one knows what's going on. This is me, Kyle and Wash loitering in front of Starbucks. I think Kyle suspects something is up with the camera.

This is another timed photo. Me, Kalem and Amy leaning on Kalem's truck in front of Starbucks. I think that's all the pictures I am going to put on here. But who knows, I may find some more later.

Here's the storm rolling in over Sky Lake. That white thing in the middle was blown across the lake in the little storm I saw. It was pretty funny watching some guys chase after it in a boat to bring it back.

This is a typical scene on the lake at Sky Ranch. A jet ski running and kids bouncing each other off the blob....now that I look at the picture, I wonder if that is me sitting up there on the platform.

These are a couple of counselors on the Hot Dog. Anything I say couldn't really add anything to this picture.

Me and a few of my kids posing for a picture. Some of the counselors called the kid that is second from the right "Blob Boy" because with the clothes he's wearing, he looks like the blob

I don't know any of these kids, but I wasn't too shy about busting in on their picture. This is during the last week of camp.

These are a few of the counselors I worked with. Can you find me in the picture?

<-- There I am. If you brighten your screen, you can see me pressed up against the glass because when I realized they were taking a picture, it was too late for me to get in there.

This is during the last few days of camp on our night off. Several of these pictures were taken with Kyle in the background doing something.

This is the last of the several pictures I took. A conveniently placed girl's head makes me uncertain of what Kyle is doing...

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