Day 54

marathon. it's two in the morning and we've barely started burning the dvd's. the other two are in the next office finishing the weekly dvd and i'm in my office working on burning and labeling my campers' compilation. i had started much earlier tonight and managed to get about 98% of my starwood work done. i finished designing, printing, labeling, burning, copying, and stuffing the dvds and pulled one out of the final stack to double check quality. good decision, bad outcome. that's the way it had to happen, i guess, and it sent me on a frustrating adventure that is still going strong. networks and disconnecting and reconnecting and converting and starting to make a new dvd menu from scratch and sending conversions back over to other computers are only a portion of the mayhem. i'm not even going to continue to relive the pain of the past several hours, but the end is in sight for me. after this, i'm gonna go and help finish burning and stuffing the hundreds of weekly dvds for the rest of the campers.

today was the last whole day of camp, though, for junior high one. all my video campers came back to finish their projects during their free time today. i'm really pleased and impressed at the amount of knowledge they were able to control and exercise for the mere five-plus hours we spent together. the quiet girl thanked me and said she learned a lot. the director girl and her friend said in their credits that they 'can't wait to do more video-making together when they get home.' the boys had a good time as well and both groups turned in solid projects. if it hadn't been for time constraints tonight, i was planning on showing one of the projects for the daily highlight during the last evening q-town.

speaking of q-town, i finally got a taste of the action on the other side of my light board and media booth. one song is kind of country-sounding, so after working it out with russ before hand and deciding which two harmonica keys i'd need to cope with a mid-song key change, i got to play harmonica on stage for the opening song. there had been no real practice and i had no on-stage monitor, but the people that could hear said it went well. it felt really good to play something again.

my hands have printer toner on them, but there's finally a stack of filled dvd cases sitting next to my left elbow. i'll finish stuffing the fronts tomorrow morning before the campers leave after lunch.

one week down, seven more to go.