Daniel's Summer Blog

A quick catch-me-up of the last month and change: Harry Potter was awesome. People will criticize, (the New York Times had a particularly scathing review, as did some of my friends) but I liked it. I read it (after going through some difficulty to obtain it) in under 24 hours, though I was by no means the first person to finish it in camp. Thankfully, no one ruined any piece of it for me, as I was diligent in avoiding the internet, and very few people in camp knew what happened ahead of time. About a week after I finished it, I found myself reading it again in my downtime, this time more slowly and thoroughly, and I was pleasantly surprised that the second read was just as good as its predecessor.

All this time, camp plodded on, much as it ever has. Gesher returned before YS - weird - which I actually participated in as a ninja in the closing ceremonies. The last Shabbat was sad as always. Gesher speakers were poignant, as was the staff Oneg at which the outgoing director reminisced about some of the first years at camp. Directly after Shabbat was an adventure.

Thanks to the machinations of Fredski, I was able to secure a ride to Atlanta, a place to sleep and a ride to the airport all in one fell swoop, with the President of the camp no less. That made my life much easier and allowed me to enjoy the wedding much more thoroughly. The wedding. Talk about setting the bar high for every other wedding I will ever go to or hear about. Everything about it was amazing, from the people there (Tom Clancy made it, Cal Ripken could not, as he was inducted into Cooperstown the same week and had related obligations) to the food (meat and delicious, though there was a surprising lack of ketchup considering the bride's love for the spice rivals my own) to the dancing (400 hundred people and they all wanted to get down with themselves). The ceremony was also good, but it turns out I am something of a fidget-er. Earlier in the day Max picked me up and toured me around his college, which was pretty cool as it is about six times older than my alma mater. He and Alli also chauffeured me around the greater Baltimore-Annapolis which was very kind of them, considering the price of coolant these days.

After my 24 hours of vacation I returned to camp, and by camp I mean the madness that is departure day of second session at the airport. I helped out wherever I could, surprised some kids who thought they would never see me again, and generally shvitzed a lot, a recurring theme for the week to come. I had Tuesday off and went into town and met up with Alyssa who had skipped out on camp this year, like the rest of her coworkers from the aida. After that it was back to work to help prepare for family camp.

A little background on camp's meteorological makeup: mornings are hot and humid, it pours for an hour in the afternoon to cool everything down before nightfall. Repeat.
During family camp it rained for all of 30 seconds over a span of four days, none of which had a heat index of below 102. Most unfortunately for the tower staff (myself and four other brave souls), the tower's popularity escalated to all-time highs as everyone and their mother wanted to climb and swing despite the massive heatwave. Long story short, we worked hard and were not at all sad to lock up the tower at noon on Sunday, having just finished our last of four two-hour sessions of family climb time. I also was given a sharp reminder to be nice to the help during family camp, as I was the help for an event and was frankly astonished. Maybe I will join SPEW to boot.

I have a problem. I need to invent a new word for a new technology. The tiny USB memory devices that everyone uses these days and have replaced the need for anything too large to email up to 8GB. The problem is there is no word for them. DiskOnKey, Thumbdrive, Jump Drive, Flash Drive, Jump disk, none has any sort of ring to it and all are bulky and vowelsome (see? I just invented a word right there, it's not so hard, except that I meant to say that the words are full of consonants). The new word has to convey what the device is, as well as be simple and easy to say (ever say Compact Disc?). It can even be a proprietary name like disgo but I am not a huge fan of that one. Membar? - sounds like member. Drimem - weird. Storestick - not so much. It needs work. Help me out in the comments.

Mazel Tovs to Joel and Sarah and to Ashira and Tim!