Web Journal!

Camp-O-Lympics ©®™!
Well, on Saturday we had the traditional Camp-O-Lympics©®™ competition. Since I happened to be the odd man out, I participated once with each team on each of the 3 challenges. The first was to make a "launcher" powered by a mousetrap that would accurately toss a mini-marshmallow into a grid with different values based on where the marshmallow landed. Some simple supplies were included - a length of Duct Tape©®™, 3 large tongue depressors, some rubber bands, a few striped straws, and maybe one or two other things. The team I assisted on that round had a catapult that functioned well during testing, but didn't perform as expected during the actual competition. It tied for first, but then lost miserably on the tie-breaker. Next up would have been the fire-starting challenge, but the clouds caused us to delay that after performing challenge 3. Challenge 3 was to construct a "boat" with an 8" by 8" piece of aluminum foil and 4 colored straws (not to be confused with the striped straws from the previous challenge). The design for the team I assisted was basically a ~4" by ~4" square with straws embedded within, which was similar in design to another team. The winning team used a bowl design which had one straw bent into a triangle below it, and it held 25 pennies, while ours only held ~17? There also was a 5 point bonus if you could guess the limit within 5 pennies. Then we finally got around to the fire-starting challenge (which was delayed quite a while due to cloudiness). It proved challenging and only one team achieved fire after a long time of trying various methods of attempting to start a fire with only a small magnifying glass, and some combustible materials (dryer lint, newspaper, wax, vaseline, and a few other things). Due to a one-point difference between the two leading teams, there was a tie-breaker trivia round of sorts. This included random questions such as how long the Zimmerpeople have been married, to obscure (to me, at least) comic book and movie trivia. The teams got oversized water bottles with freezable cores, flashlights, and fall-apart squirt guns. I, not being on any team officially, received the 4 rolls of pennies that were used in the boat-making challenge. Well, that's all I feel like typing for now, so see you around!