Its still cold! The weather is playing games with us, going from extreme heat to extreme cold for this time of the year! The nights have been dropping to the 40’s (Fahrenheit for you Aussies reading along). We have a school from Philly (common theme on the precamp posts), and despite the chilly temps and overcast skies, they are having a blast. I mean come on, they are at Camp Canadensis after all! It’s so refreshing having “kids” running around camp- climbing the wall, boating in the lake, doing tie-dye in the art center, etc. but it still isn’t the same as camp time. Only a few more weeks until we get to greet all of you back up here for another great summer.

We have been getting rave reviews on the food this year. We have switched our main food supplier to a large company from NJ and they seem to have fresher ingredients and better products. Our London Broil tonight (Flank steak) marinated of course by cook Silas, was great! Tomorrow is grilled cheese and fries (cheese toasties anyone) and then the group leaves.

They have also been commenting on how great our staff have been. They told us that this year the staff seem to be even more accomodating than usual and asked if we did any extra training. I was extremely proud to hear this, because our counselors and staff are on the “front lines”. They are the ones running our activities, serving the food, and keeping the facility running in good, clean condition. Our precamp staff is small- 16 counselors, 4 kitchen girls, 6 kitchen guys, and a few of the “head staff”. They are truly working so hard and it’s great to hear compliments.

Speaking of our staff, this past Tuesday they had a day off. Some of us head staff folks took advantage and went out for dinner to give our kitchen staff a break. Brian Krug, Justin Winch, Sam Ginsburg, Cara Corradetti, and I crammed into a booth at Texas Roadhouse in Stroudsburg, PA near our local mall and enjoyed a bloomin’ onion type thing (called a Cactus Blossom), fresh rolls, pulled pork, steaks, etc. Our waitress was especially nice and gave me a brand new sealed bottle of Roadhouse Gold Steak Sauce to take home and Justin/Brian received their famous rolls to go!

Sam Ginsburg (as I mentioned above) arrived at the perfect time to go out to dinner! Sam was a camper at camp and is now in his 10th summer at camp. Last year, the Operations Office welcomed Sam and he was a fabulous addition to our staff. Sam, Unger, and Forti- the Operations team (or as some Juniors called it last summer, the Optional Office) is now complete and we are in full swing getting everything in pristine shape for the upcoming new camper Open House and then Opening Day!

So as you can see there is alot going on up here. Will Armon will be arriving on June 1 and he doesn’t know it yet, but he will be driving all of the precamp staff out to the local bowling alley as a special thank you for all that the staff do up at camp!

One final thought- yesterday marked exactly one month until the opening day of camp. I couldn’t be more excited. The winter office staff (including me) works extremely hard 10 months each year for the upcoming 7 weeks of camp! Memorial Day weekend just passed which is the unofficial start of summer for most Americans. The official start of summer (as the highers ups in the world determine) starts on June 21. However, for Eric Forti, the absolute official start of Summer 2009 is on June 27, 2009 when the buses roll past the parking lot and park at the main office and we welcome both new and returning campers to their summer home. I am looking forward to seeing all of you soon and good luck with packing, because trunks will be picked up before you know it!

P.S.- Remember to login to the media room from our homepage for our latest Canadensis 411 and additional videos to be posted soon!

Hey All!

Good Sunday Morning to everyone and Happy Mother’s Day to all the mother’s out there! Today camp is cool. We had great weather yesterday, after an entire week of rain. Despite the rain, we had staff outside raking in between the rain storms, doing the best they could. Yesterday, with the sun shining, we had a very productive day. The entire wall/ropes area is now leaf free (on the ground that is!) as well as the area in front of the cooking room/mountain bike shack. Today, we will be raking the baseball field backstops, the Senior girls tennis courts, and a bunch of other areas.

In the office, I have been busy all week receiving the required forms for the summer. Before a camper can attend Canadensis, we require certain forms to be completed, including a doctor’s phycial form, activity permission form, and a bunch more! They were all due this past week, so there was a mad rush to turn them in! I have finally sorted through all of them and have entered them into our database.

Last night I left camp for the first time in a few weeks. Justin Winch and I went out for him to get a haircut while I ran in to Old Navy to spend a giftcard! We went to dinner at Ruby Tuesday’s and then stopped at a supermarket for a few items, including Maxwell House Coffee for our brand-new coffee machines (shout out to all of the coffee drinking staff!).

Today, we are hanging orienteering flags, cleaning the cleaning supply room (oxymoron??) and of course I will be calling my own mom to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day. Unfortunately, I have to work today and can’t be at home. On top of all this, we will have 8 staff members arriving to join our precamp staff. We are looking forward to their arrival and getting some more help here at camp.

We have groups for the next few weeks every single day! Alot of work to do for camp as well, but it’s all good because we are up at camp! Have a great day.

So the theme of this week for the staff is RAKING! We have leaves, pine cones, pine needles, sticks, and other assorted finds all over the place. Yesterday and today the staff (which now includes Luke Holten and Levi Smathers) as well as our kitchen staff raked from the Rec Hall all the way down past the boys pool, movie theatre, Honda shed, following the drainage ditch along the lake field down to the lake. We have two ways of collecting the leaves- a state of the art leaf vacuum, which I refer to as the leaf sucker upper, as well as the old fashioned way of filling trash cans and dumping them in the woods. So the sounds around camp are rakes, leaf blowers, leaf suckers, and trucks driving back and forth.

Tom is busy at the Boys Pool now (the girls pool is FILLING as I type this!) draining the pool, taking out all of the wet leaves, and powerwashing it clean. We will then have the pool painted white (with black lane markers) and then begin the filling process. During this time, the pool company has to come in and install the new drain cover to comply with the act (which you can read more about from a previous post last week).

So as you can see, things are quite busy around camp. We have lots to do before we welcome our first school next Monday and then welcome new groups almost daily until staff orientation. Saturday and Sunday are big staff arrival days for us, as we will have about 16 total staff by Sunday for precamp.

Before I go, shout-out to Cara’s blog about the CIT weekend. I was going to write all about it, but she beat me to it and did a better job! Enjoy the pics on her blog. She briefly mentions a custom made cake by me. Well on Saturday, just before it was time to serve dinner to our CIT’s and rental group, I was in the back of the dining hall in the bakery and saw a circular cake lying around. So I decided to ice it and dedicate it to the CITs. What I didn’t know is that you are supposed to remove it from the pan and flip it upside down BEFORE icing a cake, since the bottom is flatter and smoother. So, the CIT’s ended up with a double sided iced cake, HAHA! Nonetheless, they devoured it and clearly enjoyed eating every last bite- none was leftover for me. Oh well, I get the last laugh since I have the keys to the bakery all summer long once the “real” baker (NOT ME) arrives and we start producing black and white cookies, chocolate chip cake, etc.

Off to do some work and then bed. By the way, 24 is the most amazing TV show! Goodnight all.

Hi All,

Jaycal is HOME! Jaycal arrived home last night from Israel and he had a great time! He will be posting shortly a recap of his trip to Poland and Israel.

But, now that he is home, it’s time to sit down and work hard on our new project- the Canadensis Today Show! We have so much to finalize including the logo, intro theme music, segments we will feature, the guest anchors, production scheduling, etc.

Here at camp we are quite busy. The first group of precamp staff arrived- Justin Winch, Steven Scott, and Peter Tarnoff. Precamp special guest Martha Archer arrived to our aid so that tomorrow we can open the climbing wall for our group that is arriving as I type this!

The past few days have been spent preparing the boys cabin for the arrival of this group.  This included cleaning the cabins (we have an outside service do this), putting the cleaning supplies in the cabins, counting the number of beds, getting the kitchen ready to serve meals, fill the soda machines, and I could go on and on.

We also had tons of outside companies coming in. Our wall/high ropes was inspected and of course passed the other day, we had 3 tractor trailers of food deliveries arrive that needed to be unloaded, etc.

Today in response to the “Swine Flu” outbreaks we have installed hand sanitizer stations outside all of the doors into the dining halls. Of course, the best prevention of any disease is washing your hands thoroughly in the dedicted hand wash stations, but we wanted to also provide hand sanitizer as well. We also continually retrain all of our kitchen staff on proper handwashing and food handling procedures as well as inspect the cleanliness of the dining hall after each meal. This is something we always do, but I thought I should highlight some of these things as I know many people are wondering about this flu. So far, so good up here in our own little world of Canadensis and we don’t expect that to change!

It’s 9:30PM and we just got done serving a pizza snack to the group of 200 that is still arriving. I am looking forward to welcoming the 2009 CIT’S up at camp tomorrow, so until then I leave you with a sneak peek at the recycling program signage we will be posting in each cabin!

Hey Canadensis,

This message comes to you from seat 43a. I’m about to take off and return to the United States after my two weeks away! I had the most incredible trip and have so many stories to share. Speak to you all soon!

-JCal

Shalom Everyone!

Its now Thursday morning here in Israel. I meant to write the other day but I fell asleep in the middle of typing up the email. Its been busy final few days in Israel.

Yesterday we started the day by touring an old prison in Jerusalem. After our tour of the prison we walked over to a huge open square here in Jerusalem where a stage was set up for the beginning of our second march. Last week we marched from Auchwitz to Berkinow, today we marched to the Western Wall. All 7,500 of us together! It was another incredible experience.

After our march we arrived at the Western Wall. This was my last visit to the wall on this trip so I went down the wall and prayed for the last time. We then had time to walk around the Old City and do some more shopping. I met some really nice people from all over the world.

Last night was the mega event for all the marchers. We all gathered on a military base for a huge concert. I was even chosen to go on stage in front of the 8,000 people to represent our region.

This morning we returned a torah to Yad Vashem(a holocaust memorial site) that was rescued a few years ago. It was a highlight of the trip because it was such a powerful moment. More on this later!

We are now traveling to Tel-Avi to get a few more sights in before we board our flight to return back to New York! The past two week have been incredible. I’ve seen so many things, some happy and some sad. What I’ve seen, the stories I heard will forever be with me.

Leheatraoat!
-Jason

Well you really know it’s that time of the year, when Silas and the crew arrive to open up the camp kitchen! Today our first food delivery truck will arrive, followed by a few on Wednesday and Thursday as well. We need to bring in lots of food to feed all of our precamp groups.

Speaking of food, we go through alot of it during the summer time! It’s not uncommon to go through about 200 pounds of french fries in one meal! We get our eggs in cases of 30 dozen at a time and use about 8 of them a week. Throughout precamp, I will try to update you on food consumption, because I bet alot of people would be surprised at how much food we actually use!

What a lovely transition from food into garbage. We are really excited this year to announce that we will be recycling. More details to follow…but I worked on the recycling signage that will be hung around camp, so maybe just maybe I will let you bloggers preview the new signs soon!

I have to get going now as I have a bit of a cold, but tons of work to do. Enjoy the beautiful weather back at home and remember that camp is about 2 months away. I am really excited!

Hey Canadensis,

Had another long day here in Israel. We woke up early this morning had a quick breakfast and then headed out to see some great sites on our hike. We are currently up north in the mountains so the views are incredible.

After our hike we headed over to Tzfat where we hiked a little more and then had lunch. I had pizza which was really good! For those of you that know me pretty well, know that I’m a very picky eater and surprisingly the food has been very good! Then we walked around town for a little while before heading to a few different Shuls in the area. We also went to a candle factory and the highlight of the afternoon was the artist colony. It was filled with all different types of art. There was jewelry, art work, statues…you name it they had it! I did some shopping and picked up a few gifts for some people. We then boarded the bus and headed back to our Hostel.

We got back and changed for dinner and then we headed up to a ceremony for Yom Ha Zikarom. Yom Ha Zikarom is the Israeli Memorial Day. The ceremony was very somber and moving.

Tomorrow we will attend another ceremony at a local high school and then have time to interact with the kids. I’m really looking forward to talking to kids my age and seeing what school is like for them.

Till next time!
-JayCal

PS: If anyone has any questions for me please email me at editor@canadensis.com

Hey Everyone!

We have had a very jammed packed schedule the past few days here in Israel. Yesterday we traveled around Jerusalem and saw many of the great sites. The really interesting thing was that because it was shabbat the roads were basically empty. I’ve never seen streets so empty. It was really fascinating to see a street that was packed just a day before now be completely empty. The whole town was basically shut down until sunset.

After Shabbat we had our first opportunity to shop in Israel. They took us to Benhihooda street which was filled with different stores and food! I stopped by McDonald’s and ordered a hamburger. They have 2 different sizes here! They have the normal size we have in America but also a burger similar to the size you can get at a diner. We did a lot of shopping and then headed back to our hostel.

This morning we traveled back to the kotel for morning prayer and then boarded the bus for Hiafa. We had lunch in Hiafa and looked at the incredible view. You could see the entire city from the observation deck we were on. After lunch we traveled to Rosh Hanikra and hiked down the coast there as well as exploring the caves. We then traveled to our hostel and got ready for dinner.

Dinner tonight was very interesting. We had dinner in Druze home. We had dinner in a persons house, shared stories from the trip and danced to different music. It was an interesting meal and it was VERY GOOD! I really enjoyed it!

Right now we are back the hostel preparing for tomorrow. We have another busy day ahead of us.

Speak to you soon,
Jason

Hey Canadensis,

Day 2 in Israel and I’m all ready to move here! I’m having the most incredible time here. There is so much to see and do here! This morning we got up had a great breakfast and then all headed off to different types of services. My service was held at the Hebrew Union College. The campus was beautiful! So many plants and trees.

After services we headed back to the hostel for a huge lunch! There was so much food to choose from. I had snitzel which is chicken. After lunch we took walking tours of Jerusalem. I saw a lot of really interesting sights and took a lot of great pictures. I will try and send a bunch in after my trip.

After dinner we held services at the hostels amphitheater (not as great as ours!) After services we went to the huge market place next to the hostel. I did A LOT of shopping!!

(I fell asleep in the middle of writing this post so I will continue now…)

Right now I’m standing at the Kotel (Western Wal). We are traveling to Haifa this afternoon a few other places.

Speak to you later!

-Jason