Brrrr, it’s cold outside- wasn’t that the start to a color war cheer for Blizzard Blue? Well tonight, we are expecting 30 degrees Fahrenheit (yes that’s below freezing) and it is ridiculously cold as I type this. Fortunately, the office and my cabin is heated, but the school teachers who are here preparing for the students arrival tomorrow aren’t as lucky!

This past week has been crazzyyy, but in a good way. Last Monday through Wednesday, a middle school Gold Team (the high achievers/athletes) was here with about 90 students and teachers. On Wednesday they went whitewater rafting (in wet suits of course), while we welcomed a school of 450 from the Philly area. The hours were insane- breakfast at 7AM and bedtime for me and Matt was well after 11PM. We were busy working on a food order for the week and other things.

We also had more staff members arrive- Chris Kemp and Alex Dean (both are Hondas instructors from last summer) and tonight a new staff member will be joining our team! We now have a team of 16 counselors and 7 kitchen staff running the entire camp. From maintenance to running activities to cleaning cabins in camp, its organized chaos!

This past weekend, we welcomed our largest weekend ever! Over 650 people were here. Twice a year, Aunt Terri donates our facility to the Special Olympic Athletes in the Philadelphia Suburb areas. They brought up about 100 young adults who had an absolute blast. From playing beach volleyball, hiking around the lake, climbing the wall, boating in our lake, and doing arts and crafts to watching a movie and having a prince and princess ball in the Senior Rec Hall in the evenings, they were so excited to be here. In addition to Special Olympics, we hosted a Girl Scout Troop from NJ and two YMCA groups as well. We used every cabin in camp and it was busy! All had a good time, despite the high winds and rain last night.

Speaking of last night, I was invited to a camper’s Bar Mitzvah- Matt Faden (Mazel Tov Matt)! It was a great party and I got to see many of camp’s head staff members. A great time was had by all, including myself, but the midnight – 2AM drive back to camp certainly wasn’t the highlight of my weekend! This morning, I was up at 730AM for breakfast, so I am quite tired as you can imagine. See the pictures below from the party!

Another great photo- Head Counselor Ken Ricken with CIT Harris Goodison

I hope you all understand that I have to go and finish a few things, but I will try to post more often now that camp is truly right around the corner.  I will have a video 411 soon as well, as requested by some of the campers I saw at Matt’s Bar Mitzvah (Goodman, Small Fry, J Mitch) just to name a few!

However, first I have a really special video for all of you to watch. Please click below for a really special treat with more details about the upcoming CANADENSIS TODAY Show!

Click here to watch the NEW Canadensis Today Promo!

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.

Rachel Bachman is so excited to share her starbursts!

Soon all of the 2009 CITs were accounted for and and we spent the day jumping in the foam pit, playing volleyball, and exploring all the new additions around camp. We had a few CIT meetings to make plans for the upcoming summer and had fun just being together.

Some of the 2009 CITs

Forti gives some CIT driving lessons...

CIT Meg gets a lift from CIT Rachel

Some of the girls by the lake...

General silliness...

After a fun filled day and a custom cake from Eric Forti, the CITs got the chance to do some night climbing at the climbing wall.  Martha Archer drove all the way from Ohio just to help out this weekend, and she showed off her wild wall skills! After a fun night climb, everyone headed over the the fire pit outside the health center for a late night campfire, complete with s’mores and campfire songs. Camp musician Steve Scott performed some of his amazing original songs, and then I joined him in some fabulous guitar improv that had everyone singing along, and eventually laughing hysterically.

CITs around the fire!

CIT Meg and I show off our crunchy s'mores!

CIT Danielle, CIT Jess, and CIT Rachel go on an extreme golf cart ride!

We finally decided it was time to head back to the bunks for bed and the girls made their way back to our temporary home in the field bunk. The next morning we enjoyed Sunday morning breakfast (bagels!!!) before packing the cars and heading back home. This weekend was just a small taste of what’s to come this season, and judging by the fun we had, summer 2009 is going to be the best ever!

CIT Meg and CIT Mara never want to leave...

CIT Weekend Sunset

Hey All!

While I was going out for dinner tonight on Long Island I ran into Sharky! (Who is an big fan of Eric’s blog)

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!

Eric and Matt in our clean, but messy office!

Tim Penrod stops by for a quick visit

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