The big holiday party was lat night and it was a lot of fun.  Getting to see people who i don’t get to see very often is a treat.  It is an awful lot of work to pull off a party like that though.  We had twenty-some odd people at the house.  My mother and I made almost 20lbs of potatoes into latkes, we made 16-ish pounds of corned beef, a turkey and more.  I don’t remember what my father said was the count on number of bottles of wine drunk.

Seeing family and friends is fun, but it is mighty tiring.  People started to show up at 5 and the last guest left between 9 and 10, plus we did all the prep beforehand.  I think I got to tell the same stories over and over to different people, and it is hard to keep up with all of that.  Seeing my cousins Greg Weisman, and Sarah and Brian Swett was nice.  I have not seen them in a long time.  I don’t know if I can convince greg to come out to Utah this year, he has all kinds of other adventures planned.  Maybe SCUBA diving in Israel this spring, he sounded interested in that.

Then of course there are the gifts.  As much as I like getting money as a gift, sometimes I feel like it is a cop-out.  I do kinda need money to pay off all my bills, what with buying a washer and dryer and such, but then I feel like I didn’t really use the gifts that I was given.  There are things that I want to get, but then i feel like I could have used the money to be practical and pay the bills.  Worst of all, is that most of the gifts were in cash, and when i have cash I tend to spend it on things that really are not gifty, like dinner.  It is kind of a dilemma.

Over the course of this trip I did get to visit some friends of mine.  Best of all was getting to see Jesi, who, unfortunately is not working currently, thought that allowed her the time to visit.  We went out to see “Radium Girls” produced by the BU Theatre Department.  It was a great show and I got to finally tweetup with a couple more friends: @gizm770o, @jamisonkissh, and @lightingguru44.  The production was really great, a very interesting show.  I would recommend it to anyone who likes going to the theatre.  One of the other great things about the performance was the fact that they has a talkback after with the playwright, which was very interesting.  I enjoy hearing how good plays came to be.

What really bummed me out was not getting to see my good friend Molly who is currently working at Shakespeare and Company in Lennox, MA.  She had performances most of the days that I was home and then it started to snow on the night that she hoped to come visit.  To tell the truth, out of all the people that were at our party, if i had been able to see Molly, it would have made me a lot happier.  Another time I guess.

So, now thanks to Delta for free wifi on the airplane, I can post this entry.  Go figure that they would actually give something away.  I mean the fact that you have to pay to check bags now is totally ridiculous.  It is even more ridiculous that its costs you MORE to check your bags in the airport rather than online at home even though you still have to go see a real live person at the airport to actually check the bag!  It makes no sense.  More people would fly if it cost less to fly!

I think that is all I have, time to sit back and watch a movie to kill the time before we get in to Salt Lake City.  Then i have to go to work, huzzah for photo call!

Over the last day I have been discussing the effect of social networking on summer camps with the parent of a camper (@warrenss see his blog post on the topic). The camps that I work for have just started using Twitter, and so far I am doing the bulk of the tweeting. On top of my other responsibilities at camp, this is a fun one, but it is complicated and time consuming.

One might ask: “how hard can it be to post some 140 character messages throughout the day?” But it is really far more complicated than that. First and foremost, we have to make sure that we protect the privacy of our campers while still tweeting about what is going on at camp. Second, there is only one of me, and I can’t be everywhere at once. If you know camp, there is always something going on everywhere at the same time.

Then there is the issue of followers and following people. So far, we have been trying to limit our followers to parents, campers, staff, and alumni. We are not currently following anyone. It raises interesting questions because services like Twitter are designed to facilitate two way communication. I am not an administrator of the camp, so how would I deal with parents who start replying and/or posting questions. Most of the administration is busy all summer making sure that camp runs smoothly for 8 weeks, the last thing they want to have to do is moderate our Twitter accounts. We also can’t tweet what every camper in camp is doing every moment of the day, so how do you deal with the parents who feel like their kid doesn’t get enough “tweet” time?

The whole media/social media at camp is an interesting conundrum. Camp is supposed to be a vacation, a get-away from the normal. We collect all the kids cell phones, campers don’t have internet access, and they only get 15 minutes on the phone each week. On the flip side, here we are, the staff, trying to broadcast over whatever channels are available the goings on at camp. We upload photos to the camp website every day, videos about once a week. Now we are tweeting throughout the day. Why? I thought we were trying to get away from all that when we come here.

I remember going to camp as a camper, it wasn’t really that long ago (although some of our younger campers weren’t even born when I started going to camp). We didn’t have phone times when I was camper, you called your parents from pay phones on trip days, if you wanted to. We wrote letters as our major means of communicating with the outside world. I still write letters, by hand, with pen and paper when i come to camp. Sure, I can email and IM my friends and family while I am here, but there is something magical about putting pen to paper when you are here.

What does it say about where we are headed when I come to camp with a case of hard drives, DVD burners, video and still cameras, a computer, and an iPhone? Parents spend almost $10K to send one child to camp for 8 weeks. Then, as soon as the kids get here, the parents just want to hear from them. I usually have office duty one night each week. I take phone calls from parents and page kids to the office for their phone times. We also take phone calls during meals and have kids leave the meals to talk to parents, that seems somewhat odd to me as well. Maybe I don’t understand it because I never had it. Maybe I don’t understand because my parents were thrilled to get rid of me and my siblings for the summer!

So, does all this change camp? In some respects, yes, in others, no. Camp is still a get-away, a place that is very different from real life. Friendships are still as tight as ever here, and kids love to be here.

It is a very interesting thing to think about it, and certainly warrants some additional pondering as the summer goes on.