Food Glorious Food ....

Its the time of year when my scouting friends - Ladle, Stitch & Broom make our annual pilgrimage to the west coast of the south island. This year we are planning to take a group of 10 scouts to make a knife from a piece of steel and a lump of wood. http://www.barrytownknifemaking.com/ We always go over before the the camp on a 'reconnaissance mission'.

My task has been to provide some of the food. We will be eating out for the evening meals as there will be no scouts to do the washing up!

I have been out in the garden this morning and had a bit of a forage.

So, we have potatoes, cucumber, courgette, carrots, parsnips, onions, corn on the cob and some tomatoes.

Men, and women, cannot live on veggies alone so I had a rummage in the freezer. I pulled out a duck which has been roasted and the meat stripped. I also found some kuni kuni bacon - it is a little fatty but quite tasty. The chickens provided the eggs and my wife very kindly let me take our last camembert!

Everything you see above has been grown or made on our lifestyle block. The chaps (actual and honorary!) have 9 hours to let me know if I have forgotten anything.

I think we are going to be eating very well!

PS. I have not forgotten the green salad Ladle - that is scheduled for lunchtime!

Scout Geek Camp

It is Pre-JOTI (Jamboree on the Internet) aka Geek Camp time again but this year it is bigger and better. We have again returned to Cotswold School to give 18 Harewood & Bishopdale Scouts a change to get familar with the chat program we will be using for JOTI.

We have replaced all of our old computers with 40 Pentium 4 machines kindly donated by Chrischurch City Council and the University of Canterbury. Each workstation has a 19 inch monitor and upto 1Gb of RAM and will be used for a variety of scout activities.

Jaymo_Black can be seen in the above photo running a workshop showing the scouts how to embed scripts within the chat program for doing things like writing text is different colours.

JOTI 2008

It is hard to believe that the Jamboree on the Internet (JOTI) has come around yet again. We have again been back to Cotswold School this weekend and have been using IRC to contact scouts and guides around the world. We have had over 80 people attend the event.

A great time has been had by all and a big thank-you goes to the Bishopdale and Harewood Scouts team who have organised the event on behalf of the Torlesse scouts zone. I personally haven't laughed so much in a long time!

I have been running a seperate blog for the event which can be found here:

http://joti2008.blogspot.com/

I have a nasty feeling my colleagues are going to 'get me back' for some of my posts at the annual zone scout camp in January! I'll keep you posted on what happens.