Good morning!
Does anybody feel like a duck? A day like yesterday does give you an appreciation for what our duck-billed friends in the great Northwest deal with on a regular basis. A little bit of rain never stops them from whatever they need to do (baseball, mowing the lawn, a camping trip, etc.) or they’d never get anything outdoors done. I am thankful for our Webelos guests and their families that this didn’t happen to be the weekend we were out camping for our annual Webelos Weekend (it IS the weekend we chose back in August, but the McDowell Mountain facility was already taken, so we had to move it two weeks earlier. This also of course means someone was camping out there in our site yesterday, and I’ll bet their fire wasn’t nearly as big as ours was :-)).  In any case, while it may have negatively impacted our Webelos attendance, I know that our troop would have dealt just fine with the weather. It was a pretty warm storm – it was raining rather than snowing even above 7,000 feet, and we would have made whatever adjustments needed and have been prepared. It is what scouts do. However, I gotta tell ya, I was much happier to be repairing two showers in my home yesterday than huddling under an EZup in a Scoutmaster Conference on a drizzly camping trip! Sometimes it helps to be schedule-lucky instead of schedule-good!
Getting back into scouting this week, we will have our troop meeting Tuesday night. The original meeting theme is ‘Can you cook?’ without a stove, but we will also need to spend time preparing for Scout Sunday at Blessed Sacrament, which will be Sunday, February 3rd. The boys will finalize the schedule, but we will have shifts on that Sunday from between 7AM and noon timeframe, and will have stations set up in the courtyard as parishioners go into and come out of mass during the morning. Some of those stations will include a campsite, dutch oven cooking and fire starting. I know it is a possible impact to your family’s own church schedule, but it is a very important, once a year opportunity for our troop to interface with many of the members of our charter organization, and is an excellent relationship and recruiting occasion for our troop with Blessed Sacrament. I would ask that that you participate if it is at all possible.
For those of you close to rank advancement, this Tuesday would also be an excellent night to sit for your board of review, as it is the last one before our Court of Honor coming up on the 5th.  We had three boards and two conferences going last Tuesday night in preparation for it – it is great to see those skills developing, and you so capably demonstrating them for our reviewers. For the Court of Honor, please bring a dessert or snack to share as part of the celebration. There is also a rumor that there will be a shed/equipment organization project in the near future (sometime in February – stay tuned for details). I hope you are also having an opportunity to sell your Scout-O-Rama tickets in your neighborhoods, to family, and in front of our participating stores – for each ticket sold, 35% goes into your scout account, as does 100% of all additional donations to scouting.  For those of you with items for the February newsletter, please finalize them within the next two weeks.  And don’t forget that the weekend of the 8th is our annual trip to Sunrise for the T648 ski/snowboard trip. Lots going on – please make sure you are participating as fully as possible or you’ll be missing a bunch!
See you at the troop meeting!
Mr. Cole