Friday Night, August 17, 2012
Up in the barn, there is a roller coaster – an unfinished roller coaster – and it calls to us. Like an itch you cannot scratch, the cookie you cannot have, or the water balloon you are not allowed to throw at your sibling.
It is also the morning in the week when tinkerers suddenly realize that this, right now, is their last day of building. But one can only stand so much premature nostalgizing, we abruptly depart the Ranch House and head to the barn.
Thursday Night, August 16th, 2012 – 11:30pm
Our day started with the arrival of this in our dining room:
You just know it’s going to be a weird day when it starts like that. Carter says that he is known for his epic bed-hair and we’re starting to believe him.
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Wednesday Night, August 15th, 2012
One way you know that it is time to go to the beach is that nobody objects when you announce it over breakfast. Nobody wants to stay and work in the barn? “No!” Ok then, let’s make sandwiches…
We pack the icebox, toss in this and that, load up the vehicles, and head out to the newly discovered secret Tinkering School beach (which is public, just not well known).
Tuesday Night, Day 3, August 14th
Gever is up early today, awakened by fragments of design solutions to the problems they encountered yesterday. He gets a mumbled “Is it time to get up?” from one of the boys in the boys dorm, but they are fast asleep again before he can answer. He sets out the breakfast buffet of cereal, yogurt, bagels, toaster, and all the fixin’s, before the house is awake. He desperately needs someone to talk to about the ways the wheel mountings for the luge capability on the car can be done – but the place is stubbornly peaceful. Time for a walk. Outside, the morning sun lights up a beautiful sky.
Monday Night, Day 2, August 13th
“Rolugester” (pronounced row⋄luge⋄ster) is not a word that rolls easily off the tongue, nor is it a word that you might use on a daily basis – unless you happen to be with us here at Session 4. You see, we aim to build a hybrid roller coaster that can start on precision rails and smoothly (and with some velocity) transition to a plywood luge track which the passenger must steer through. Roller Coaster + Luge = Rolugester.
The day started with a quick walk down to the creek to check in on an experiment that was set up at the creek. After observing that the crawdads would eat the salami off of a grape without touching the grape itself, we wondered if they didn’t like grape or if they just liked salami so much that they wouldn’t a grape if salami was present. To test this latter hypothesis, it was decided that we would leave four grapes, three intact and one smushed, in the creek and give the crawdads twelve hours without salami to distract them from the delicious fruit. At breakfast, the tinkerers made guesses about what would be found at the creek; all grapes eaten, some grapes eaten, or no grapes eaten. The opinions were pretty well balanced between the three choices.
Four sessions into the summer, I can say, without equivocation, that every session is different. Each group of tinkerers manages to differentiate themselves in social dynamic, innate interests, and skills they are bringing to the camp. As sometimes happens, we had a bit of a hiccup with the cameras today, so we’re a little light on photographic evidence (which is unfortunate because we saw Bigfoot).
We heard from the Ranch Manager that crawdads had been spotted in the creek, so we head down the road past the lovely fall colors (which are all poison oak). Read the rest of this entry »
