As you may know, I’m a member of my local Scouting group. And last weekend was JOTA – JOTI, something I and several others have been organising* for since about February. (If my memory serves me right.)
Together with three others, I consentrated on the JOTI part, though we also did some overviewing of the whole event (Get people to do that JOTA part, saterday night program for leaders / rovers, timetables, etc) as well. Organising it was a lot of work, but boy was it worth it. 😀 For those of you who speak Dutch, a fellow organiser (Erik) has journals / reports on it here (I don’t think he was planning to translate them.. but who knows). For the non-dutch readers; The rest of the website is also available in english. Just click the flag icon top left.
Now, back to the story.. We had been preparing for months, but the last few weeks, work got really intense, as we where getting in PC’s for us to prepare for use, and monday last week, we started setting up everything at the location the event would be. A movie of us bringing in the PC’s we had stored from last year can be found here. (Credits for the editting go to Erik as well.) After that, we brought the PC’s that where already on location because we had been working on them in and put them on there places. The result: two islands like this.
After that, we ate diner. (Thanks to fellow organiserRon his wife, Angelien for the great diner.) A couple of hours later, we called the pizza guy for more food, and then went to sleep.
The next day, we finished setting everything up. Not all PC’s where working yet, and we found out that a few PHP scripts didn’t work as expected (Resulting in Bas and me coding troughout diner) but all in all, we where ready for the first group.
That evening another group (the one Erik and I are in, actually) also had there share of JOTI, and after that, we got some well deserved sleep.
The next moring, at about 8:30, we had to wake up because in just 30 minutes, the next groups would arive. Thankfully, the first group consisted of beavers, who wheren’t able to follow the regular JOTI program. Instead, Erik had found a game for them to play. (Or better: One of us played it, using a beamer as display and following directions from the little ones.) This gave us some time to try and fix the last few PC’s (two turned out to just be plain stupid and useless, the rest is working great now.) and really wake up. About an hour later the next group arived and this continued untill diner. (We did have a lunchbreak, but that wasn’t really worth mentioning in any further detail.) At this point, we where done for a few hours. And trust me, we needed that break. 😛
The diner itself was a BBQ, and after that there was an evening program in wich groups would ride around our town, trying to awnser questions and complete tasks. There was also a spotcar, who’s task it was to catch us on camera. Bas nearly got us (himself, me in the passagers seat and three ladies in the back) killed to make sure they couldn’t take a picture, and we still didn’t win, but it was great fun. 😀
That fun continues after the program, back at the PC’s and ended at bout 8 Am, sunday. Once we woke up (4 hours later for must, just 3 for Ron and even less for Jesse, who had gone home for the night but came back to help clean up) we cleaned up as much as we could (We did some finishing up last evening, but that was about 30 minutes of work.. though it would have been more, had we attempted it sunday.) and then went home for a verry deserved sleep. (Thank heaven for no school on monday, too. 😉 )
Refered notes:
- Just for our local group, don’t get me wrong.