A Week of Networking

It's been a great week this week for our Road to Eagle. Wednesday's troop meeting was a parents meeting about summer camp. Wow, I had no idea how much money summer camp was going to be. Yeah, I'm thinking that I may need to be Membership committee for our troop. We need to raise money. Not that $230 is a ton of money, but I'm hoping that we can figure out some money making ideas to help offset the cost of camp. So, I've connected with the NESA committee in our council and they meet every month for a breakfast of eagles. I have this sneaky suspicion that they aren't very active. I'm hopefully going to change that. They need to be visible.

So I wasn't able to go to the parents meeting, but my wife did. I had all kinds of questions about things that the troop says they need for camp. So, using this wonderful thing called the world wide web, I went to work on some forums and in twitter to see about a few items.

Here are some of my discoveries.

Footlockers - There are many out there. But we need a lockable footlocker. I've found a few, but when I was a scout, I had a big footlocker. I'm going to have to check with our scoutmaster how big he recommends, but it seems that Walmart has a 2 pack of them for under $40! We'll see what he has to say about size and then go from there.

Rain Gear - Again, when I was a scout, we wore ponchos! I loved my poncho (Not really). So, my wonderful wife went to google and came up with a name of frogg toggs. So, back to twitter. Most everyone had good things to say about them. I did go to the outlet mall yesterday and checked out ll bean, columbia, the usual suspects. I just wish the coleman store hadn't closed. I'd still be there shopping over 24 hours later. I did find a nice rain jacket at ll bean for $25. It was a little big, so room to grow, but it was waterproof. The problem with just a jacket is that we would need pants too. So the search continues.

Hiking boots - This is a big concern of mine, since our son is growing right now like a weed. 4 inches in 6 months, and his feet seem to be following suit. I hate the idea of spending a bunch of money on hiking boots for him to be able to wear them for a month or 2. I had a great tip from Scoutmaster Shawn (He's a scouter in WI, who does podcasts, twitter, etc....) who told me that we should spend about $50, buy the boots about 3 weeks before camp, and make him break them in for 2 weeks before camp. Of course my cynical wife say to me, "but it's July! It's hot and humid here." I don't care about that, I thought it was a great idea Shawn had. While we were at the outlet mall yesterday, many stores had waterproof boots for under $50, so I'm encouraged by that.

I'm a little bummed out that Will is going to miss the next 2 troop meetings, but I'm happy for him to be going on a spring break vacation with his grandmother. I hope that sometime in the next couple of weeks that I can get together with our scoutmaster and committee to get things rolling!! I have a ton of ideas that keep me thinking constantly about our troop.

Hope you had a great week

Eagle Scout Doug