Day 6

What difference a day makes! Yesterday I was pining for home but today was so much fun.

So yesterday we had a day off. It was quite boring, and I felt the effects of being the only counsellor staying with my host family. As I've mentioned before, alot of families are housing two counsellors whereas I'm the only one being hosted by mine. It was such a dull day, I didn't really do alot, and after a couple of hours of being here alone with my thoughts I got more and more to thinking of home and how I was being really crap at adjusting and stuff. Spoke to Wiz on MSN which was coolio, especially when Dad and then Doobs joined him on Webcam! They said I should hang on for Mum to come home but I had to go because Aimee [host mum] was going out with Brooke and asked me to watch Brad. So I did, not really in the mood because I was having a miserable day. Leanne came round just after 4:00, which lifted my spirits a little bit because the main thrust of my bad mood was how I was doubting whether or not I'd fit in. The fact that someone came round was therefore a huge plus. Anyway we just chatted while Brad played on the Wii and then went outside. Leanne had to go after about half an hour because her and Amy, who are being housed by the same host family, were going to see a dance recital. I stayed out with Brad and he taught me all these various games, bless him. He wanted to show me how good he was at football, basketball, his scooter, his bike, frisbee...

We ate at about 6; it was leftover Spaghetti that Aimee made for when we went to her mum's house the night before, which was really nice, and she made some meatballs to go with it. Then I went with Richard [host dad] and Brad to see Brad play baseball. I'd never seen a baseball game before, so seeing a first and second grade match was quite a good experience, especially seeing as how tiny they are! I didn't realise how similar it was to rounders! I got back and found that a few people, co-counsellors, had been in touch over Facebook and I felt a hell of a lot better about the summer than I did earlier in the day.

Then today was so much fun, so much more fun than I had expected! It was another Orientation session at camp, although it didn't start until 2pm so we got a bit of a lie-in. The first bit was what I was dreading the most, which was swimming. It was fine though. We had to do the same tryout that the kids would have to do, which was a length of front crawl, a length of breast stroke, a length of side stroke [no, I didn't know what it was either], and a length of Elementary Backstroke, which is this freaky stroke which isn't too similar to what you'd get if you tried to do breast stroke on your back. It was absoloutley knackering though, but luckily everyone else found it knackering too!

The next bit were these team-building games, where we got split into two groups and in our smaller group played a load of little exercises. Some of them were really good fun, like wink murder (I was the murderer... yes maaaate), and I think the fun factor of them helped everyone come out of their shells a little bit. They also got me talking to some people who I hadn't got round to talking to much yet, which was good.

We had this break session and I also got talking to some more people who'd come over from the UK but who I hadn't had much of a chance to speak to, and that made me feel really good knowing that I'd made some progress in getting to know some of these people who seemed to be grouping off quite early. Making jokes and stuff kind of broke the ice a little bit, so now I'd feel comfortable having an actual proper conversation with them.

We got split into tiny groups and went around camp doing these little challenges that some of the campers had to do. Our group was only like 8 people big so that was good, I found myself being much more Shaun than I've been so far. Got talking to a few more people, a couple of whom were other English guys and they seem like the kind of guys who are really cool but you'd be surprised if they had a bad bone in their body. It was quite fun getting stuck into these little challenges, like getting hands and knees dirty and stuff!

Got back at like 7:00 and went straight in the shower, before having dinner upstairs. They'd already eaten various leftovers so I had some of the leftover meatballs and Cous-Cous with raw carrot from previous nights. I also made a dent in the lump of cheesecake Aimee's mum had given me on Sunday!! Then at like 7:45 I got a call from Dean, a returning counsellor who was one of the first people I met last Thursday, saying a load of them were going down to Champps, this sports bar down the road. I hitched a ride with them and there were more than 20 people there. Some of the people I broke the ice with earlier I then had a chance to hang out with a bit more. Oddly, the two people who I'd spoken to most of all before coming to camp are the two people I've actually had the least chance to speak to since we arrived. Strange beans.

Once we got to Champps I realised I hadn't planned as far ahead as getting home again afterwards, so I guiltily called Aimee and Richard not long after we got there to take them up on their offer of giving me a lift home. I called early on because I didn't want to ring out of the blue, you know, I gave them some notice. So Aimee came to get me at about 9:30 and said it was actually really responsible of me to call them and ask for a lift early on.... there's me worrying they'd be not to happy at having to come out to get me but she's impressed that I took the initiative to ask in the first place!!

So we got back and fairly quickly I said goodnight and said I was off to bed. No sooner am I downstairs that the doorbell goes [waking an angry Brooke!] and it's Sarah, Leanne and Amy, with Princess the dog, asking if I wanted to go for a walk with them! That was really nice, a twilight dog walk around our subdivision. We found this nearby park and sat on the swings for a while. Princess the dog is completely lacking in many senses... she suspiciously sniffed her own footprint, got tangled up in her own lead, and didn't seem the least bit bothered that four complete strangers were taking her out for a walk!

Leanne said at one point "Did you guys think a week ago that in seven days you'd be sitting in a park in the dark with three new people on the swings?!" Nope!! But it was a cool day. I felt a bit more adjusted and a bit more myself, and like I'd started to make some good friends.

Tomorrow is going to be a looooong day, apparently we're going to be campers tomorrow and the returning counsellors are going to be our counsellors! So it being 11:15pm now I'm going to go to bed. I just wanted to blog before bed because if tomorrow's a complete disaster, I didn't want to lose the positivity of right now!