Mile Markers

Well, since I haven’t gotten around to blogging but once this week, I guess that means I’ve been very busy. Oddly, it has seemed like a busier week. But it may seem that way for a couple of reasons. First, we have campers all week long. Our first junior high group doesn’t leave until tomorrow. Second, my usual weekly schedule has been thrown off a bit because we don’t have regular camp next week. Instead we have Family Camp. Which means there are several things I don’t have to do…but then there are other things I do.

Of course, work is going to get busier. The fliers for the two autumn women retreats went out late last week. Already, we’ve got twenty or thirty back with phone calls and e-mails asking if there is still space. Apparently, not only do these fill but there are always waiting lists. It also means I have to start thinking about them.

And the quilt brochures for the fall go out next week. Before the month is out, I’ll have piles of them on my desk. But just as we’ve been trying to streamline summer, we’re going to see what we can do to streamline quilt a bit. Lisa is open to ideas and since everything is new to me anyhow, we may as well get a little wild!

But with the end of this month comes some mile markers. For one, we are 1/3 of the way through the summer. We have six camps left for kids and will finish off the summer with a family camp, a week break and then a family camp weekend. It’s almost hard to believe I will soon have more camps put away in manila envelopes under my desk than binders full of registrations above it.

And I have only three summer mailings left to do. When I started nearly two months ago sending out letters to campers who would be arriving when (we hoped!) the snow would finally disappear, it seemed like I’d be working on them all summer long. But I’ll be done before July is up. And then I almost wonder what I’ll do with my extra time!

Not only that, but we seem to have started on a successful path of streamlining standard registration on registration day. We set a record this past Sunday of having our money reconciled, every camper present and canteen cards in the canteen before 7 pm. There were a few bumps, but it appears to be going really well!

I’m starting to wonder if we can’t do the same thing for Quilt. Marc and I are meeting with our database guy on Monday to see what he can tell us. And then I’ve got some ideas simmering in the back of my head that might also work. We probably won’t be on the cutting edge this fall (although we have five weeks of quilt retreat to make the attempt), but by next spring we could even have registration on line! We are talking of putting Women’s Retreat, Men’s Retreat and Dads ‘n Daughters online.

Camp Lebanon: Welcome to the 21^st Century!