For now, please check out Reuben's blog titled "justifications" to read more about early bird. Although I have proved to be a far superior four square player to Reuben, he is a better writer so take his words on early bird and digest them well.
http://hagreu.blogspot.com/2009/06/justification.html
Secondly, Niagara Falls housing site has a bat problem. Thats right a bat problem. I am going to be recording this problem through my blog from Reuben's blog and entitling it...
"The Bat Journal"
There has thus far been two entries to the "The Bat Journal" and I pray every night that there will be many more.
Entry #1
When we arrived at Potter's House and Deacon Ron was giving us a tour and again when Ben and I were inspecting the building for prior damages with Deacon Joe, we were informed of the bat that haunts the ol' place. Noted. Last night the five of us were sitting around the staff room, very near to calling it a night, when the bat flew into the room. It made a few circles and left us cringing in fear. It returned a few minutes later; Ben instructed us not to move and then explained how sonar worked. He is applying for a science teacher position at the local high school, too. Then the bat retreated into the kitchen. After much hullabaloo, Wesley, Ben, and I mustered up our courage, entered said kitchen, and spent probably ten minutes trying to figure out how to get this five-inch creature out of our residence. Ben and I ended up chasing the thing wildly around the room; the bat ran into Ben's chest and head several times, which explained the truly unearthly sounds he was making, and I finally trapped the beast with the big Iowa flag I wisely purchased before leaving for the summer and threw it all out the window. The next ten minutes were spent changing out of the completely soiled pairs of pants that we all ended up with afterward.
Entry # 2
On Wednesday night everyone was in the gym, hanging out before it was time for bed. The YouthWorks! staff and all the adult leaders (except the leader from Illinois, who was planning on making a quick trip into Canada, and did, and brought back ketchup-flavored chips) were engaged in an intense "leaders only" game of four square. At about ten to eleven, when lights out was going to happen, we decided the game was done, and as the crowd of spectators and players broke up, someone yelled, "There's a bat!" and, lo and behold, there indeed was a bat. Was it the same one that had violently attacked us in our quarters upstairs the week before? No one knows. All I do know is that pandemonium ensued; seasoned YouthWorks! veteran Ben said he had never seen chaos erupt so quickly on a YouthWorks! site in his life. The first thing that happened after every junior high girl in there started screaming was that someone threw the four square ball in the bat's general direction, and several leaders, assuming it was one of the younger boys, immediately condemned the action. It turns out that Mark threw the ball, though: "I thought it'd be sweet if I hit the bat with it." Which it would have been, really. The four square ball was not the only ball that got thrown at the bat; the trip leader from Michigan also resorted to throwing one of his kid's new football but got it stuck in the rafters, right after the kid had said, "Don't use my football." He'd gotten it two days before as a birthday gift from his small group leader; Wesley and I used rope to get it down the next day. Balls were notthe only things that got hurled at the bat; the trip leader from Pennsylvania threw this dish rack at the thing super hard and it almost went right over the tarp that constitutes one wall of the girls sleeping room. That dish rack was not the only thing that wanted badly to go into the girls sleeping room; at one point in the confusion, the bat, which spent most of the time tediously circling the entire gym, made a nose dive out of our sight and into the aforementioned girls sleeping room. Obviously this solicited many a shriek and scream from everyone in there, which was the first funny part. Kinda. The second was how long the bat stayed down there; I sort of assumed that it had caught itself in some thirteen-year-old's hair. The third funny part of the nose dive was that there was this adult leader who was in the makeshift doorway of the sleeping room, and I watched her the entire time. She put her hand over her mouth as she watched whatever it was that was happening in that tarped-off area, laughing but gasping in disbelief several times and doing double takes all over the place, and then in the end she doubled over in laughter. Which I was soon reduced to. Before and after that, Ben and I just stood in the middle of the room, watching. I was completely at a loss as to what to do, despite being sort of in charge. One of us suggested to the other that maybe we could move everyone out into the courtyard, but then, after a pause, we shook that idea off. The other site director on site that night, Steubenville's very own Kim, didn't help at all; it turns out that she and Lisa had been in the kitchen during the entire event, calmly eating Oreos and watching all the male staff members and leaders run around and leap into the air to try to capture or maim the bat with garbage bags, dish racks, big cardboard boxes, and Iowa flags. As for the other female staff members, well, I don't really know where Kryn was, but I know Stockton was in a corner shielding herself and a couple middle school girls with some Happy Fun Bags, which are paper sacks that you'd imagine using for a inanimate, nonthreatening lunch and not in defense of a bloodthirsty flying mammalian. To each his or her own, I guess. Ultimately, Lisa left her cookie post and got a ladder and pole used to extend paint brushes, and the bat landed in high up in one corner. Ben climbed up the ladder and brought the pole back to smash the creature, but not before turning around and yelling, "Cover your eyes and ears." He then knocked the bat unconscious. Hoping to salvage a bit of glory, I swooped in and grabbed the bat with my Iowa flag. If only I had a dollar for every time I've used that thing to carry a bat outside. Ben and I marched ("Walk slow and somber, and put your head down") past the sobbing mourners (I am not making that up) in the hall and went outside; I released the bat into the night from whence it came. Will we see it again? Time will tell. When all was said and done, lights out was done only ten minutes later than scheduled, even though the bat's reign of terror had seemed to last a lifetime. What did I learn from this experience? Nothing, because I still think that there was fancy little that could be done. The only precaution we have decided to take is to do "bat drills" on Sunday night so the participants are prepared for this type of intrusion when it goes down. And, lastly, Ben said he was going to text our supervisor Heather the following: "I just slaughtered a bat in front of seventy participants...do I need to fill out an incident report?"
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