Hello Canadensis!
Well since this is the middle of the week, I feel like it would be wrong to just pick today (Wednesday) to begin this blog. So I will begin with Monday. For most of our campers, Monday was a day off from school, Martin Luther King Jr. day, so the phones were busy with families calling with questions, etc. This is definitely one of the best parts of my job, because even though it “interrupts” my work, I am happy to have a chance to speak to parents and campers on the phone and help prepare them for the upcoming summer. Jaycal actually was in the area for a party he went to on Sunday, and so he stopped by the winter office for a brief tour and to produce a few 411s for us. It was his first time to the office and while it’s not that exciting of a place (to me), he was so excited to be there! We held a production meeting in the war room, aka “my office” where we discussed my upcoming Where in the World is Eric Forti segments. We started creating some clues for each of the locations as well as planned the logistics for how all of this would go down. I wish I took a pic of our meeting to share with you, but I forgot, sorry! Otherwise on Monday, I interviewed a candidate for a staff position, paid some bills, and then had a meeting in the late afternoon to discuss the possibility of moving our office. There is a chance that we will be moving to a different area within the Philly suburbs and so Matt Unger (Operations Manager) and I went to discuss the options. More on that another time.
Tuesday was busy with mail, meetings with Brian (he works from the NJ office, but visits us in Wyncote, PA weekly), and then a full winter staff meeting (Aunt Terri, Brian, Matt, Cara, and myself) to discuss our SENIOR TRIPS! We are of course going to the same cities as last year, but we are going to try and add additional new and fun things to each trip. I can’t give away too much just yet, but one trip will now be including a stop at a beach to see a nighttime fireworks show over the Atlantic- how cool is that! The other topics of our meeting included T-SHIRTS (a favorite of our campers) and we even mentioned the topic of COLOR WAR TEAM NAMES. We haven’t yet come up with them, but how cool would the Eric Forti Blue Blog vs. the Cara Corradetti Gold Blog be? Of course we know who would win, right? Matt was busy working on our laundry room. On the last day of postcamp (in late September) we actually had a small fire in our commercial laundry room. Thankfully nobody was in the building at the time so there were no injuries, but we caught it in time and Phoebe (shout out!) came to the rescue with an extinguisher. Anyway, 1 hour and 2 fire trucks later, the fire was out (it was small, I promise- its just that in the Poconos all the firemen respond for “fun”) and now we have to replace a few dryers in the laundry room! Matt is charged with the mission of finding energy efficient commercial dryers that will handle the amount of laundry we do on a daily basis. Below are three photos of the laundry room fire back in September. Never before seen by camp families…I hope I don’t get into too much trouble for posting these!
Today is Wednesday and I actually took the morning off. I own my condo in Center City Philadelphia and with interest rates on the decline I decided to refinance my home. My closing went well this morning and then it was off to the office. I arrived in time for lunch (phew- what would I do if I had to miss lunch!) and then met with our accountant. This part of the job is boring for most camp directors, but I love dealing with the books. As a graduate from the Binghamton University School of Management and my experience at Ernst & Young, I enjoy being the controller and working on year-end journal entries with our accountant. I know, sounds boring, but the world of credits, debits, T-Accounts, and journal entries can actually be fun when they happen to “tick and tie” properly. I also spoke to Jim Price (Lake Director last summer) on the phone in Australia and he is doing well. Finally, one of my “Wall/Ropes” staff applicants accepted the job. His name is Andrew and he is from Pennsylvania and attends Penn State! A surprise phone call from Sam Ginsburg (the 3rd member of our Operations Team) rounded out the day and was a pleasant surprise! It’s always great to catch up with friends. Now I am home, eating dinner (Chinese is my favorite), and watching TV.
Tomorrow promises to be an exciting day as we are finalizing our winter head staff meeting (more on that tomorrow) as well as the upcoming Summer 2008 reunion!
