No nerds here.

OK, so since my last post, I've gotten a little feedback from a few people who don't have the spine to leave their opinion on my blog, so they email me instead. Let me say this very clearly: SPACE CAMP IS NOT NERDY!

As I mentioned to a friend (with horribly misguided opinons), no self-respecting kid who ever saw the movie came away NOT wanting to go to Space Camp. Where else are you going to get to eat french fries cut like the space shuttle, ride a centrifuge that makes you almost puke up the freeze-dried ice cream you ate at lunch? Nerdy? Pffft. I choose not to dignify some statements by responding to them.

But the responses I've received led me to blow off school work for a minute tonight and look through my binder. Here are a couple of our projects we were working on during the week I was there:

I'm not sure why I was so concerned with burns covering a large part of the body. I had probably just finished a first aid merit badge, or something; I don't know. But don't worry: Dr. Young had it all locked down.


Five years or so should do it, right? It's OK if it's not enough though. You'll note we had a contingency plan.

This one was my favorite:


In all fairness, our counselor (not a mormon) suggested we put the bit about the mormons in there. We weren't going to do it, but he encouraged us. It was interesting though, because it gave me my first taste of people giving me grief about my religion. Quite a few of the kids from other groups, who had all been cool to us up until we presented our project to the larger group, refused to talk to us after that, including this really cute girl (her name was Lisa, and she was from Tennessee, and she had a HOT accent) that I kinda dug. Later, when we were launching our rockets, one kid wouldn't let me look at the grasshopper he was stuffing into his model rocket (it wasn't even the kind with the payload bay for shooting insects into the sky either; he was just kind of cramming the thing in the middle of the parachute) because he told me the grasshopper didn't like mormons. Stupid grasshopper. Must have been bitter for what our seagulls did to his cousins.

The most ironic part was that a couple of our group weren't even mormon, but thought the idea was cool anyway, so they caught all the flack that we did for no reason.

--Come to think of it, why were the non-mormons so OK with blasting us into space? Wait a minute...!

So, yeah. In addition to being one of the coolest weeks of the first 12 years of my life, here are some other reasons why it was cool:

I got to ride a plane for the first time in my life.

I got to run on the horizontal people-mover escalator things in O'Hare Airport, annoying the ever-loving crap out of countless people trying to use them how they were meant to be used.

I got to see a huge part of Chicago lose power at once from the air as we took off.

I bought a T-shirt for my mom that she STILL wears when she gardens. That's got to be one of the toughest T-shirts in the history of T-shirts b/c that thing still looks brand new.

I was in Space Camp, y'all, Space Camp. Seriously, how many of you can say that?

Yeah. It rocked. Nothing anyone says to the contrary can change that.

So all you nerds (you know who you are) can go play Magic, The Gathering, or go to a Star Trek convention or something, and leave me alone about the cool things I've done in my life.