Cub Camp and blueberry pickin'

Continuing with the last posting's theme of a busy summer, here are some pictures from Kenny's Cub Scout camp which was held here in Monticello the week after school got out (early June). Hope, in her role with the Cub Scouts, helped organize the events and got a number of the presenters (including myself). In the picture above, "Deadeye" Kenny works on his aim with a BB gun, with the one successful shot being a very good bullseye, pictured below:

Even lil' Beth got in on the action, and she hit the paper (upper corner) if not the bullseye:

They held this Cub Camp so that the area boys who weren't able to travel the 100+ miles to the nearest Scout camp had opportunities to participate in many of the activities offered there. Below, Stephen seems more interested in the pretty ads than the mold he is supposed to be using to make a plaster-of-Paris cast of a deer's footprint:

The days of this camp were brutally hot, and the boys were constantly running and playing:

so the organizers offered plenty of cool water to drink, and plenty of water-based activities:

The event was held at a Baptist student home here in Monticello, with the youths of that home away on a separate trip, the facilities of the home were available. This included a large swimming pool, which was probably the kids' favorite activity. Kenny was formally the Bragg kid involved with the camp, but both Beth and Stephen participating in a lot of the activities so Hope could help out. The picture below shows how sneaky Stephen can be:

No, those aren't wounds on his legs--he got his little greasy mitts on a marker, and decided to write on himself. Oh, and this picture is a self-portrait: apparently, he found his mom's digital camera and took this picture himself! It's not always trouble with Stephen--in the picture below, he is reaching to pet a baby alligator being held by a worker with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission:

Kenny also had a blast with the rain gutter regatta, where they made small sailing boats, and then blew them along a course made out of (what else?) a rain gutter:

Kenny got third place, for which he was thrilled to receive a small trophy:

On a recent weekend, we also went with our archeologist friend Jessica Howe to pick blueberries at the home of some other people we know through the local archeological society:

Note how tall the corn is in this picture: certainly a tad bit higher than knee-high by the Fourth of July, as this was a couple weekends ago now! The blueberries were in fine shape:

The friends that let us pick the berries, Leon and Peggy Chapman, do not sell them--they just have SO many plants that there is no way they could eat all of these delicious fruits themselves. Below, Stephen shows off his pickings (with a little help from Dad):

and pictured below is Beth, in a pseudo-replicated pose made famous (in the Bragg Family North, at least) by a different little girl, about this same age, so many years ago... Recognize the glint in her eye, Lisa?

After berry picking that hot morning, we drove around the countryside a little bit. We were actually about a half-hour east of Monticello, in the Mississippi River Delta, that flat, broad expanse of fertile farmland found along the Mississippi River. During World War II, it also was home to several Japanese internment camps, where American citizens of Japanese origin were relocated during the war because of fears of their loyalties. Below is a picture of some of the monuments erected since the end of the war at the Rowher, Arkansas internment camp:

The writing on the monuments is probably too hard to read, but the monument in the middle titled "Courage" is dedicated to one of the US Army military units formed from men whose families were interred in these camps while they fought and died for their country (the US, of course). The bottom of the monument lists two of the battles this unit fought in, Cassino and Anzio, two of the bloodier battles in the Italian campaign. Interestingly, the POW Camp just outside of Monticello housed Italian prisoners of war... I don't know who captured them, but I don't think it was this unit of Japanese Americans--I believe they mostly fought Germans in Italy. A little further down the road is this house built on a mound:

I believe it is a prehistoric Indian mound used to help keep this much more modern home up out of the frequent floods that would hit this area.

We didn't do too much this weekend--Hope and worked on the house a bunch, and we enjoyed the fairly nice weather. We launched a few little fireworks in our yard, and watched our neighbors launch MUCH bigger ones for a while. Saturday morning, Kenny and I took our canoe out to the Saline River:

This was Kenny's first time as a paddler of a canoe--he's ridden as a passenger before, but never got to use the oars. He was a little less than enthusiastic for paddling upstream, but did okay on the way downstream. He's still got to get bigger and stronger to help me out in loading/unloading the canoe and paddling, but I think he'll do fine in the not too distant future.

We look forward to seeing many of you when we leave for Rhinelander later this week, so don't expect a blog posting any time soon!