The Dirtiest of Jobs

Each summer the staff come prepared to do a number of duties. Some of them are very fun and others can be . . . well let’s just say they aren’t anyone’s favorite. But one of the jobs that must get done around the camp usually goes on without many people noticing – the infamous trash run. After a good motivational speech, some of the staff gather on the back of a trailer ready to get nice and dirty. The “trash trailer”, as many have named it, roams the entire grounds as the staff empty every trash can at the camp. Sometimes this takes as many as 3 trips to complete, and in the end the camp is trash free – at least that’s the goal. Above is a great action picture of some of the 2008 staff working hard to empty the trailer into the dumpsters. Thanks to everyone who was a part of a trash run and took a good shot of trash juice to the face.

Seth Gordon
Recreation director

I Give Up

It’s one of my favorite things about summers at Tejas.

Once each week all of the girls gather in a conference room for Girls Discipleship. The teaching time usually begins about 15 minutes late because of all the chatter that fills the room. Most of the time there’s food, usually some form of chocolate; and the health conscious of the group snack on fruit. The opening prayer is sometimes started over the last few words of conversation as a tired staff unwinds from a long day and settles in for some time in the Word. We end the night in smaller groups, hearing the testimony of and praying over each person. With no ill-will toward the male of the species, it is the place where relationships are formed, real fellowship is enjoyed, and God’s Word is applied to all of our lives.

This year we have studied the surrendered life: embracing the concept that real strength comes in giving control to Another. We’ve covered topics like giving up our personal rights, letting God manage our time, surrendering our emotions, and in talking about our finances really addressed greed and selfishness.

I usually really like getting to teach the group of girls. I find that the process of preparing and teaching is a fulfilling one for me. But this topic has been different. To say that I have been challenged personally is a bit of an understatement. Jennifer Jones (who picked the topic and who assigned me to teach specific weeks of the study) says that it was the Holy Spirit that put it all together, but it’s been kinda fun to blame it on her. Thanks be to God, but I was convicted at every turn. Some weeks of preparation were rough. I found myself sitting down to prepare to teach, expecting to have a nice, neat outline ready in an hour or so, and found that the Lord was more interested in making me look more like Jesus than in me having an outline put together. More than once I would have an outline written, only to change it the morning of the meeting as I sat on my couch spending personal time in the Word.

While being refined is certainly not always fun, what an incredible Savior we have who refuses to leave us where we are. Even when we are in vocational ministry, He is not interested in where we have been with Him before, how we have seen Him move in the lives of others, or where we think we ought to be headed. In being obedient to be transparent in front of our SMT girls, I have found the blessing of a more intimate relationship with God. What a job! I can’t believe I get paid for this. And Lord, it’s Yours!

Natalie West
Summer Camp Director

Dooploma

With the swift approach of the new wastewater plant comes the need for an on-site, state licensed plant operator. Upon our arrival at the camp, one of my first assignments as the new Facilities Director was to complete a correspondence course and take a state exam to receive a class-D wastewater operations license. Well, I am happy to be reporting back that the "paper work" is done and as soon as the plant construction is complete we can all safely flush, knowing that what we send downhill will soon be processed into clean (non-potable) water to hydrate those meadows fields.
Matt Wall, our Project Manager, will begin studying for his class-D license in the very near future.

Mike Newton
Facilities Director

Swimming Under the Late Night Moon

One of my favorite activities during the summer months is a pool party. Many groups enjoy coming down to the pool during the evening to splash under the moon. As the first summer hosting two groups at once, I was questioning whether or not the pool was going to be able to stay as sparkling clean as it has in the past. Luckily with the great cleaning work of our supervisors, the pool has remained as clear as ever before and remains one of the most popular recreation areas of the summer.

Seth Gordon
Recreation Director

Rec in the Meadows

The last time I posted (some time back in may) I wrote about the creation of the new Rec fields - so far they have been working great. During one of my favorite weeks of the summer I took the this picture down in the meadows and it really made me realize how neat it is to have a Rec field literally in the middle of the meadows - we even have a windmill next to it. Hopefully it has provided as much fun as I have enjoyed on it. Although the fields are not up to professional sports team standards, they are far better than the areas we have used in the past.


Seth Gordon
Recreation Director

May the Geeks Unite!

Ok... Ok... you thought this would be posting about retreat items and summer camp, but you are trumped on this one. The IT guy of Camp Tejas is coming out and taking over. The last post was about controlling Lights and A/C units from computers (which is really cool). This post is about the use of DD-WRT, updating our wired network infrastructure and installing an internet filter.

First off, DD-WRT is a way to have more control over our wireless access points around the camp. I have been playing with a couple of test routers over the last year, and now I am starting to "revamp" our wireless boxes around the camp. Since we have been adding wireless access points over the last several years, each box has its own settings and web pages. With DD-WRT I am able to have a common interface for all (or at least most) of our wireless access points. Today I finished revamping our Dining Hall and Tejas Home boxes, I also got ready to install one for the Office, Tejas Inn and SMT Office. Hopefully with this open source product, administration of our wireless network will be a little easier.

Second, I have been playing around in attics this week. Since getting here, I have been using non-kosher methods of getting network access faster between buildings at the camp. In the early 2000's we used wireless bridges between our main buildings. This helped a whole lot, but with the advance of technology, our solution was not keeping up. Applications, shared files, Internet, VOIP phones and printers needed more bandwidth. My "cheap" solution was to start using old 4 pair phone lines that were run back before I was born (not really, but a while ago) as network cable. Today's standard speed is 100 megabits, but on some connections I am lucky to have 10 megabits. With all that said, I have started to replace old lines with new ones and have installed 1000 megabits switches to help speed up our network. In the near future I plan on replacing the lines between buildings with Fiber Optic cables. This should really speed things up and hopefully be a versatile solution for the future of technology at the camp.

Lastly, the newest addition to our family of network products is an Internet filter. This solution by Intgerity Online will help safeguard our staff and guests with the waywardness of the internet. It helps to filter internet content and blocks bandwidth consuming games and applications. In the future we plan to add an email component to this solution to help with spam.

These are the happenings of the IT guy.

Paul Biles
Retreat Director