Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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12 of 12, March 2017

Last year’s March 12th was on the first day (Saturday) of the annual Scout Guide Regatta; this year’s happens to be on the Sunday of Regatta, and next year’s — thanks to the nature of calendars and the timing of the March long weekend that determines the Regatta dates — will be another Regatta day, this time the Monday. You’re stuck with Scouts and tents and water activities for March’s 12 of 12 for another year yet.

My day began preposterously early, as an oversight in our planning meant that I had to do a 3am to 6am security shift. Fortunately it was drizzling and so no one was feeling stupid enough to be out and about misbehaving, which meant that it was all very quiet and my somewhat zombified state didn’t matter all that much. I completely failed to remember about 12 of 12 during my wanderings, and so you don’t have a photo of the dark night viewed through a raindrop-splattered lens. I then managed to get an hour’s worth of sleep before the masses arose for breakfast. Unfortunately, the rain was still hanging around, although it came and went and came and went, and at least it wasn’t too cold.

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There were rowing events today, including some leader-parent races.

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I think we came third in a very tight finish in the long-distance event, having rowed our little hearts out. That’s me on the left in the middle, looking somewhat bedraggled.

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After lunch — and a failed attempt to have a nap to catch up on sleep — the weather started to improve, making the outdoors an even more inviting place to be. The Scouts got stuck into dinghy racing, with Bob the Dinghy rendering faithful service yet again, despite the fact that we’d forgotten to fix him up from last year.

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The kids had fun with the inner tube relay, and once it was over they messed around with the tubes since the events were finished for the day.

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The sun was well-and-truly shining as we joined the lengthy queues for dinner, and then it was nice to picnic on the oval.

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In the evening there was a lovely service to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1967 bushfires that had devastated the local area. Two Scouts and two Guides paddled kayaks along the beach, with each kayak towing a string of plastic bottles containing little electric candles while we listened to a first-hand account of someone’s experiences of that fateful day.

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After the solemnity of the occasion we had a bit of fun together as a troop (we had 22 Scouts at Regatta, by far our most ever), before sneaking up onto the point to enjoy the moonrise.

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We finished the day back in our troop tent, with chocolate and the telling of one of my shaggy dog stories (now a tradition of Regattas and other camps), before sending the kids — and later ourselves — to bed.

(The “12 of 12” project involves taking 12 photos on the 12th of the month. This provides the opportunity to get snapshots of different aspects of your life (or, sometimes, the same aspects of your life, but at different times!). I have been doing this since 2009.)

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