A Scoutmaster's Blog

Once again, this note is more for myself then anyone, but this blog reached a total of 75,000 visits today (since the counter began in June 2007). It has only been a bit over four months since it reached 50,000 visits. The daily visits have been increasing nicely. It was not that long ago when this site would be lucky to receive 150 a day.

I would like to thank you all for coming to this site and reading the blog. It will be interesting to see when it hits 100,000 views.

The Cub Scouts of the Central Minnesota Council will have quite a surprise when they attend Day Camp this year the Parker Scout Reservation. The medieval them will come to life like never before with the completion of the new Miller Castle. Yeah, you read that correctly. A castle! Complete with a courtyard surrounded by masonry walls and towers at the corners.

During last night’s district roundtable we were shown pictures of the nearly completed castle. I will not lie. I was impressed. From the masonry exterior to the medieval decor on the interior of the building it appears to have captured the feel of the “knights of old” very well.

Of course, the castle includes all of today’s modern conveniences. The building is well insulated and heated for year round use. It has a large modern kitchen and a large “commons” room for dining and activities. There are separate bathroom and shower facilities for the youth and adults. A “barracks”, complete with bunk beds, is available for troops and packs who wish to use the building for overnight stays. The basement adds one more storm shelter to the camp, in addition to a large storage area for program materials.

I am looking forward to going to Parker this spring and touring the castle. I believe it will be a great addition to the camp and will help to increase the number of Scouts, packs, and troops who use the facilities.

Pictures of the Miller Castle can be seen at our council’s website at http://www.bsacmc.org .

The month of January really kicked off the new year to a busy start for our troop’s (and this blog’s) website. There was a total of 26,097 visits to the troop’s website, with a total of 134,705 page views. This includes 10,682 hits to this blog’s homepage. All told, there was over 147.8 GB of data transferred. I think that is a record for the site.

Of course, most of that bandwidth is used by the video podcast. The top videos of the month of January 2009 were:
The Leaders of Scouting (Mike H) – 407 hits
Little Bunny Foo Foo – 455 hits
The 2001 National Jamboree Video – 480 hits
The Buttons and Randall Show #3 – 577 hits

I have to thank David H., a former member of Troop 68, for providing the space and bandwidth for the website. If he wouldn’t provide the troop with the free domain, server, and bandwidth I would not be placing all these videos online for you to enjoy. Thanks David.

And thanks to all of you for reading this blog, watching the videos, and checking out our troop’s website.

This episode of the Melrose Scouting Productions Podcast gives you two campfire favorites for the price of one. (Well, the price is free so I guess that does not really matter.) One song and one skit. From two different troop Laughs For Lunch Shows. Yep, we are spanning the decades with this episode.

The first skit we call The Sleepwalker. It involves some Boy Scouts sitting around the campfire late at night, talking about the events of the day, when a sleepwalker walks up to them and takes stuff from them. They do not want to awaken the sleeper though because, “It is dangerous to wake up a sleepwalker. She’ll bring it back in the morning.” Oh yeah, that IS a girl who happens to be sleepwalking.

The second part is a Scouting favorite known as the Baby Bumblebee song. The Scouts had the audience participate in this song during the show. Unfortunately, we do not have any footage of the audience singing along. The boys do a great job, and the last line always gets a smile from me when I watch it.

You are invited to leave a comment here using the link below, at the iTunes Music Store, or at the PTC Media forums. Or drop me an email at webmaster@melrosetroop68.org. It really is great to hear what you think about the podcast videos.

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