I know, you frequently see “I did [this or that] Rebel Badge but I do other badges as well. I spied that Pawprint Badges had a Volcanoes badge and as they’re big and beautiful and I was going to Iceland, I thought I’d do that one.
To be honest, I find Pawprint badges work better to do with my Brownies or at Guides than on my own. That’s because you have to play at least one game and that’s often difficult solo. The way they work is that there are four parts – Craft, Food, Games and Other and depending on your age, you have to do a different number of clauses to complete a badge. For example, 7-11 – Brownie age – have to do one from each part plus any other one activity. If I’m doing the badge with my Brownies, I get it for doing all the behind-the-scenes work but if I’m doing it on my own, as an 18+, I do one from each part plus any other four activities. See how it works?
Craft
I did two crafts and actually, I wasn’t even thinking about this badge when I did the first. Build a campfire, on account of the word volcano coming from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. I lit two fires at Try Inspire Qualify.
I wasn’t thinking about this badge either when I was curled up in the back seat of my car, wearing my sleeping bag, because it was too cold and far too early to retreat to my one-man tent, drawing the volcano I’d seen the day before in the coloured pastels I’d taken all the way to Iceland so I could sketch some views. But it absolutely counts. I had drawn a volcano!
Food
Technically this is a bit of a cheat. The Food page offers all kinds of choices, from melt-in-the-middle lava pudding to exploring state change by making caramel to making laverbread (yes, really pushing the boundary of volcano-related food) to using a pressure cooker. Mine wasn’t on the list but it was in the spirit. As I walked up to Meradalir, looking across at the steaming flow from 2021’s Fagradalsfjall eruption, I thought how the surface of the young lava flow had exactly the same texture as chocolate brownies, and was almost the same colour. So when I got home, I made a tray of brownies. And then I looked at my pictures and realised that to be the same colour, I’d need to use 150% pure really bitter chocolate in my brownies.
Games
I opted for “test your knowledge by taking a volcano quiz” and to make it harder, I did the ones the pack suggested as well as literally any other volcano quizzes I could find. Turns out my general volcano knowledge isn’t that good and my knowledge of other countries’ volcanoes is downright patchy. But it was an activity I could do without my Brownies!
Other
That’s four of my eight. Yes, the other four came from Other. This is the more practical section.
Watch a video of a volcanic eruption. Yep. I watched so many the first few days of the Meradalir eruption. I left the livestream running on my big TV and watched it covetously. I tried to link it but it’s finished and I can’t link the 723-hour video that’s resulted. Have my playlist here and then if anything still works, you can figure it out for yourself. I
watched everything that crossed my social media and I sought out new people to follow so I could find more videos.
View this guide on Instagram
Create a news article. Oh yeah. That was a blog post. I’m no journalist, as you can tell, but for the purposes of a badge, an excited “this is what’s going on!” blog post is definitely a news article.
Take a trip to an active volcano. Yep, again. Did that, wrote a blog post about it.
And finally, watch a film about a volcano. This is another self-chosen clause. I made a film about an eruption. Admittedly, it’s actually a six-minute vlog of the trip above but I put far more effort into making it than anyone would in merely watching a film and I watched mine many times. I hoped they’d be on YouTube by now but unless I move this post, the first episode is out tomorrow and the volcano episode is next Tuesday. I’ll update this post with the links as and when. There are six episodes in the Iceland summer 2022 series and I’m acutely aware that half of that series will be out in November, which is very much not summer. It all took longer to edit than I expected.
And that’s the eight parts of my badge done! I’ll say it again: badges aren’t just for kids, even when they’re kind of designed for kids, like the Pawprint ones. I grabbed this one because I knew I’d do nearly enough clauses just in my natural volcano-worship but other badges push me to do new things or bigger things or look at things differently and that’s why I keep doing them.