Goodbye Calwood

Sigh. This is our last night at Calwood (which, just so you know, is actually Cal-Wood, but I hate typing that for some reason). I'm really pretty sad about it. But instead of being sad, I guess I could tell you what I did for my last few days.

Monday: The high on Monday was like 33 degrees, which is far warmer than it had been. That means we could work outside again! In the morning, we had to load up Angie's truck with branches from brush piles. Someone (probably Angie) had cut down a bunch of trees and left the branches in piles along the road up to Solitude Point. We had to load them in her truck so she could dump them in the burn pit by the barn. This is surprisingly hard work. The branches all get tangled up in each other, and many had been buried by snow. Heaving them out is hard sometimes, but really satisfying when you get a really hard one free. It got pretty cold and windy after we had been out for a while, which made waiting for Angie to come back when she went to dump a load pretty miserable.

In the afternoon, Tomm, Marquis, and I built bird boxes. Remember the bluebird boxes that we cleaned a week or two ago? Angie and Rick wanted a bunch more built. Some people had already worked on that before (some with pretty funny looking results), but Tomm and I hadn't. It wasn't too difficult though. Rick had cut template pieces for each of the sides, and we just had to try to repeat it. It was pretty fun. The only saw available was a jig saw, which is NOT my favorite, but I always enjoy building stuff. I'm proud to say that I think mine looked like one of the most well put-together. We also decorated them a little be burning designs and our initials into them with a soldering iron that was in the shop. I don't know how, but I somehow managed to completely forget to take pictures.

Tuesday: In the morning, there were more brush piles. These were even harder. Jess, Michala, Heather, Marquis, and I had a tough time with some of the branches. There were a few we just had to leave, they were so stuck. We were in a different area than we were on Monday, and the trees here were apparently taller. We had to saw several in half so they would fit in the truck. Let me tell you, hand sawing for long periods of time gets tiring. The first tree you cut, you get all excited because it's so easy. Then you do a few more. And a few more after that. Then you're pretty tired and never want to see another hand saw. Also, it was even windier than it was on Monday, and we were farther from the burn pit, so we had to wait a long time between loads in some crazy strong wind.

For the past several days, TK has been Rick's special helper. They've been working on getting the old barn doors (which got pretty messed up in the strong wind) off and taken apart, and new ones on.Tuesday afternoon, TK was scheduled to split wood. So I was Rick's helper. My task was to take apart the other barn door that TK hadn't gotten to yet. Taking apart is often more fun than putting together, so I had a good time. There were nails everywhere, a few random screws, and gigantic hinges. What more could you ask for? I got to know my pry bar and hammer pretty well yesterday.

After work yesterday, most of us went down to Boulder. Why, you ask? Because Tomm had an appointment to get a tattoo. He's been wanting a hand-sized tattoo of a velociraptor on the back of his shoulder for a while now, and one of the Calwood staff people has a tattoo artist brother in Boulder. So Tomm made an appointment. And we all wanted to come watch. Jess, Lindsey, TK and I were there when Mike, the artist, put the stencil on, then when he started doing the outline, then we went to go get food because no one really wanted the four of us crowding around the whole time. He got the outline and some shading done, and he'll come back sometime for the color. It actually looks pretty cool.

Wednesday: Today, in the morning, Christina and Heather were scheduled to split wood. TK and I were scheduled this afternoon. Christina fell on Monday, put her hand out to catch herself, and landed on her thumb wrong. She went to the doctor yesterday and found out her thumb was broken, and now has a cast (which we have all signed). So she couldn't split today. Angie said they were almost out of gas for the splitter, so the afternoon people might not be able to do it. I volunteered to take Christina's place, because I really kind of wanted one more turn splitting. Working the splitter is pretty fun and I didn't want to miss my last turn. Also, I had heard that everyone who wasn't splitting would be seeding an area between the barn and lodge, and splitting sounded more fun than that.

It turns out that seeding didn't happen in the morning. I don't know why. So it got moved to the afternoon. Since TK and I were actually scheduled to split in the afternoon, I decided to go ahead and take another shift. About five minutes into it, Angie came and got us and said they need everyone to seed because it was such a big job. One person sprinkles seeds, and everyone else covers the ENTIRE HUGE AREA with dirt from piles Rick had dumped with the bulldozer. Shovel, dump. Shovel, dump. Shovel, dump. Let me just say that I am very tired right now. The good news is that Angie said that if we didn't finish, we'd have to do an hour or so tomorrow. All we're supposed to do tomorrow is pack, clean up, eat lunch, and go back to campus. No one wanted to come back out and shovel tomorrow. We actually did more than Angie's goal for the day. So no shoveling tomorrow!

So there we have it. That's all the Calwood work. I still haven't quite realized that we're really leaving tomorrow. This has been such a great first project. My team is SO lucky.

Longest. Entry. Ever.

Wow, longest absence ever. There was a lot going on, and the internet kept going out. I hope you're nice and settled in, because the longest absence ever leads to the longest blog post ever.

Thursday, Dec. 3: In the morning, it was still too cold to work outside. Calwood has a bunch of fishing poles that had been donated, but they were all tangled up, and some of them didn’t work. We had to untangle them and try casting them, and if they didn’t work, try to fix them. So…I cast my first fishing line! It wasn’t quite as exciting as I thought it would be. It was a pretty easy morning.

That only took until about 10:30. Angie and Rick didn’t have anything for us to do, but we still had to fill our day somehow to get our hours. We decided to do some service learning (which counts as hours) by going to museums. Since the road was still pretty icy, we could only take the cargo truck down the mountain because the van couldn’t handle it. The truck only holds six people, so Christina made two trips to bring us all down. I was in the second group so I could have time to pack for Chicago. We went to some kind of atmospheric research center. It would have been pretty interesting, but we were all too tired to really pay that much attention.

After the atmospheric place, Christina took me to the bus station so I could get to the airport. I flew to Chicago that night to get to K-Spang’s memorial service on Friday afternoon. It was really nice, and I am so glad I got to go. It was really helpful for me to be able to see other people who cared about her.

Random story: We had to wear our uniforms to the atmospheric place because we were getting hours for it. I went straight to the airport from there, and I didn’t think it was worth it to change at the airport, so I flew in my uniform. This created the biggest airport security ordeal I have ever experienced. I took off my shoes, put my purse on the conveyor belt, took my laptop out of my backpack, and went through the metal detector. Since I never wear belts ever, I forgot that I was wearing one with my uniform. Obviously, I beeped in the metal detector. I remembered the belt and took it off, but the guard had to pat me down because I had beeped. Remember the thousand pockets in the uniform pants? Pat pat pat – “Maam, do you have something in that pocket?” “Yes.” “Can you pull it out please?” Oh look, random papers. Pat pat pat – “Do you have something in that pocket?” Oh, cash and my ID. Pat pat pat – oh, my boarding pass. Pat pat pat – chap stick. It was ridiculous.

I flew back to Denver on Sunday. In the morning before I left, Christina called me and said that there was already a lot of snow on the mountain, and they were under a winter storm advisory, so I wouldn’t be able to get back up to Calwood that day. Nichole, one of the office people on campus, would pick me up from the airport and take me to campus. I would work and eat with a team from the Earth Unit, who is currently living on campus, until the roads were clear enough for me to get back to Calwood. I checked the weather when I got to Denver, and it was supposed to be snowing until Wednesday. I mentally prepared myself to stay with the Earth team for a few days. It was pretty creepy staying in the dorm when it was so empty. There was no one on my floor. I did not enjoy that part.

On Monday, my temporary team had to leave at 7:15am. That’s usually when I wake up at Calwood. Their project is called Learning Landscapes. When the weather was nicer, they were going around to schools and building playgrounds. Or something. But since it had been snowing for the past couple weeks, they’ve been doing inside work. They go around to schools, usually inner city elementary schools, with blank banners and paint. They go into art classes and help the kids design a banner with whatever theme the school had decided on, and they help the kids paint them. They are usually hung up on poles outside the school. The Earth team already had 14 people, so I took up the last seat in the 15-passenger van. We went to the warehouse where we were supposed to pick up the banners, but they sent us to another place. We went there, and they sent us somewhere else. The third place sent us back to the first place. We got the banners and went to the school. Susan, the person in charge of their project, told us we would be splitting up. Half the group stayed there, and the rest of us went with Susan to another school. When we got there, we found out that the school hadn’t decided what they wanted on the banners yet, so there was nothing for us to do. So we went back to the other school. We helped with a first grade class and a fourth grade class. It was really pretty fun. The kids were adorable and the people on that Earth team were awesome. I felt awkward with them at first, but they totally made me feel welcome.

At lunch time after those two classes, Christina suddenly walked in the door. I was completely surprised. She said there was a lull in the snow, so she came down to pick me up so we could be back before it started snowing again. She said Nichole had tried to call me, but my phone was on silent. (I was at work, after all.) Christina took me back to campus so I could get my stuff, then we went back up the mountain. I was back! Yay! I had fun on their project, but I had missed my mountain.

Tuesday: The temperature was in the single digits, so too cold to work outside. Again. NCCC requires everyone to turn in a resume at the end of this round, so we worked on those in the morning. In the afternoon, there was actually a school group coming to Calwood. I don’t know how a bus made it up the hill. Calwood staff said a few of us could shadow the class to get a better idea of what they do. Tomm, TK, Marquis, and I volunteered. The kids that were coming were from an 11th grade special needs class, and Calwood was going to teach them some sheltering skills, among other things. They were going outside. I wore long johns, uniform pants, and snow pants on the bottom, and two long sleeved shirts, a hoodie, and my AmeriParka on top. And a hat. And some gloves and amazingly warm boots that I borrowed from Calwood. It was extremely cold that day.

We didn’t go far from the lodge to do the activity they had planned. Mari and John, the Calwood teachers for the day, said the four of us could do the activity also. We were all supposed to build a shelter that would hold in as much heat as possible for a “creature” that would only be a couple inches tall. The guys and I built a pretty good shelter. A layer of sticks on the ground, then a layer of pine needles, then sticks to make walls, then cover everything in pine needles, then cover it all with snow for insulation. The way Mari and John had planned to test the shelters was really clever. They had film canisters with water and Jell-o mix inside. If our “Jell-o baby” stayed liquid, then our shelter was warm enough and our baby survived. If it solidified and turned to Jell-o, the shelter let in too much cold, and the baby died. Mari and John didn’t allow quite enough waiting time to let anyone’s baby completely turn to Jell-o because it was SO COLD, but ours was definitely still all liquid. Some people’s had gotten a little thicker already. We kept our Jell-o baby alive!

Later in the afternoon, I was downstairs in the lodge with a few other people, and Christina burst in all excited and said that the lake was frozen enough to play broom ball (hockey, but with no skates, brooms instead of sticks, and a soccer ball instead of a puck). Angie had showed a few people how to test the ice thickness, and it was thick enough to be safe. So we all bundled up again and went back outside. There was about a foot of snow on the frozen lake, which took about an hour with all of us working to shovel it off, then we played. Several of the Calwood staff came out to play with us. Most of you probably know that I am really not a sports person, but it was really fun. I stayed on defense the whole time and actually did pretty well, blocking a lot of people. And managed not to fall on the ice a single time. We played for probably a little over an hour, then we all got too cold. (My team won with a score of 2-1!)

Wednesday: Again, too cold to work outside, but there wasn’t anything for us to do inside. We drove to Denver to do some ISP hours at Share America. You may remember that I’ve done ISP there before, where I bagged onions for a few hours. This time, it was potatoes. Put three pounds of potatoes in bag a bag, tally the bag, then put it in a giant box. We ended up with four people on each side of the table bagging, TK and myself tallying our respective sides, and one person putting the bags in the box. It turned into a competition between the two sides. Really it was just TK and I insulting the other person and their team, but it was fun and made the time go faster. His team unfortunately won by about 50 bags, but at one point we were down by like 85. At the end of the day, we had done 1,710 bags, which is 5,130 pounds of potatoes.

Thursday, Dec. 10: Yet again, too cold to work outside. At the end of each project, every team has to turn in a portfolio of the project. We worked on our Calwood portfolio all morning. In the afternoon, some people went to build more of those bird boxes we cleaned, and others of us went to build new doors for the barn. The barn doors get pretty messed up with the strong winds and needed to be replaced. Rick gave us the measurements, lumber, and tools, and away we went. He told us to only build the frame of the doors, and we’ll add the plywood later. It was cool. I haven’t used a miter saw in a while, so that was nice.

Christina had recently gone over our budget, and discovered that we are WAY under our food budget. Basically, our food situation is awesome. We always have a ton of food and we have really good cooks on our team, yet we are still way under budget. We’ve talked to a few other teams about food, and most seem to be unhappy with it. Other teams run out of food a lot or have way too much spaghetti or something. None of us know how we’re doing so much better with food, but no one’s complaining. Anyway, since we have so much extra food money, we decided to go down to Jamestown to the Merck for dinner. On Thursdays, they only have one thing for dinner, and also live music. We’ve been down there for the music on Thursdays before, but never had any food. Dinner that night was lasagna, either a vegetarian option or meat option. I got the meatless one, which was butternut squash and walnut. Oh my goodness, it was amazing. It was a pretty fun night, with a fantastic dinner and live music.

Friday: Friday was a day off for us, because the team had to work last Saturday (I was in Chicago, but it was Calwood’s annual Christmas Tree Fundraiser. They raised $7,000!). Some people wanted to look at the university in Boulder, and others just wanted to walk around the university area (“The Hill”) because we had heard there were a lot of cool places there. We found a sandwich place that some of the Calwood interns had told us about called Half Fast Subs. They have a HUGE selection of sandwiches, and really cheap drink specials. We split into a few different groups, but my group found that place and had lunch there. It was really good food and had a fun vibe.

After we hung out in Boulder for a while, we drove to our Denver campus to spend the night. We had an ISP planned at another of those H1N1 vaccine clinics in Denver, and we had to be there at 8am Saturday morning. If we had gone from Calwood, we would have had to leave at like 6am to get there in time. Obviously, we would all rather be closer so we wouldn’t have to get up so early. Where was this clinic, you ask? It was at Columbine High School. Yes, THAT Columbine High School. It looked like a pretty nice school. I don’t know if they’ve done a lot of renovating or something, but it all looked really new inside. The work was really boring. There were WAY too many volunteers there so there wasn’t much for anyone to do. I spent a little time with one of those counter things counting how many people came in, but most of the day was spent wandering trying to find something to do. Oh well. I still got ISP hours for it. I think as of now, I have 40 of the required 80 hours.

Which brings us to today (finally). I have done absolutely nothing today except watch a lot of Arrested Development with Jess and write this insanely long blog update, and its been fabulous. Everyone but Jess and Rob went down to Boulder today, so it is nice and quiet. The temperature is supposed to be just above freezing (warm!) for the rest of the week, so hopefully we’ll be able to work outside for our last few days. Wednesday is our last day of work, and we leave Thursday. I’m really excited to go home and see family soon, but it’s weird to think about leaving Calwood. It seems like we’ll come back after Christmas break, but we’ll go to New Orleans instead. (By the way, we found out we’ll be living in a 3-bedroom, 1-bathroom house in the upper 9th ward there. So no walking around alone will be allowed. We’re definitely getting spoiled with this project.) I’ll try to be better about updating this thing, for you as well as for myself. I think I’m really going to like having a record of everything we’re doing.

I Hate Thinking of Titles

You know, sometimes the events I'm getting ready to write about just don't lend themselves to a good title. It's really very frustrating.

Monday: All day Monday, we worked on the trail to Longview (remember the place where I burrowed into the forest to find barbed wire?). Angie and Rick had dumped a huge pile of trail mix at top of the hill to Longview, and we had to bring it out to the trail. When we were about to leave for this, Angie told us that Rafa, the director of Calwood, was out hunting elk with his son kind of in the area, so don't be scared if we hear gun shots. (This tidbit will be important later.) Anyway, while some people had more wheelbarrow action, Heather, Tomm, and I dug out water bars. You know how sometimes on trails, there's a log going across the trail to be like a step? Water bars are like that, except they have more purpose. When the trail is on a hill, you have to dig out a little trench on the uphill side of the log, so the log is raised a couple inches. Off the the side of your little trench, you have to dig a bigger trench. So the water runs down the trail, hits the log, then runs off the side of the trail into your bigger trench. This is to prevent erosion on the trail. The water bars had already been dug, but they had filled with dirt. We just had to sort of clean them up a bit. Most of them weren't too difficult, but the ground was pretty frozen for some of them.

We were done with the water bars by lunch time, so after lunch we had to help the others with the trial mix. By this time, the others had gotten pretty far down the hill. This makes it VERY hard work. You have to wheel a full, heavy wheelbarrow a LONG way down a bumpy hill that has several of those log steps, many of which are pretty high. Then, you have to push the empty wheelbarrow a LONG way up a bumpy hill. Each trip with the barrow took about 10 or 15 minutes, since we had to go so far away. Even the strongest people on the team were exhausted by the time they got back up the hill. After us water bar people joined them, we had enough to have two people for each of the three barrows, and we could switch off. Having a 10 or 15 minute break between trips made it not too horrible. By the time we finished in the afternoon, I think we had gone at least a quarter of a mile down the hill. When you make several quarter mile trips with a wheelbarrow on a hill, that adds up to a pretty hard day.

Monday was also a day we had all been waiting for, because we found out our next project! My team got our first choice - Habitat for Humanity construction in New Orleans! Woo hoo! When you add that to our current project, we are seriously getting spoiled. Right now we're doing hard work, but it's usually fun. We get to have an amazing view any direction we look. We have a lodge and two cabins almost all to ourselves. Our sponsors are amazing - super nice, informative, helpful. Our next project is our absolute top choice. Want to know what the other Sun Unit teams will be doing? Jordan's team, the other team in Boulder right now, will be on Habitat construction with us, so they got lucky also. Julie's team, who is in New Orleans right now working in a Habitat warehouse, has a local project, with the Red Cross, and they have to live on campus. We're on our local project right now, and we get to live here. Scott's team, which is currently in New Orleans doing Habitat construction, has a regional project. They have to do taxes in Texas. Seriously. There are like four projects next round that are just helping people in whatever community do taxes. I think they're on the Texas coast, so at least that will be nice, but they're still doing taxes for two months. Dani's team, who is working at the Arkansas Children's Hospital right now, has what everyone calls Poop in a Bag Project. There's a project in Arizona, which a team from another unit is on right now, where they build trails and stuff in some really remote area. They have to camp out. They can only shower once a week. And you know how when you camp, you're supposed to leave no trace that you were there? Yep. Poop in a Bag Project. How did my team get so lucky?

Also on Monday afternoon, Vaughn (our Unit Leader) came to visit, along with Nichole (the Sun Unit Development Assistant) and Sarah (the Sun Support Team Leader). Sarah and Nichole work in the office. Sarah was actually my first Team Leader when I first got here. I was supposed to have Dani, but a bunch of TLs, including Dani, got sent to American Samoa soon before we all got to campus, when they had that tsunami. So Sarah had to take over Dani's team for a while. Anyway, the three of them came to visit and see how we were doing. Chirstina told us later that they were all really impressed with how we seem to be handling the work and how good our attitudes are.

Tuesday: Yesterday morning, a few of us got some experience with the wood chipper. We drove out to where Angie had cut some pine trees, and fed the branches into the chipper. It was kind of fun for a while, until we realized that this particular chipper wasn't very good. It was way too small. There were several branches that were pretty small, but the chipper wouldn't take them. We spent way too much time trying to wrestle branches in. After only an hour or two, Rick got a radio message that we were supposed to get like four or five inches of snow that day. The chipper had to be driven back into town, so Rick and Angie decided to take it early to avoid having to drive back up the snowy mountain. Plus, it was kind of a waste of time having to wrestle with the small one so much. I think at some point later, they'll get a bigger one, and we'll continue that project.

In the afternoon, we got to clean out bird boxes. Calwood has about 50 bird boxes on trees all over the property. Each of the educators here have certain boxes that they take care of and use to teach kids. They take kids to the boxes and record data about what kind of birds had been there, what kind of nests are inside, if there are any eggs inside, etc. A few different kinds of bluebirds and wrens use these boxes, but they won't use them if there's anything inside already. We got split into small groups, and each group got a bird box map with an area circled, and sent out to clean them. We also had to do a little repair on the tops of some of them, to make them latch better. Heather, TK, and I got the area we had to drive to. I think we lucked out though. All but one box was pretty close to the road, so we'd drive until we saw one. I got to drive the cargo truck. That thing is just fun. That one box that wasn't on the road required a hike up a fairly steep hill, but it was kind of fun.

We were the second group to finish and come back to the lodge, so Angie gave us another project. Someone, at some point in the past, was doing some kind of research project near the lodge. She had put metal spikes in the ground with string connecting them. I don't know what it was for. Angie said she and the kids trip on them all the time, so she sent us out to remove them. While we were doing this, the other groups came back. When we were almost done, we saw Angie, Rick, and several of our teammates come down the road, and stop and stare. We went over to see what they were looking at. On a fairly treeless part of a hill about a quarter mile away, there was a herd of elk. They kept pouring out of the trees. Rick said there were at least 80 of them. It was really pretty cool to see. Angie said something about how it was too bad Rafa wasn't there, since he was trying to let his son Brooks to shoot his first elk yesterday, and then we saw a car drive down the road. It was Rafa and his two sons. We heard a couple shots, and saw an elk go down. At the first shot, obviously the herd ran up the hill into the trees. A second later, they all came running back down, and split up. Angie said there must have been a mountain lion up there to scare them back down. We all REALLY wanted to see the lion, but it didn't come out of the trees. After they split up, they still just kind of stood around in the clearing. Rafa came on Angie's radio and said he needed help, so Angie went to get her gun. Apparently, two elk had been shot. Sometime before Rafa and his sons drove up, pretty much the entire Calwood staff had come out to see the herd. When all the shooting was over, everyone was allowed to go over to the hill. I tentatively went over, but left soon after the skinning started. That was a little too much for me. I suppose the whole thing was kind of interesting, mostly just because when will I ever have this experience again? But I really don't like the idea of hunting. I guess last night Rafa and the staff started skinning and butchering them, but it got dark and VERY cold really soon, so that was finished today.

Wednesday (today): We woke up today to about 8 inches of new snow, and a high of like 15 degrees. It was determined too cold to work outside. Calwood gets TONS of donations of outdoor gear from an REI store nearby. Apparently, you can return pretty much anything for any reason at REI, but then they can't resell it. We had to go through tents that were donated, see if anything was wrong with them and if they could be fixed, and label them with how many people would fit inside. So we had to fully assemble all the tents, and figure it out. Lots of them didn't have poles. How can you have a tent with no poles? Calwood also had a big box of spare tent parts, so at the end of the day, we had to try to match up spare poles with poleless tents. It was fun for a while, but setting up and taking down tents all day gets a little old. At least we got pretty good at it.

I think tomorrow will be another inside day. I think it's supposed to stay pretty cold for the next few days. I can't really imagine how many more indoor projects they can think of for us to do though.

Tomorrow night, I'll be flying to Chicago for K-Spang's memorial service on Friday afternoon. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, but I SO wish it were for a different reason. Apparently on Sunday, when I'm flying back to Denver, there's supposed to be a lot more snow. Which means I might not be able to come back up the mountain. There's a plan in place for if that happens: I'll stay on campus in Denver, live in my empty dorm room in my hall of other empty rooms, and eat and work with one of the teams that is living on campus this round until the roads are clear enough to get back up here. Obviously, I'm hoping for no snow this weekend.