AmeriHike...Part 2

Again, sorry for no posts in so long. Our internet has been down since Sunday night and it just came back tonight. Not the whole building, just my entire floor. I don't know why.

All day Monday was training with American Red Cross to become First Aid/CPR/AED certified. There was a lot of lecture, but the lecturing lady was hilarious. I'm not really sure how you can manage to be funny while talking about horrible things that can happen to people, but she managed it. We got to practice CPR rescue breaths and chest compressions on the mannequins, and I think I managed to hurt my hand somehow. You have to put one hand on top of the other to use both hands for chest compressions, and I guess I was pushing really hard. It's not a big deal, it just feels like a bruise. AEDs are surprisingly easy to use. That's definitely a good thing. If you're trying to help someone who's heart just stopped, you probably don't want to use a really complicated machine. You just turn the thing on, stick the pads on the rights spots on the person's chest, and do what the machine tells you to do. At the end of the day, we had a test. I only missed one! So I guess I know what to do, but I SO hope I never have to use any of it. (The one I missed was about how to do a splint, so no one had better ever need me to do that.)

Yesterday was diversity training. All day. The two guys leading it were kind of funny, and there were a lot of activities instead of just sitting in a lecture the whole time, but it was still just being in one room for 7 hours talking about how great diversity is and how we shouldn't judge people. I agree that diversity is fantastic, and things would be terribly boring without it, but I really don't feel a need to talk about it for 7 hours. One of the guys leading it was pretty familiar with AmeriCorps and NCCC because he's done these workshops for a lot of our groups. He said that some professor or something somewhere wrote an AmeriPedia of all the terms and acronyms we use, and offered to email it to any of us who were interested. Um, YES I'm interested. I'm sure I'll let you know if I get it and if it's any good.

Since I like blogs and stuff with pictures, I like putting pictures on mine. Slim pickins with pictures for this post, so this is what you're getting:
One of our Diversity Day activities was where everyone got four pipe cleaners. We were supposed to assign to each one an aspect of ourselves that makes us who we are and make some kind of sculpture with it, then explain it to the small groups we were in. I kind of did it wrong. I was concentrating on making something more interesting than just twisting them together or making a circle like everyone else did, so I forgot to think of what they meant until after I was done and needed to figure out how to justify my creation. The yellow one was my family and the pink one was my gender. The blue one I decided to make my geographic location, and I told them about how I grew up in the Midwest, but my family is all from the south so I have southern values and stuff, so basically my geographic location is all crazy. (Family, gender, and geographic location were all on a list they gave us of aspects of our culture we could use for this activity.) I decided to make the squiggly green one my theatre life, since it's something that has shaped me a lot. I think a green sparkly squiggle is a good representation of theatre, don't you? Christina, the team leader who quarantined me for suspicion of having swine flu, was in my small group. She looked at it upside down of how I was looking at it and thought it looked like a pig. Hardy har, Christina, hardy har.

Last night, I went to a nearby bar with people for trivia. We had two teams of sun unit people having a little friendly competition. The other team came in third, and my team was tied for first with another team of people we didn't know. Fact of the Day (taken from the tie breaker question): When hockey first started, there was a rule that no player or goalie could pass the puck forward. (Which I completely don't understand. How did they get it to the other end to score?) When was this rule changed? It was not 1908, as my team randomly guessed. (Actually, a guy on my team from Chicago picked that year because it's when the Cubs won the World Series. But I digress.) It was 1929. But we won, because our guess was closer than the other team's. Woo!

All day today, we had our last Unit Time. We drove about an hour away to Boulder, which was nice because I'd been wanting to go there. What did we do first? You guessed it. We drove up into a mountain and went hiking. Apparently we love hiking. This one was not nearly as bad as the Death Hike. The whole thing took about 25 minutes and most of it was not composed of horrible steep rocky hills, like the Death Hike. The alternating mud and ice on the trail posed a bit of a challenge, but not too bad. Since I knew we were going to Boulder, I made sure to bring my camera. The view at the top of the trail on Bald Mountain was fantastic, so I pulled out the camera. And...the battery was dead. I'm having really bad camera luck. (I just looked for some Google Images, but didn't find any that were even close to what I saw. Sorry!)

After the Non-Death Hike, we went to the Pearl Street Mall. Remember the pedestrian 16th Street Mall in Denver that I've been to several times? It was like that, only cuter. I guess Colorado really likes its pedestrian streets. Boulder is really a pretty cute little city. Judging, of course, only by Pearl Street and what I saw on our way in and out of the city. Oh, hey, Google Images IS good for something!
I had lunch at a place called the Boulder Cafe with a few other people. It looked pretty nice, and the menu looked decent. I got fish and chips, which I usually enjoy, but it was pretty disappointing. There was some weird flavor that I did NOT enjoy in the fish. Oh well. We didn't have a lot of time in the Pearl Street area, so we just walked around a little after lunch. Right when our time was almost up and we needed to head back, we found an Army Surplus Store. We went in for a few minutes, but I bet I could have found some pretty cool stuff if I had more time. Too bad I don't know when I'll get to Boulder again.

Tomorrow is a day we've all been looking forward to for a long time. We find out our permanent teams! Well, mostly permanent. There are four rounds of projects we'll be doing. We will be with the same team for first, second, and fourth round projects. The third is what they call Shuffle Round. They said we'll get a list of what projects will be happening that round, and we rank our individual preferences. We'll get put on teams based on our rankings, so we won't be with our regular team. I think that's a good idea, because they all say we'll probably be sick of our team by then and we'll want a break from them.

Anyway, we find out our "permanent" teams tomorrow. Yay! I'm sure it will be fine. The sun unit seems to be pretty good. I really like most people in our unit. I just want to know!