Week 2 of TLT

The week started off with everyone's favorite thing: van safety! Oh, the joys of sitting in a room for three hours being told multiple times that the vans are heavier and more top heavy than cars and that you need to use a ground guide when you back up. Then, like last year, the rest of the day was spent in a van with the rest of my unit driving around. TK, Matt, and I were drivers last year, so Vaughn didn't make us drive that day, but the other six Sun people did.

Tuesday was learning about AmeriCorps expectations of TLs, and also learning (again) how to change a van tire, check the oil, put on the snow chains, and all that other fun stuff. Is it sad that I can sum up an entire day in just one sentence?

Wednesday was yet more safety training. I don't even remember what exactly we talked about, but I'm pretty sure most of it was common sense. We also had a little session to learn about how to motivate our teams to do PT (ooh! Another acronym!) and think of different activities to do with them.

After lunch, we got our technology packages! For office TLs like myself, that only meant our government-issued cell phones. But still, that's kind of exciting I think. They're even brand new this year. The TLs phones last year were pretty beaten up. Field TLs also got a laptop and a GPS, which I will also have for the round when I go into the field and have a project.

That night, a friend of one of the staff who is a yoga teacher came to do a class for the Sun and Water units (Earth and Fire had their class the night before. There's too many of us for one class like that.). The first third or half of the 1.5 hour session was really pretty hard. There were a lot of really difficult moves that not many people could actually do. After that, she slowed down and it got a lot more relaxation and stretching oriented. I didn't enjoy that intense part at the time, but I sure felt good when it was over.

The next morning, with half of us sore from yoga the night before and the other half STILL a bit sore from yoga two days ago, we had PT at 6am with two of the staff people. I remember that before I left for my last AmeriCorps year, I read somewhere that you do PT five days a week during CTI. I'm pretty sure I did official group PT like twice during that whole month. Apparently, they're a lot more serious about making TLs do it. Every Tuesday and Thursday we'll be doing PT. This first session was at 6am and lead by staff members, but every other one will be lead by fellow TLs (and I also heard we can decide as a group to do it after work instead of 6am if we want). The way-too-perky-for-6am staff members led us through some stretches and cardio stuff in the freezing cold of still-dark 6am-ness, then brought out the Fit Deck. The Fit Deck is something that was just been purchased, and they said every team will have one when they leave for projects. It's just a deck of cards each with a different exercise on them. They were split into four groups based on what part of the body it worked, and we rotated through them with our units. Some of them were hard, some were funny, and overall it wasn't too bad. It's nice when there are other people around for that sort of thing sometimes.

After 6am PT when the day actually started, we had an entire day with the Program Directors. These are the people who go over organizations' applications to have an AmeriCorps team and decide what projects we do. The three people were very nice and not bad speakers, but the room was the exact too-warm temperature that makes everyone sleepy. And we had to be in there all day, with the exception of our lunch break. Whew. That was a really long day.

Friday, we had a lesson in cultural competency. It started off where we were all at different tables in groups of five with a deck of cards and rules for a card game. We practiced the game for a few minutes, then started a tournament. The tables were numbered and the object was to get to table number one. (The two winners of each round move up a table and the two losers move down a table after each round.) When the tournament started, we were no longer allowed to talk. As could probably be expected from this situation, each original group had received a different set of rules. It was kind of interesting. We also had a session with the Resource Manager, who taught us how to document our use of our budget while on spike. Since the budget can be as much as like $6,000 of government money on a debit card (it is used for food and hotels during travel, groceries, laundry, etc.), it all has to be carefully documented on a complicated-looking Excel spreadsheet. We also had an activity where he gave us a huge packet of receipt photocopies and had us put them into the spreadsheet to make the budget balance out, and also find the charges with missing receipts on the bank activity printout. It was difficult and we didn't even have enough time to finish, but we all agreed that it will probably be much easier when it's our own stuff not a jumble of someone else's, and when we can update our form every few days or so and not do all the receipts all at once.

Also, as some of you may know, yesterday was my birthday. In the middle of lunch on Friday, everyone started singing happy birthday to be and also brought out a cake (that was from the local Super Target and was way more delicious than you'd expect a Target cake to be) and a card that everyone had signed. It was really nice.

We went out that night, first to hang out in a park in Denver and then go to a couple bars. They sang happy birthday again at the bar when it tuned midnight.

I had a nice relaxing day on my actual birthday also. After lunch, I went to a mall that was a bit farther away than I was expecting, but it was a pretty nice one. I haven't been shopping in a really long time. Then we went out again that night. It was a pretty nice birthday weekend.

I feel like there was something else that was kind of random that I wanted to talk about here, but I don't remember. Hmm. Maybe it'll come to me.