This is a story from like a month ago and there have been other things to write about between now and then. But I like to do things chronologically, so bear with me.
During third round when I was in Flagstaff, Vaughn said that since the projects department had so many projects they wanted us to do, there was a possibility of forming a composite team or two (where they pull like one or two Corps Members from several different teams to form a new team) that office Team Leaders would lead. I told him I would probably be interested, mostly due to the fact that I felt I was really good at being UDA (and Vaughn had been saying something about how great I was like every week), but being in the field was way more challenging and another round in the field would benefit me more than another round at something I’m already good at. He said he really didn’t want to lose me in the office (which of course I take as a compliment), but that he’d keep that in mind.
It turned out there was only one composite team, which another office TL really wanted, so he got it. Ashley (the STL with the media department), Jourdan (the logistics department STL), T-Lou (short for Therese Louise, the program STL), and myself were selected for a special project in Austin, TX. We found out we were going the first day back in Denver and needed to deploy when the rest of the teams left, so we only had about a week’s notice. Things we didn’t know until maybe three days before we left: where we would live, how long we would be there, how we would eat, what exactly we would be doing, and how we would get there. Things we still didn’t know when we actually arrived in Austin: how long we would be there and what exactly we would be doing. A few days before we left, we found out we would be living in a “converted garage apartment” (I just can’t get away from those garages) called Smoot Cottage on the campus of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary with two beds, a restroom, and a house two feet away with a kitchen we would use. We would have a budget of $4.50 per person per day for food, which is what teams usually get on spike, and would cook in that kitchen nearby. We would be driving the one minivan AmeriCorps has. We were also told that we would be helping set up a call center to be used in times of disaster (hurricanes, etc.) for the whole state of Texas, but had exactly zero other details. No one, including the NCCC staff or the Austin people who were asking us for help, knew how long we would be there. It was pretty much just that we would leave when we were done. The best estimate anyone could come up with was two to four weeks.
We set off on the same Monday morning when all the teams left, feeling very much like we were going on family vacation in our minivan. We got there Tuesday evening and met Liz, the President and CEO of the organization we would be working with. She actually used to be the Chief Operating Officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which is in charge of all AmeriCorps programs. (Side note: I now kind of want to become a Chief Operating Officer someday, just so I can add “COO” after my name. I had never heard of that title or seen that acronym before.) So she knows all about AmeriCorps and LOVES NCCC. She calls us the Green Berets of AmeriCorps.
Wednesday morning, we showed up for our first day of work. We were put in a small conference room (the table could only seat six people), each given laptops, and told that this would be our work space. Liz told us that one of the biggest problems with disaster response is unaffiliated volunteers. That seems strange at first, but totally makes sense when you think about it. Liz basically said it can be more if a hindrance than a help when “Dickie Bob and his friends jump in their truck with their three dogs and a chainsaw and head down to Alabama and say they want to help.” (That most likely wasn’t the exact wording, but Dickie Bob, his three dogs, and his chainsaw were definitely involved in her scenario, and we thought it was hilarious.) This call center would not be for people affected by the disaster who needed help, because they already have the 2-1-1 hotline. Our call center would be for Dickie Bob to call and ask what he can do, so he could be matched with a specific organization that could put him to work. It had not been decided yet if our call center would also be for people to call and say they have a microwave and five bags of clothes they want to donate and ask where they can send it. The Department of Child and Family Services, or Department of Child Protective Services, or Department of Family Protective Services (I can’t actually remember the name, but I feel like the acronym is DFPS, so let’s assume it’s that last one) was supposed to be setting up and running this call center, but they changed their minds. The task was then sent to Liz, who asked for NCCC to help. After she explained all of this to us, we thought about what kind of tasks it seemed like would need to get done and attempted to divide the work into four parts. Jourdan would put together a list with contact information for all volunteer disaster services in Texas, T-Lou and Ashley would work on scripts for volunteers to use for answering phones, and I would work on finding out what software and equipment such as phones, phone lines, and computers would be available and what we would need.
Liz was absolutely wonderful and helped us as much as she possibly could. This is the President and CEO we’re talking about here. She did some of her own research and scheduled a couple conference calls and meetings for us with various people, and let us in on a crazy meeting where we had a projector hooked up to a computer that was somehow showing the computer screen of the guy in Washington DC (maybe?) who was running the meeting, so we could see his presentation and see him move his mouse around to point at things as he talked on speakerphone. Technology these days, I tell ya. Anyway, most of what we found out was that this was going to be an ENORMOUS job that we didn’t actually have any idea how to do. We spend most of our time in that room attempting to do research on other states’ disaster services, other call centers, etc., but the more we found out, the more it overwhelming it seemed.
We were scheduled to have a couple meetings with I don’t even remember who anymore on Friday afternoon. While we were out wandering the city during our lunch hour like we always did (and by always, I mean for the three lunch hours we had there), Liz emailed us and said that the meetings were canceled and could we please come to her office when we get back from lunch. When we got there she told us that she informed whoever needed to be informed that she refused to do the call center. She assured us that it had nothing to do with us and that we were wonderful. She said there were just too many state organizations and other non profits who were involved (which is the main reason it became so overwhelming for us, because it was really difficult for us to tell who all was involved and what we needed from them) and that none of them were making decisions. Also, her organization’s budget (which I think comes from the state, but I’m not entirely sure) had recently been cut by like 84% and they were having to let go of eight or nine of their 22 staff members, so they just didn’t have the money or the manpower to take on this big of a project. These other organizations just weren’t coming through with allotting a budget, giving authority, and in general just making decisions the way they were supposed to. We talked with Liz for quite a while about her life and how she got to where she was. She’s really kind of incredible. And she said that one of the most important lessons she’s learned is when to cut her losses and say no to things. With all these organizations not doing what they were supposed to, she felt like our time was being wasted because we couldn’t actually move forward on things. She said our time was too valuable and she couldn’t stand feeling like she was the one wasting it, so she told the state (or whoever) that she wouldn’t do the call center unless all these other things happened first. And she told us that we were free to go back to Denver whenever we wanted to. So instead of working on this project 2-4 weeks, we worked 2.5 days. We called our various Unit Leaders and told them that we could come back whenever, but since we had only been there 2.5 days, we’d really like to be able to leave Austin on Monday so we have a little time to explore and so our entire weekend isn’t taken up with driving since it’s a two-day trip. They agreed, so we got to spend the weekend in Austin!
The weekend was pretty fun. Unfortunately, I don’t quite feel comfortable telling the best story of the weekend (which occurred after a rally on Saturday morning with all the various AmeriCorps people on the steps of the capitol to celebrate the end of AmeriCorps Week) on a public blog because it involves some public people, but please feel free to ask me privately. It’s nothing too embarrassing for anyone, I just don’t want to post it on the internet.
Other highlights of the weekend:
The bats! Underneath the Congress Street Bridge in Austin is home to the largest bat population in the country, or something special like that. Every night at dusk, a couple hundred people gather both on top of the bridge and in the park next to the bridge to watch the millions of bats all pour out at once. We got there about 45 minutes before it started and we could hear all the bats under there making their eerie screeching sound, and then they all came out to start their night of hunting. It was crazy. Millions of bats just fly out from under this bridge and all head the same direction. We left about 20 minutes after it started and there were STILL bats coming out. I wish I had internet right now as I’m typing this so I could look up how many bats live under there. (I’m doing like I did last year in New Orleans, and typing this in a Word document at my internetless housing and saving it until I get internet and can post it.)
Jourdan and I went to something called the Renegade Craft Fair on Saturday. It was like a regular craft fair, but slightly funkier and geared toward a younger crowd. I bought some earrings from a guy who makes jewelry out of broken skateboards.
Ashley and I went to breakfast on Sunday morning at Austin Java while T-Lou and Jourdan went on like a 10-mile run. I had breakfast at Austin Java twice with TK and Lindsey last year when a bunch of people went to Austin for spring break. It is SO GOOD. If you ever find yourself in Austin, it’s at 2nd and Lavaca. Seriously. I saw other places in the city called Austin Java, but they looked different and I can’t speak to the quality of these other ones, but 2nd and Lavaca is delicious.
That afternoon, we went swimming at Barton Springs Pool. It’s like a natural spring pool that they built walls around. Or something. And by “went swimming,” I mean swam for like 15 minutes then laid out in the sun for an hour and a half. Jourdan and T-Lou both went in another time or two, but I just soaked up some vitamin D. And yet, I’m still as pale as ever.
We stopped for the night on the way back to Denver on Monday in Amarillo, which is really close to where T-Lou is from. She insisted that we go to Palo Duro Canyon. Ashley didn’t feel like it, but the other three of us went. I didn’t quite feel like doing the hike that T-Lou and Jourdan wanted to do, so I just drove the giant loop road through the park then sat and watched the beginning of the sunset at a nice overlook spot. We were there at like 6pm so there were hardly any other people. I was alone at that overlook spot for quite a while. It was really nice. I love sunsets.
So that’s the Austin Adventure. Then we all came back to Denver and went back to our regular jobs in the office. Until, that is, I got sent off on my next unexpected, not-much-notice adventure. This post is getting to be quite long, so that story will have to wait for another time. Here’s a hint though: I’m not in Denver right now.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Do You Know What Tumbleweeds Taste Like?
Because I do. And the reason why is most of my team's favorite task at this project so far.
So a couple times before, a Park Service guy has come to take three people away to Wupatki to clear tumbleweeds from a barbed wire fence. Sounds thrilling, right? Both times, the group came back talking about how fun it is. Or maybe not fun, but satisfying. No one really got it. But last week, most of the rest of us got a chance to do it.
There's a really long barbed wire fence about half to three-quarters of a mile from the highway. So we park on the side of the highway, put on our aggressively bright orange vests, and hike on out there with our rakes and McLeods (which is pronounced like McLoud). I found a picture to post because most people probably aren't familiar with McLeods, but I'm on my govy laptop, which is not the greatest. So you can do it yourself! Just Google Image 'McLeod tool.' Anyway, the wind tends to blow in one direction around here, so tumbleweeds just blow into this one fence all the time. There are antelope in that area and the silly things crawl under the fences when they're running from coyotes instead of jumping over. The Park Service only clears this fence like every five years. Five years of accumulated tumbleweeds is really kind of a lot.
This tumbleweed project works best on the days when the wind is strong enough to push you off balance a little. You can just hack into a thick patch of tumbleweed to loosen it, raise your McLeod, and let the wind whip it over the fence. It's kind of hard to describe why it's so great. It's fun when you get a really big bundle of tumbleweed when the wind is gusting especially hard and you can just watch it fly. It's also so satisfying to walk up to a section of fence with tumbleweeds four feet high and almost two feet thick that you can't even see through, then walk away with it completely cleared. It's also kind of nice to think about helping the antelope out, but I suppose that one comes at the expense of coyotes being able to eat.
The only bad part of the tumbleweed project is that you end up finding super sharp little bits of tumbleweed all over you, including inside your clothes and pockets. And sometimes little pieces can fly into your mouth. They don't really taste like anything, but your mouth is a fairly unpleasant place for tumbleweed to be. But everyone, including me, still loves doing tumbleweeds. We get excited when we hear that's what we'll be doing today. And there was one time when our regular supervisor said he thought we were doing tumbleweeds, everyone got excited, then the guy we were actually working with that day said we were doing something different. That was a disappointed team right there. (Luckily, the other project was right by a road and was deemed unsafe after only a couple hours by our regular supervisor due to the especially strong wind, so he sent us to go do tumbleweeds. Yay!)
So a couple times before, a Park Service guy has come to take three people away to Wupatki to clear tumbleweeds from a barbed wire fence. Sounds thrilling, right? Both times, the group came back talking about how fun it is. Or maybe not fun, but satisfying. No one really got it. But last week, most of the rest of us got a chance to do it.
There's a really long barbed wire fence about half to three-quarters of a mile from the highway. So we park on the side of the highway, put on our aggressively bright orange vests, and hike on out there with our rakes and McLeods (which is pronounced like McLoud). I found a picture to post because most people probably aren't familiar with McLeods, but I'm on my govy laptop, which is not the greatest. So you can do it yourself! Just Google Image 'McLeod tool.' Anyway, the wind tends to blow in one direction around here, so tumbleweeds just blow into this one fence all the time. There are antelope in that area and the silly things crawl under the fences when they're running from coyotes instead of jumping over. The Park Service only clears this fence like every five years. Five years of accumulated tumbleweeds is really kind of a lot.
This tumbleweed project works best on the days when the wind is strong enough to push you off balance a little. You can just hack into a thick patch of tumbleweed to loosen it, raise your McLeod, and let the wind whip it over the fence. It's kind of hard to describe why it's so great. It's fun when you get a really big bundle of tumbleweed when the wind is gusting especially hard and you can just watch it fly. It's also so satisfying to walk up to a section of fence with tumbleweeds four feet high and almost two feet thick that you can't even see through, then walk away with it completely cleared. It's also kind of nice to think about helping the antelope out, but I suppose that one comes at the expense of coyotes being able to eat.
The only bad part of the tumbleweed project is that you end up finding super sharp little bits of tumbleweed all over you, including inside your clothes and pockets. And sometimes little pieces can fly into your mouth. They don't really taste like anything, but your mouth is a fairly unpleasant place for tumbleweed to be. But everyone, including me, still loves doing tumbleweeds. We get excited when we hear that's what we'll be doing today. And there was one time when our regular supervisor said he thought we were doing tumbleweeds, everyone got excited, then the guy we were actually working with that day said we were doing something different. That was a disappointed team right there. (Luckily, the other project was right by a road and was deemed unsafe after only a couple hours by our regular supervisor due to the especially strong wind, so he sent us to go do tumbleweeds. Yay!)
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Packing for Nothing
Well. If you've been watching the news, I'm sure you know about all the craziness with Congress not agreeing on a budget. After having continuing resolution after continuing resolution, finally it came down to if there wasn't a budget by last Friday, the government would shut down. And everything the news was saying implied that there really wouldn't be an agreement by then so a shut down looked likely. All NCCC teams were told that if the government shut down on Friday, we all needed to leave and come back to Denver on Saturday morning. So on Friday, in accordance with instructions from both Vaughn and our project supervisor, we packed up our entire campsite. This included everything. People's personal stuff and tents, the kitchen tent the park service provided for us, and all the kitchen equipment from both campus and the park service. This also apparently included my team cooking and eating as much food as possible so it wouldn't be wasted. The plan was to pack up everything, sleep in the maintenance garage, then hit the road as early as possible Saturday morning. It snowed a little on Friday morning, then just stayed cold and really windy for the rest of the day. While no one actually wanted a shut down, people sort of got into road trip mode and started getting used to the idea of spending a few days in Denver, sleeping in a hotel on Saturday night on the way back, and just having a break from camping and the icky weather we've been having. I have to admit I was feeling the same way. (And the theory was that if there was a shut down, it wouldn't be for very long, and we'd all go back to our projects when the government was up and running again, so we probably wouldn't even miss that much work at our projects.) I had to spend some time in town Friday evening finding a hotel for our trip back. After calling 12 hotels and having them either be too expensive or sold out, #13 was a miracle. It would have been far too expensive, but it just happened to be the general manager who I was talking to, and she brought the room prices down about $35 each after we got to talking and I explained the situation. (It helped that she just had a huge group of 25 rooms for several days cancel on her.) She asked what my budget was, and then just said she could make that work. And it would have been pretty nice too, with a hot breakfast that sounded really good and I think a pool and hot tub and everything. If you ever find yourself needing to spend the night in Moab, UT, you should look into staying at La Quinta. So after I made this amazing hotel deal, I went back to the camp site feeling all victorious and excited to tell my team about it. As soon as I got out of the van, my Corps Members told me that Obama came on the radio and said that they had agreed on a budget. I called Vaughn, and he confirmed that yes there was a budget and no we weren't going anywhere. Well let me tell you, my team wasn't happy. They were completely exhausted and cranky from packing everything up and they were really looking forward to a break in Denver and getting to see friends and everything. Most of us went downtown to get some food then we went back and slept in the garage. ...And then woke up Saturday morning to fairly heavy snow with about 6-8 inches on the ground already. My poor team. Obviously, no one wanted to go set up camp again in all that snow, so I called my project supervisor and he said we could just stay in the garage all weekend and set up on Monday. Whew. The main problem now is that everyone packed for just spending one night in a hotel and then being back in Denver, so most of our stuff is buried in the back of our cargo truck and no one wants to dig anything out. So for example, I'm pretty sure no one has showered since at least Friday (Thursday for me) because our towels are packed away. Well, actually, several of them got a hotel room last night, so I would hope they showered there. I want a shower too! So yeah. I think morale might still be a little low. But we're hanging in there. At least the weather is supposed to be better this week. Still fairly cold at night, but nice and sunny during the day. And I think we might be done with that stupid walkway at Wupatki. That thing was really draining people's energy because it was pretty frustrating. So things are looking up!
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
My Project!
Well, here I am at my project! North Central Arizona National Monuments in Flagstaff, AZ. I don't even know where to start with this, because I don't have much time. My team got 3-week free passes to the YMCA, and we go pretty much every day. No joke. We get home from work, eat dinner, then go to the Y till it closes at 9:00. I felt like alone time tonight, so I just dropped them off and came to a coffee shop. So much to talk about but so little time! I'll do my best to do a quick summary.
First of all, my team is absolutely wonderful. They work really hard and when I ask them to do something, they just go do it. They're also silly and ridiculous a lot of the time. I got super lucky there. I have 10 people, five male and five female. I think I have the best shuffled team too. Most of the other teams have like four people from one regular team and none from another or something, but I have three pairs of people from the same team, then one from each of the other four teams. It doesn't get any more shuffled than that. I think that's a plus, since it avoids having people only hang out with the people from their regular team who they're really comfortable with.
Second, we live in tents. We have two porta-potties at our campsite and get all our water from a tap on the side on the maintenance yard garage at the nearby Walnut Canyon. You know those Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a redneck if" jokes? We make a lot of "You know you're homeless when" jokes because we wait to brush our teeth and put in contacts if we know we're going to be in a public restroom soon. Also, a few times when it's been super cold at night, we've brought our sleeping pads and sleeping bags into that same maintenance garage to sleep. Yep, we take shelter in a garage when it's too cold to sleep where we normally do.
My project is...interesting. Or something. The scenery is beautiful. We've only worked at Walnut Canyon and Wupatki National Monuments so far, but we'll probably be at a few others before we leave. You should go Google those right now since I don't have any pictures yet. There have been a few frustrations so far though, including:
Job #1 We've Had to Redo: At Walnut, in the parking lot by the visitor center, there was a HUGE dirt pile. Our first task with that was to pull out the pieces of asphalt, concrete, and rock from the dirt and make separate piles. That's right, we sorted rocks. Then we brought out wheelbarrows to bring dirt out to the Rim Trail and spread it out to be like a shoulder off the newly-paved trail. (That's what all the random pieces of asphalt came from.) We thought we were done, then our supervisor walked the trail with me and pointed out all the places that could use more dirt, so we did it again. Then after I had not been on the trail for a while, my team told me they were done again, so I told the supervisor. He then walked the trail with me again and pointed out MORE spots. Bleurgh.
Job #2 We've Had to Redo: At Walnut, we dug up a bunch of signs and moved them to other places along the Rim Trail, which turned out to be much more of an ordeal than it sounds. The ones we had to dig up all had big pieces of concrete on the bottom. Then we were told we could put the in the ground in the new place with the concrete still on, but it turns out there's really no way to make them sturdy that way, so we had to go back and break the concrete off and pour new concrete. I can't really complain because I was off the work site doing paperwork and getting some van maintenance done when they had to do the new concrete, but my team wasn't happy about it.
Job #3 We've Had to Redo: We then moved on to Wupatki. We were met by an archaeologist who explained that there was a historic stone walkway that led up to an employees-only area. The stones all had to be removed last fall because they had to put in a gas line that ran the entire length of the walkway. The archaeologist had taken 40 pictures of the walkway and the stones all got placed on numbered palates, so we would at least have a general idea of what area each stone should go in. The archaeologist didn't have any tools for us and had no idea of the technique for doing this. The project was literally "Here are some pictures of how it used to look. The stones are over there. Make it look like this again." So it began with a massive puzzle, laying the stones out to match the pictures (most of which were super distorted due to the archaeologist being pretty short, so the pictures were taken at a fairly sharp angle). We then spread ourselves out along the walkway to start digging them in once we had tools, but we had a few different opinions of how to go about doing such a thing. We were visited by another archaeologist one day, who went along looking at everyone's work and basically told us we were all doing a good job. The next day, our regular supervisor (who hadn't been with us for several days) informed us that that second archaeologist told him which group he thought was doing it right, and that everyone else would have to redo their work. That walkway was only supposed to take us one of our four-day weeks, but tomorrow will be day # 7 on it because no one told us how to do it at first.
So yeah. My team is generally pretty happy, so even though they get frustrated at having to redo things, everyone's attitude is still pretty good.
If you want to try a fun game, keep an eye on the weather in Flagstaff, then think of my team living in tents/a maintenance garage. There have been some pretty cold nights. I've started amusing myself with counting how many articles of clothing I wear. I frequently get up to 13 at night. That's ridiculous!
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Upcoming Project and My Vacationing Suitcase
So. As you may or may not know, part of being an STL (Team Leader working in the office) for the Denver campus of NCCC is that you trade places with a field TL and go out with a team for the third project round, which we call shuffle round because all the teams shuffle up as well. I finally found out my project last week! It was my first choice, even though I was the 11th person to get to choose a project. It's an environmental project at multiple national monuments in and around Flagstaff, AZ. I Googled the ones listed in the project description that we will be working at and they look AWESOME. I was wanting a project in either Arizona or New Mexico all during last year, and now I have one! The only thing is that on the project description sheet, which provided the only information we had before choosing projects, under housing all it says is "Camping." Some other projects said things like "Camping with support trailer" or "Primitive camping," but mine just says "Camping." I'm fine with camping. Big Bend was absolutely my favorite project last year, and I camped for two months for that. I just want a few more details since there are lots of different kinds of camping. Really I just want to know how close we'll be to a bathroom and shower. Is that so much to ask?
The day after I found out my project, I left for Vermont for a long weekend (Thursday to Sunday of last week) visiting my brother, who is in grad school there. I had been wanting to visit and it kind of had to be before I leave for my project (which will be like March 14 I think) because once I leave for that, I won't be back until the middle of May. Obviously, the middle of May is a really bad time for anyone in any kind of school, so I had to go before.
Anyway. So I was flying Southwest, which lets you check bags for free. I don't have a suitcase here in Denver and I haven't checked a bag in like my last 5 flights, but I was able to borrow a nice small rolling suitcase from a friend and thought why not, it's free. I don't like checking bags because I'm a little too paranoid, and especially when you're flying by yourself, it's obnoxious to have to lug all your stuff around to go to the bathroom or get a snack when you don't have someone to watch it for you. So I packed up the little suitcase and dropped it off at the Denver airport. On my first flight, I got a window seat right where they put the conveyor belt to load bags onto the plane. I was staring out the window watching. I was pretty sure I saw my bag go on (it had a bright pink TRANSFER tag, which I saw the bag check lady put on, and said BDL, the Hartford airport), but it was a little black rolling suitcase that looked like every other little black rolling suitcase. The guy next to me said something about how he's had that window seat before, and it's always reassuring when you see your bag go on. I told him I think I saw mine, but I borrowed from a friend so I wasn't sure. Later, we talked about where we were going, and he said he was also going on to Hartford and said we'd have to book it to our connecting flight. I said I'm sure we'll be fine.
So I landed in Chicago, got off the plane, and looked at the monitors to find the gate for m next flight. It said Boarding, but luckily it was only two gates over. A lot of people were already on, but I still managed to get a window seat! (Southwest doesn't assign seats.) As usual, I chatted with the lady next to me a bit. I told her about how I got off the plane and this flight was already boarding, and jokingly said "I hope my bag made onto the plane." She seemed a little worried for me, but I said I'm sure it'll be fine, it was only two gates over.
I land in Hartford, turn my phone on, and see that I have a voicemail. It's someone with Southwest IN SEATTLE telling me that they think they have my bag there, but it has someone else's name on it. They also asked if I see a bag that's not mine with my name on it, to please turn it in. So I went straight down to the Southwest baggage claim office and the very nice lady there said that yes, the computer is saying my bag is in Seattle, but I could go ahead and look on the carousel if I want. I had already talked to Carl and he was running a little late picking me up, so why not. Most bags were already off the carousel by that time and it stopped not long after I got to it, but I did indeed find a little black rolling suitcase with my name on it that I had never seen before. When I went back to the office, the lady said that they could get my bag on the first plane to Hartford and it would get here tomorrow. I said Awesome!, but then remembered that Carl lives two hours away from the airport and I didn't want him or me to have to make that trip again. So she said they could Fedex it and it would get to Vermont on Saturday. I called Carl to get his address, and he reminded me that he lives on campus and they don't do mail on Saturdays. We hung up and he very kindly found a friend that lives off campus and could get mail on Saturdays, and he gave me her address to tell the Southwest people. Before I left, I asked if since I wouldn't get my bag till Saturday, did they give vouchers or anything for like toothpaste or underwear. She gave me a toiletry kit and said that if I bring receipts for buying stuff to replace what would have been in my bag, they would reimburse me up to $50. (Brief tangent: I absolutely do not understand why people get rude and angry in situations like this. This person works in the office. She had nothing to do with it. She seemed very happy that I was still smiling and thanking her even though I was going to be without my bag for like a day and a half.)
We didn't get to Vermont until like 11 that night. Carl had class from 8:30 to 12:30 on Friday morning. He had me drive him to class so that I could keep his car in case I wanted to venture out around town. It was like painfully cold that morning, so I knew that if I went back inside to his room, I wouldn't want to go back out in the cold, so I'd better just do my exploring now. I don't know how, but I found the little downtown area. The roads kept forcing me to turn, so I got confused and had given up and was trying to get turned around to go back to campus, when I saw a building I recognized from driving through downtown last night. Amazing! I had some pretty good breakfast and a cup of tea from a cute little cafe, and by that time it was still cold, but not painful anymore. I found an outdoor store that was having a pretty big sale, and bought some nice wool hiking socks and silk glove liners (which I had kind of been wanting since last year). Those decisions might have been influenced by the cold and my lack of warm clothes. (I had a sweater and my parka, but warm socks, gloves, hat, and a scarf were all in my cross-country suitcase.) Then I walked around a bookstore and decided to go back. While I was getting turned around I saw a used bookstore, which I love, so I had to stop again. I found the three books after "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (which I read in Big Bend last year) for a total of like $10! I got back to campus with perfect timing to check my email and stuff then go to lunch with Carl after his class. After that, he needed a nap due to insomnia the night before, and I went out again to the always hated but sometimes necessary Walmart.
That night, it was one of Carl's best friend's birthday, so we went with like 10 other people to an Indian restaurant. I had never had Indian food before, but with a little help from his friends, managed to order something not too spicy (which I CANNOT handle) and really pretty good. We all went back to campus for cake that a couple other friends had baked, then played a pretty intense game of Oh Hell. Oh Hell is a card game that Carl and I had grown up playing with our dad's side of the family. He had already taught several of his Vermont friends the game, and they love it. It was crazy. I think I did better than I ever had before, and it usually would have been good enough to win, but Carl and a friend who usually loses did better. Carl had a nearly perfect game, until everyone set out to take him down, and they succeeded on the last hand. It was pretty fun.
Saturday was pretty relaxed. Someone we sat with at lunch that day told us she and some other friends were going to a jazz concert that night, so we decided to go too. Jazz isn't my favorite thing ever, but this band was really good. And it was in a big building that used to be a cotton mill, but ad gotten turned into a bunch of artists' studios and performance spaces. We all went out to a pub downtown after the concert.
So I forgot to mention that after dinner on Friday, someone from Southwest in the Hartford airport called me and said that my bag had just gotten there so it was too late to Fedex that night, but they could do it tomorrow and it would get to me on Monday. I said no thank you, I'm leaving on Sunday. They said I could come pick it up, but again, it was two hours away. So I said no thank you, please just hold on to it until Sunday when I come to the airport to leave. And then they gave me a $100 Southwest voucher. So I didn't have my bag all weekend. Between the toiletries in that kit and what Carl had, the stuff I got reimbursed for from Walmart, and Carl's T-shirts, I was pretty much fine. It was kind of weird to be meeting all these new people and going out and everything wearing my brother's shirts, but it wasn't that bad. His friends are all wonderful, and most of them had heard the story of my bag going on vacation to Seattle. It was a really good trip and I'm glad I was able to go.
The day after I found out my project, I left for Vermont for a long weekend (Thursday to Sunday of last week) visiting my brother, who is in grad school there. I had been wanting to visit and it kind of had to be before I leave for my project (which will be like March 14 I think) because once I leave for that, I won't be back until the middle of May. Obviously, the middle of May is a really bad time for anyone in any kind of school, so I had to go before.
Anyway. So I was flying Southwest, which lets you check bags for free. I don't have a suitcase here in Denver and I haven't checked a bag in like my last 5 flights, but I was able to borrow a nice small rolling suitcase from a friend and thought why not, it's free. I don't like checking bags because I'm a little too paranoid, and especially when you're flying by yourself, it's obnoxious to have to lug all your stuff around to go to the bathroom or get a snack when you don't have someone to watch it for you. So I packed up the little suitcase and dropped it off at the Denver airport. On my first flight, I got a window seat right where they put the conveyor belt to load bags onto the plane. I was staring out the window watching. I was pretty sure I saw my bag go on (it had a bright pink TRANSFER tag, which I saw the bag check lady put on, and said BDL, the Hartford airport), but it was a little black rolling suitcase that looked like every other little black rolling suitcase. The guy next to me said something about how he's had that window seat before, and it's always reassuring when you see your bag go on. I told him I think I saw mine, but I borrowed from a friend so I wasn't sure. Later, we talked about where we were going, and he said he was also going on to Hartford and said we'd have to book it to our connecting flight. I said I'm sure we'll be fine.
So I landed in Chicago, got off the plane, and looked at the monitors to find the gate for m next flight. It said Boarding, but luckily it was only two gates over. A lot of people were already on, but I still managed to get a window seat! (Southwest doesn't assign seats.) As usual, I chatted with the lady next to me a bit. I told her about how I got off the plane and this flight was already boarding, and jokingly said "I hope my bag made onto the plane." She seemed a little worried for me, but I said I'm sure it'll be fine, it was only two gates over.
I land in Hartford, turn my phone on, and see that I have a voicemail. It's someone with Southwest IN SEATTLE telling me that they think they have my bag there, but it has someone else's name on it. They also asked if I see a bag that's not mine with my name on it, to please turn it in. So I went straight down to the Southwest baggage claim office and the very nice lady there said that yes, the computer is saying my bag is in Seattle, but I could go ahead and look on the carousel if I want. I had already talked to Carl and he was running a little late picking me up, so why not. Most bags were already off the carousel by that time and it stopped not long after I got to it, but I did indeed find a little black rolling suitcase with my name on it that I had never seen before. When I went back to the office, the lady said that they could get my bag on the first plane to Hartford and it would get here tomorrow. I said Awesome!, but then remembered that Carl lives two hours away from the airport and I didn't want him or me to have to make that trip again. So she said they could Fedex it and it would get to Vermont on Saturday. I called Carl to get his address, and he reminded me that he lives on campus and they don't do mail on Saturdays. We hung up and he very kindly found a friend that lives off campus and could get mail on Saturdays, and he gave me her address to tell the Southwest people. Before I left, I asked if since I wouldn't get my bag till Saturday, did they give vouchers or anything for like toothpaste or underwear. She gave me a toiletry kit and said that if I bring receipts for buying stuff to replace what would have been in my bag, they would reimburse me up to $50. (Brief tangent: I absolutely do not understand why people get rude and angry in situations like this. This person works in the office. She had nothing to do with it. She seemed very happy that I was still smiling and thanking her even though I was going to be without my bag for like a day and a half.)
We didn't get to Vermont until like 11 that night. Carl had class from 8:30 to 12:30 on Friday morning. He had me drive him to class so that I could keep his car in case I wanted to venture out around town. It was like painfully cold that morning, so I knew that if I went back inside to his room, I wouldn't want to go back out in the cold, so I'd better just do my exploring now. I don't know how, but I found the little downtown area. The roads kept forcing me to turn, so I got confused and had given up and was trying to get turned around to go back to campus, when I saw a building I recognized from driving through downtown last night. Amazing! I had some pretty good breakfast and a cup of tea from a cute little cafe, and by that time it was still cold, but not painful anymore. I found an outdoor store that was having a pretty big sale, and bought some nice wool hiking socks and silk glove liners (which I had kind of been wanting since last year). Those decisions might have been influenced by the cold and my lack of warm clothes. (I had a sweater and my parka, but warm socks, gloves, hat, and a scarf were all in my cross-country suitcase.) Then I walked around a bookstore and decided to go back. While I was getting turned around I saw a used bookstore, which I love, so I had to stop again. I found the three books after "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (which I read in Big Bend last year) for a total of like $10! I got back to campus with perfect timing to check my email and stuff then go to lunch with Carl after his class. After that, he needed a nap due to insomnia the night before, and I went out again to the always hated but sometimes necessary Walmart.
That night, it was one of Carl's best friend's birthday, so we went with like 10 other people to an Indian restaurant. I had never had Indian food before, but with a little help from his friends, managed to order something not too spicy (which I CANNOT handle) and really pretty good. We all went back to campus for cake that a couple other friends had baked, then played a pretty intense game of Oh Hell. Oh Hell is a card game that Carl and I had grown up playing with our dad's side of the family. He had already taught several of his Vermont friends the game, and they love it. It was crazy. I think I did better than I ever had before, and it usually would have been good enough to win, but Carl and a friend who usually loses did better. Carl had a nearly perfect game, until everyone set out to take him down, and they succeeded on the last hand. It was pretty fun.
Saturday was pretty relaxed. Someone we sat with at lunch that day told us she and some other friends were going to a jazz concert that night, so we decided to go too. Jazz isn't my favorite thing ever, but this band was really good. And it was in a big building that used to be a cotton mill, but ad gotten turned into a bunch of artists' studios and performance spaces. We all went out to a pub downtown after the concert.
So I forgot to mention that after dinner on Friday, someone from Southwest in the Hartford airport called me and said that my bag had just gotten there so it was too late to Fedex that night, but they could do it tomorrow and it would get to me on Monday. I said no thank you, I'm leaving on Sunday. They said I could come pick it up, but again, it was two hours away. So I said no thank you, please just hold on to it until Sunday when I come to the airport to leave. And then they gave me a $100 Southwest voucher. So I didn't have my bag all weekend. Between the toiletries in that kit and what Carl had, the stuff I got reimbursed for from Walmart, and Carl's T-shirts, I was pretty much fine. It was kind of weird to be meeting all these new people and going out and everything wearing my brother's shirts, but it wasn't that bad. His friends are all wonderful, and most of them had heard the story of my bag going on vacation to Seattle. It was a really good trip and I'm glad I was able to go.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Aahhhhh....
Hello dear readers. I write to you this fine evening (well, night by this point) in a rather contented mood. All is as it should be again. In what way, you ask? I'd love to tell you.
**Actually, first I'm going to go on a tangent. I recently (or maybe 3 months ago) found out that the title of Unit Development Assistant, or UDA as we affectionately say, was completely made up by the Denver campus of NCCC. This position exists on all campuses (campi?), but it is called Unit Support Team Leader. You see, the entire group of green-shirted Team Leaders can be divided into two categories: Field TLs (the ones who go out and lead teams on projects) and Support TLs (it's the government, so we say STL). STLs are all the TLs working in the office. There's an STL with the Community Relations department, one with the Operations department, and one with the Programs department. There is also one for each unit, which is me for the Sun Unit. Despite several staff members telling us clearly that the job of UDA doesn't really exist, the entire staff still calls us UDAs. Go figure. But from here on out, if I say something about "the STLs," that will mean the four UDAs and the one STL from each of those departments I mentioned.**
So. Here's the first thing that is as it should be. When the entire Corps is in Denver on campus, everyone eats all meals in the cafeteria. That's just how it is. When teams go on spike, they receive a budget and go grocery shopping and fix all their own food. The STLs and whichever teams happen to be local are given access to kitchens and also receive a budget and go grocery shopping. However, the city forced us to renovate the kitchens back in like early November. This was supposed to be done by the time teams left for spike and the STLs and local teams would have started using them, but it so totally wasn't. Thus, local teams and STLs were forced to eat in the cafeteria for another month. People complain about the cafeteria all the time, but let me tell you, the quality went way down when everyone left and they were only cooking for 50 of us instead of 300. It was really rather sad, as you could imagine. That was nearly four months I had to eat in that place.
Our Christmas break started almost immediately after everyone got back from their first projects. After break was what we call "Transition Week," which is the week you always spend back in Denver between projects. Last week was transition week, so everyone was eating in the cafeteria as expected. Then we got the wonderful news: THE KITCHENS WERE DONE! Kind of. There's still an inspection that needs to be done by the fire department, which means that a security person has to be around while we cook until the inspection happens to make sure we don't set the stove on fire, but we can use the kitchen! Jourdan (the Ops STL) and I went grocery shopping for the STLs on Sunday and we've been eating real food ever since! No one's made anything too exciting yet, mostly because we seem to have forgotten how. Even after these three days, we all walk into the kitchen and have to take a moment to stand in the middle of the floor and look around confusedly, wondering what to do. But I'm sure that will wear off.
The other thing contributing to my Happy Courtneyness right now is that I finally got to go back to my yoga class at the YMCA. During the first project round when everyone was gone, I got in to a pretty nice routine at the Y. Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday I went to Body Pump (an hour-long weight-lifting class), and Tuesday and Thursday I went to yoga. I've been to yoga classes before here and there, and they're always kind of ok, but I've never really felt much of a desire to stick with it. Emily, the yoga teacher at the Y, is absolutely WONDERFUL in every way. She explains things very clearly, so I'm not always having to look around to see what I should be doing. She walks around to check our postures most of the time, but she'll go back up to the front to demonstrate when she's about to have us do something more complex. This class is specifically Flow Yoga, so she even includes when to inhale and exhale as you're flowing between postures, but not in a way that's annoying or cumbersome. If she's walking around and sees that you maybe don't quite get it, she quietly corrects you in a way that doesn't make you feel like a clumsy awkward oaf.
I would probably have wanted to keep going back just because Emily is so wonderful, but this is also the first yoga class I've taken where I've felt better for days afterward, not just for an hour or so like other classes. For the purposes of this post, "feeling better" mostly means "feeling not so lopsided." You may or may not know that I've had scoliosis my whole life. It's not severe or anything, but there's definitely an S curve and also a twist going on in my spine. Studying the Alexander Technique (you should probably click that link - I find it so fascinating) with the brilliant and magical K-Spang for my last year and a half of college did wonders for my lopsidedness, but that was well over a year ago now. It pains me greatly to say it, but my body has forgotten a fair amount of what she helped me accomplish. You know what also helps me not feel quite so lopsided? Flow Yoga with Emily at the Y. It's been three weeks now since I've been to that class, so even though tonight's class was a little rough for me, it was still wonderful to be back.
And now I'm going to read a little David Sedaris and go to bed. Life is good.
**Actually, first I'm going to go on a tangent. I recently (or maybe 3 months ago) found out that the title of Unit Development Assistant, or UDA as we affectionately say, was completely made up by the Denver campus of NCCC. This position exists on all campuses (campi?), but it is called Unit Support Team Leader. You see, the entire group of green-shirted Team Leaders can be divided into two categories: Field TLs (the ones who go out and lead teams on projects) and Support TLs (it's the government, so we say STL). STLs are all the TLs working in the office. There's an STL with the Community Relations department, one with the Operations department, and one with the Programs department. There is also one for each unit, which is me for the Sun Unit. Despite several staff members telling us clearly that the job of UDA doesn't really exist, the entire staff still calls us UDAs. Go figure. But from here on out, if I say something about "the STLs," that will mean the four UDAs and the one STL from each of those departments I mentioned.**
So. Here's the first thing that is as it should be. When the entire Corps is in Denver on campus, everyone eats all meals in the cafeteria. That's just how it is. When teams go on spike, they receive a budget and go grocery shopping and fix all their own food. The STLs and whichever teams happen to be local are given access to kitchens and also receive a budget and go grocery shopping. However, the city forced us to renovate the kitchens back in like early November. This was supposed to be done by the time teams left for spike and the STLs and local teams would have started using them, but it so totally wasn't. Thus, local teams and STLs were forced to eat in the cafeteria for another month. People complain about the cafeteria all the time, but let me tell you, the quality went way down when everyone left and they were only cooking for 50 of us instead of 300. It was really rather sad, as you could imagine. That was nearly four months I had to eat in that place.
Our Christmas break started almost immediately after everyone got back from their first projects. After break was what we call "Transition Week," which is the week you always spend back in Denver between projects. Last week was transition week, so everyone was eating in the cafeteria as expected. Then we got the wonderful news: THE KITCHENS WERE DONE! Kind of. There's still an inspection that needs to be done by the fire department, which means that a security person has to be around while we cook until the inspection happens to make sure we don't set the stove on fire, but we can use the kitchen! Jourdan (the Ops STL) and I went grocery shopping for the STLs on Sunday and we've been eating real food ever since! No one's made anything too exciting yet, mostly because we seem to have forgotten how. Even after these three days, we all walk into the kitchen and have to take a moment to stand in the middle of the floor and look around confusedly, wondering what to do. But I'm sure that will wear off.
The other thing contributing to my Happy Courtneyness right now is that I finally got to go back to my yoga class at the YMCA. During the first project round when everyone was gone, I got in to a pretty nice routine at the Y. Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday I went to Body Pump (an hour-long weight-lifting class), and Tuesday and Thursday I went to yoga. I've been to yoga classes before here and there, and they're always kind of ok, but I've never really felt much of a desire to stick with it. Emily, the yoga teacher at the Y, is absolutely WONDERFUL in every way. She explains things very clearly, so I'm not always having to look around to see what I should be doing. She walks around to check our postures most of the time, but she'll go back up to the front to demonstrate when she's about to have us do something more complex. This class is specifically Flow Yoga, so she even includes when to inhale and exhale as you're flowing between postures, but not in a way that's annoying or cumbersome. If she's walking around and sees that you maybe don't quite get it, she quietly corrects you in a way that doesn't make you feel like a clumsy awkward oaf.
I would probably have wanted to keep going back just because Emily is so wonderful, but this is also the first yoga class I've taken where I've felt better for days afterward, not just for an hour or so like other classes. For the purposes of this post, "feeling better" mostly means "feeling not so lopsided." You may or may not know that I've had scoliosis my whole life. It's not severe or anything, but there's definitely an S curve and also a twist going on in my spine. Studying the Alexander Technique (you should probably click that link - I find it so fascinating) with the brilliant and magical K-Spang for my last year and a half of college did wonders for my lopsidedness, but that was well over a year ago now. It pains me greatly to say it, but my body has forgotten a fair amount of what she helped me accomplish. You know what also helps me not feel quite so lopsided? Flow Yoga with Emily at the Y. It's been three weeks now since I've been to that class, so even though tonight's class was a little rough for me, it was still wonderful to be back.
And now I'm going to read a little David Sedaris and go to bed. Life is good.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
My Actual Job Has Finally Begun!
Oh goodness. I didn't realize it had been TWO MONTHS since I last posted here. Sorry about that. Team Leader Training (TLT) ended just a couple weeks after that last post and the Corps Members got here to begin their month of training (Corps Training Institute, or CTI). That's when my real job as UDA began. I guess now I'm kind of at a loss for how to go about blogging. I used to do a day-by-day kind of format, but that's when I was doing things everyday that would (theoretically) be interesting for other people to read about. Now that my job is much more administrative, I'll have to figure something else out.
But I'll do my best to give you a general idea of UDA tasks.
Task #1: Every week, every team submits a Weekly Progress Report, or WPR. Obviously, this report just tell what they did that week. There are categories for quantitative tasks done on the work site, service learning, Physical Training (PT), Media coverage, team morale, things like that. UDAs are in charge of sending these out to the entire staff every Monday. Sun Unit's WPRs have mostly been getting better every week, but they still need quite a bit of proofreading before the whole staff can see them. The main problem is that they're supposed to be written in third person, and some people just can't quite remember that.
Task #2: Along with submitting WPRs every week, Team Leaders (TLs) also send me how many hours each of their Corps Members (CMs) got that week. I then enter the numbers into a giant spreadsheet that keeps a running total of everyone's hours. Everyone needs 1700 hours of service by the end of July in order to graduate from the program.
Task #3: UDAs are in charge of sending each team a package or large envelope of the team's mail that has been sent to campus. We've only done this once in the three weeks that the teams have been gone on their first projects just because there hasn't been much. No one wants to waste money to send a package that only has like 3 pieces of mail in it. Most of the UDAs also include their own things in the mail. I sent various puzzles and a quote ("It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without also helping himself" - Ralph Waldo Emerson) to each team, which I think I'll probably continue every time I send mail. I wish I could say it was my idea, but that's what last year's Sun UDA did, and I know my team always loved the puzzles (crosswords, logic puzzles, Sudoku, etc.). Sometimes teams also have something specific they need sent. One of my teams is in Houston, and there's going to be some kind of ceremony for the city of Houston to honor AmeriCorps. Obviously, they need to wear their formal uniform (steel toes, black pants, and white polo) for that, but one of the CMs didn't bring the black pants or polo. So I had to go into his room and find them in his closet to include in that team's mail.
Task #4: Every project round, one team from each unit lives on campus and has a project in the Denver area. I'm not really sure why, but the CMs on those teams have to have room inspections done every week. CMs who don't have local projects get their rooms inspected before they leave, but I don't know why local teams need room inspections every week. Anyway, guess who's in charge of the weekly inspections? Yep, the UDAs.
Task #5: Lots and lots of emails, phone calls, and texts. I'm sure this goes for other units and UDAs as well, but Sun TLs frequently call or email me with questions and requests. I also send lots of mass texts and emails. I TRY to just send one big email with all the reminders and announcements they need per week, but that hasn't actually happened yet. Other things just keep coming up after I've already sent the big email. I'm sure the TLs are all getting pretty tired of seeing my name in their email and text inboxes, but they just need to learn to love it.
So those are all the things I can think of that all four UDAs do every week. The rest of our time is spent with a lot of random things that come up. Also, all of our jobs seem to be slightly different because each of our Unit Leaders ask different things of us. Vaughn seems to be the most laid back and doesn't ask much of me, which just means it's more up to me to find things to keep myself busy. (And when I fail at that, I've gotten addicted to logic puzzles, specifically these .)
So yeah. That's how I spend my working hours. Next up will be my non-working hours, but I'll save that post for another day. Which most likely will be less than two months from now.
Oh, but before I end this one, here's where my unit is for their first projects:
Sun 1 (TL - Cody): Cal-Wood Education Center! My first project last year!
Sun 2 (TL - Brandon): Denver Mountain Parks
Sun 3 (TL - Matt): St. Louis Parks and Recreation
Sun 4 (TL - TK): Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks
Sun 5 (TL - Lupita): Boys and Girls Club in Denver (They're the team living on campus whose rooms I'm inspecting this round.)
Sun 6 (TL - GG): Project Homecoming (kind of like Habitat for Humanity, in New Orleans)
Sun 7 (TL - Meg): Houston Parks and Recreation
Until next time!
But I'll do my best to give you a general idea of UDA tasks.
Task #1: Every week, every team submits a Weekly Progress Report, or WPR. Obviously, this report just tell what they did that week. There are categories for quantitative tasks done on the work site, service learning, Physical Training (PT), Media coverage, team morale, things like that. UDAs are in charge of sending these out to the entire staff every Monday. Sun Unit's WPRs have mostly been getting better every week, but they still need quite a bit of proofreading before the whole staff can see them. The main problem is that they're supposed to be written in third person, and some people just can't quite remember that.
Task #2: Along with submitting WPRs every week, Team Leaders (TLs) also send me how many hours each of their Corps Members (CMs) got that week. I then enter the numbers into a giant spreadsheet that keeps a running total of everyone's hours. Everyone needs 1700 hours of service by the end of July in order to graduate from the program.
Task #3: UDAs are in charge of sending each team a package or large envelope of the team's mail that has been sent to campus. We've only done this once in the three weeks that the teams have been gone on their first projects just because there hasn't been much. No one wants to waste money to send a package that only has like 3 pieces of mail in it. Most of the UDAs also include their own things in the mail. I sent various puzzles and a quote ("It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without also helping himself" - Ralph Waldo Emerson) to each team, which I think I'll probably continue every time I send mail. I wish I could say it was my idea, but that's what last year's Sun UDA did, and I know my team always loved the puzzles (crosswords, logic puzzles, Sudoku, etc.). Sometimes teams also have something specific they need sent. One of my teams is in Houston, and there's going to be some kind of ceremony for the city of Houston to honor AmeriCorps. Obviously, they need to wear their formal uniform (steel toes, black pants, and white polo) for that, but one of the CMs didn't bring the black pants or polo. So I had to go into his room and find them in his closet to include in that team's mail.
Task #4: Every project round, one team from each unit lives on campus and has a project in the Denver area. I'm not really sure why, but the CMs on those teams have to have room inspections done every week. CMs who don't have local projects get their rooms inspected before they leave, but I don't know why local teams need room inspections every week. Anyway, guess who's in charge of the weekly inspections? Yep, the UDAs.
Task #5: Lots and lots of emails, phone calls, and texts. I'm sure this goes for other units and UDAs as well, but Sun TLs frequently call or email me with questions and requests. I also send lots of mass texts and emails. I TRY to just send one big email with all the reminders and announcements they need per week, but that hasn't actually happened yet. Other things just keep coming up after I've already sent the big email. I'm sure the TLs are all getting pretty tired of seeing my name in their email and text inboxes, but they just need to learn to love it.
So those are all the things I can think of that all four UDAs do every week. The rest of our time is spent with a lot of random things that come up. Also, all of our jobs seem to be slightly different because each of our Unit Leaders ask different things of us. Vaughn seems to be the most laid back and doesn't ask much of me, which just means it's more up to me to find things to keep myself busy. (And when I fail at that, I've gotten addicted to logic puzzles, specifically these .)
So yeah. That's how I spend my working hours. Next up will be my non-working hours, but I'll save that post for another day. Which most likely will be less than two months from now.
Oh, but before I end this one, here's where my unit is for their first projects:
Sun 1 (TL - Cody): Cal-Wood Education Center! My first project last year!
Sun 2 (TL - Brandon): Denver Mountain Parks
Sun 3 (TL - Matt): St. Louis Parks and Recreation
Sun 4 (TL - TK): Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks
Sun 5 (TL - Lupita): Boys and Girls Club in Denver (They're the team living on campus whose rooms I'm inspecting this round.)
Sun 6 (TL - GG): Project Homecoming (kind of like Habitat for Humanity, in New Orleans)
Sun 7 (TL - Meg): Houston Parks and Recreation
Until next time!
Monday, September 27, 2010
We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Blog Post to Bring You...
A TALE OF HORRIBLE PAIN!
So AmeriCorps took us (all the TLs) out to dinner tonight at a Chinese buffet. I wandered around for a while and filled my plate with food that looked promising. Part of my plate was from a salad bar thing. I had red onions, green and red peppers, broccoli, carrots, and maybe some other stuff I don't remember. All delicious, right? I sat down with my food and the first thing I ate was a piece of green pepper. OH MY GOODNESS THAT WASN'T A GREEN PEPPER. In case you weren't aware, I canNOT handle spiciness AT ALL. I popped the piece in my mouth and chewed approximately 1.5 times before my mouth was on fire. I am very proud of myself that I didn't yell or cry or spit it out, I actually managed to chew it the rest of the way and swallow, but then the pain got worse. My thinking was somehow clear enough through the pain panic that I remembered that you're not supposed to drink water, you're supposed to drink milk (which of course was not present) or eat bread, but I didn't have any. I took a bite of egg role, but that didn't help. I took a bite of chicken, but that didn't help. Though I managed not to yell through this ordeal, a couple people around me noticed the (probable) pain on my face and asked if I was ok. I said yeah, that was just really spicy. They asked what, and I pointed to the pepper. They informed me that it was a jalapeno pepper. A JALAPENO PEPPER! I think it's the way it was cut that totally made it look to me like a regular old harmless green pepper. Meg went and got me a piece of bread, and Lupita had French fries (why there were fries at a Chinese buffet, I have no idea) that she shared, so that took some of the edge off. I was pretty traumatized though. All I ate after that were fries, green beans, and chicken. Why do people willingly eat jalapeno peppers? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! Also, the stupid thing was covered in seeds, as peppers in restaurants frequently are. I'm pretty sure I have a jalapeno tree growing in my stomach right now, just lurking there waiting to destroy me. (Do jalapenos grow on trees? Or does the devil just keep them in potted plants in his backyard?)
Whew. Now that that's out of the way, I can tell you the latest TLT news. On Monday of last week, we had some boring meetings that aren't even really worth writing about, and then Habitat training all afternoon. Each unit did it at different times, so I was only with Sun people. We went to the local Habitat for Humanity warehouse for a guy named Bruce to teach us how to use tools that I've been using for the past six or so years. He taught us about miter saws, circular saws, chalk lines, drills, and hammers. We then had to pair up and go around to different stations to actually use each of the tools. We had to make cuts with the various saws to specific measurements and practice drilling and hammering. We practiced with all the things for a while, then he made us take a "test" with all the tools. Really the only part worth mentioning was that he wouldn't let us leave until we had put a 16-penny nail (those are the big ones) in a piece of wood in three hits. There were framing hammers there for us to practice with (huge heavy hammers that are pretty much made to sink 16-penny nails), which I have never used before. They're kind of nice when you get the hang of them. I got a nail in three hits a couple times during the practice, but it didn't count unless Bruce was watching during the test part. It took me a while to do it with an audience, but I did it a couple more times!
The rest of the week was pretty chaotic. We had a little mini-spike Wednesday through Friday, so Tuesday was all just getting ready for that. A spike is a project where the team lives somewhere other than on campus, remember. The mini-spike was just to show new people what a spike is like and prepare them for what's to come a bit better. Here's the silly part: So we're already split into four units, right? Well for this we were split into three groups, A, B, and C. We would be working and traveling with our group, but buying food, cooking, and checking out tools and dishes with our unit. Does that make sense? No. It does not. So Tuesday was spent with our units, checking out equipment and making a grocery list and shopping. The problem here is that there was no clear leader. This is a big group of leaders. My unit gets along really well, but there were a few differences of opinion in how to go about organizing the day.
Wednesday, we left for our spike. The plan was that each group would work with Habitat here in Denver for one of the three days, then spend the other two days working at the campsite where we would be living. Group A at Habitat Wednesday, B on Thursday, and C on Friday. Also, everyone had another day of service thing on Saturday, and group C would be working at Red Rocks Park that day. So Wednesday, A went to Habitat, B (my group) went to the campsite, and C went to Red Rocks for an orientation thing for their project on Saturday. They were supposed to meet us at the campsite after lunch. Well B got to the campsite, and Matt, the supervisor, told us that there was a change of plans and he was going to take us to Red Rocks to do the orientation with C. Even though it was an orientation for something we wouldn't be at. Ok, whatever, we do what we're told here. So we were all bored for about an hour and a half during this orientation, and then they unexpectedly put both B and C to work moving rocks. There were big piles of rocks along the road that needed to be spread along the trail because one of the projects for the Saturday thing was to build a couple rock walls. It was fine for a while, because most of the rocks weren't too big, we didn't have far to take them, and a few times we formed a line and passed them down while singing Disney songs. Then, we got to the fourth pile. This pile was made mostly of BIG rocks, and they had to be taken first down a really steep hill, then a LONG way away. We tried carrying individual rocks all the way from the pile to the destination (way too exhausting!) and also passing them down a line and throwing them down the steep part to people waiting at the bottom, but those didn't really work. We ended up throwing/rolling them down the hill right from the pile, and then people carried them together the rest of the way. Also, Red Rocks park is called Red Rocks for a reason. The rocks are all covered in red dust, which got all over us. Even though we have to tuck our shirts in with the uniform, everyone's stomach was red by the end of the day. It was ridiculous.
My group was supposed to go to Habitat on Thursday. However, we were told at that orientation that someone would need to be there to set up the Saturday thing (there would be like 200 volunteers there on Saturday that they needed to get ready for), but C was supposed to be at Habitat. B and C just ended up switching Habitat days so C could set up their own thing at Red Rocks on Friday. So on Thursday, we finished that pile of rocks. Then we were sent to help get rid of a bunch of Russian Olive trees, which are an invasive species. Two Red Rocks employees chainsawed them down and cut them into manageable pieces, and groups A and B (25 people) carried them into piles. Does that sound like a productive use of time? If it does, I described it wrong. There were about 20 of us just standing and waiting at all times. It was a little silly.
After that, Matt took us to see the amphitheater, since a lot of people had never been there. Then he took us to go climb around in a cave. Then he took us to an old CCC camp. (Tangent: The CCC is the Civilian Conservation Corps, which existed for several years after the depression. Men 18-25 years old could work for room, board, a uniform, and I think $25 a month. $5 would go to them and $20 would go home to their families. The CCC built the amphitheater at Red Rocks. They were nicknamed the tree army, because they also planted a ridiculous number of trees and build a ridiculous amount of trails in national parks. National parks pretty much wouldn't be the same without the CCC. My specific AmeriCorps program is called NCCC, pronounced N triple C, which stands for National Civilian Community Corps. NCCC is kind of modeled after the CCC. Oh look, a link if you want to know more. I think it's pretty cool. Also, my maternal grandfather was in the CCC back in the day, which I didn't know until after I already decided to join NCCC. End tangent.) The CCC camp had also served as a chapter of CCC alumni. We didn't get to meet anyone, but we did get to look around and see lots of pictures and read stories and stuff. It was really pretty cool.
Finally Friday was B's day at Habitat. The house was mostly done, there was just little indoor finishing work to do. I spackled and caulked all day. It's tedious and boring work, but I don't mind it that much. I alternated between working with other people and getting to talk and working by myself and getting to zone out and turn my brain off. Not a terrible day.
On Saturday, while group C was at the Red Rocks thing, A and B went to a different volunteer day, the Platte River Sweep. It was pretty cool. There was a bunch of free swag, which is always nice. Most of the volunteers were just picking up trash, but our group got to do some landscaping and painting railings and stuff. At the end, they raffled off like 30 things. I think like 10 of us won something. I won an umbrella. Someone else won a mini-grill/cooler combo. A couple of us won backpacks. A couple won lottery tickets (they didn't win). And we only had to work a half day.
That night was Oktoberfest in Denver. Your guess is as good as mine why it was in September, but whatever. It was fun.
Sunday was spent doing absolutely nothing productive except thinking about writing a blog post. Obviously, that didn't work out.
Which brings us to today. We had to check in all the equipment we checked out for the spike then do a debrief for the staff. Also, all the office team leaders had to sign in to their desktop computers for the first time and watch the boring video that tells us how to be secure with computers that are on a government network (like our desktops are). It was super complicated to get into, but then the video was boring.
In the afternoon, we had the first four of our twelve hours of Supervisory Skills. 1-5pm today, then all day tomorrow. Not much to say about that. It was fairly boring, but the guy leading it probably did as well as was possible.
And now it's almost bedtime. Good night!
So AmeriCorps took us (all the TLs) out to dinner tonight at a Chinese buffet. I wandered around for a while and filled my plate with food that looked promising. Part of my plate was from a salad bar thing. I had red onions, green and red peppers, broccoli, carrots, and maybe some other stuff I don't remember. All delicious, right? I sat down with my food and the first thing I ate was a piece of green pepper. OH MY GOODNESS THAT WASN'T A GREEN PEPPER. In case you weren't aware, I canNOT handle spiciness AT ALL. I popped the piece in my mouth and chewed approximately 1.5 times before my mouth was on fire. I am very proud of myself that I didn't yell or cry or spit it out, I actually managed to chew it the rest of the way and swallow, but then the pain got worse. My thinking was somehow clear enough through the pain panic that I remembered that you're not supposed to drink water, you're supposed to drink milk (which of course was not present) or eat bread, but I didn't have any. I took a bite of egg role, but that didn't help. I took a bite of chicken, but that didn't help. Though I managed not to yell through this ordeal, a couple people around me noticed the (probable) pain on my face and asked if I was ok. I said yeah, that was just really spicy. They asked what, and I pointed to the pepper. They informed me that it was a jalapeno pepper. A JALAPENO PEPPER! I think it's the way it was cut that totally made it look to me like a regular old harmless green pepper. Meg went and got me a piece of bread, and Lupita had French fries (why there were fries at a Chinese buffet, I have no idea) that she shared, so that took some of the edge off. I was pretty traumatized though. All I ate after that were fries, green beans, and chicken. Why do people willingly eat jalapeno peppers? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! Also, the stupid thing was covered in seeds, as peppers in restaurants frequently are. I'm pretty sure I have a jalapeno tree growing in my stomach right now, just lurking there waiting to destroy me. (Do jalapenos grow on trees? Or does the devil just keep them in potted plants in his backyard?)
Whew. Now that that's out of the way, I can tell you the latest TLT news. On Monday of last week, we had some boring meetings that aren't even really worth writing about, and then Habitat training all afternoon. Each unit did it at different times, so I was only with Sun people. We went to the local Habitat for Humanity warehouse for a guy named Bruce to teach us how to use tools that I've been using for the past six or so years. He taught us about miter saws, circular saws, chalk lines, drills, and hammers. We then had to pair up and go around to different stations to actually use each of the tools. We had to make cuts with the various saws to specific measurements and practice drilling and hammering. We practiced with all the things for a while, then he made us take a "test" with all the tools. Really the only part worth mentioning was that he wouldn't let us leave until we had put a 16-penny nail (those are the big ones) in a piece of wood in three hits. There were framing hammers there for us to practice with (huge heavy hammers that are pretty much made to sink 16-penny nails), which I have never used before. They're kind of nice when you get the hang of them. I got a nail in three hits a couple times during the practice, but it didn't count unless Bruce was watching during the test part. It took me a while to do it with an audience, but I did it a couple more times!
The rest of the week was pretty chaotic. We had a little mini-spike Wednesday through Friday, so Tuesday was all just getting ready for that. A spike is a project where the team lives somewhere other than on campus, remember. The mini-spike was just to show new people what a spike is like and prepare them for what's to come a bit better. Here's the silly part: So we're already split into four units, right? Well for this we were split into three groups, A, B, and C. We would be working and traveling with our group, but buying food, cooking, and checking out tools and dishes with our unit. Does that make sense? No. It does not. So Tuesday was spent with our units, checking out equipment and making a grocery list and shopping. The problem here is that there was no clear leader. This is a big group of leaders. My unit gets along really well, but there were a few differences of opinion in how to go about organizing the day.
Wednesday, we left for our spike. The plan was that each group would work with Habitat here in Denver for one of the three days, then spend the other two days working at the campsite where we would be living. Group A at Habitat Wednesday, B on Thursday, and C on Friday. Also, everyone had another day of service thing on Saturday, and group C would be working at Red Rocks Park that day. So Wednesday, A went to Habitat, B (my group) went to the campsite, and C went to Red Rocks for an orientation thing for their project on Saturday. They were supposed to meet us at the campsite after lunch. Well B got to the campsite, and Matt, the supervisor, told us that there was a change of plans and he was going to take us to Red Rocks to do the orientation with C. Even though it was an orientation for something we wouldn't be at. Ok, whatever, we do what we're told here. So we were all bored for about an hour and a half during this orientation, and then they unexpectedly put both B and C to work moving rocks. There were big piles of rocks along the road that needed to be spread along the trail because one of the projects for the Saturday thing was to build a couple rock walls. It was fine for a while, because most of the rocks weren't too big, we didn't have far to take them, and a few times we formed a line and passed them down while singing Disney songs. Then, we got to the fourth pile. This pile was made mostly of BIG rocks, and they had to be taken first down a really steep hill, then a LONG way away. We tried carrying individual rocks all the way from the pile to the destination (way too exhausting!) and also passing them down a line and throwing them down the steep part to people waiting at the bottom, but those didn't really work. We ended up throwing/rolling them down the hill right from the pile, and then people carried them together the rest of the way. Also, Red Rocks park is called Red Rocks for a reason. The rocks are all covered in red dust, which got all over us. Even though we have to tuck our shirts in with the uniform, everyone's stomach was red by the end of the day. It was ridiculous.
My group was supposed to go to Habitat on Thursday. However, we were told at that orientation that someone would need to be there to set up the Saturday thing (there would be like 200 volunteers there on Saturday that they needed to get ready for), but C was supposed to be at Habitat. B and C just ended up switching Habitat days so C could set up their own thing at Red Rocks on Friday. So on Thursday, we finished that pile of rocks. Then we were sent to help get rid of a bunch of Russian Olive trees, which are an invasive species. Two Red Rocks employees chainsawed them down and cut them into manageable pieces, and groups A and B (25 people) carried them into piles. Does that sound like a productive use of time? If it does, I described it wrong. There were about 20 of us just standing and waiting at all times. It was a little silly.
After that, Matt took us to see the amphitheater, since a lot of people had never been there. Then he took us to go climb around in a cave. Then he took us to an old CCC camp. (Tangent: The CCC is the Civilian Conservation Corps, which existed for several years after the depression. Men 18-25 years old could work for room, board, a uniform, and I think $25 a month. $5 would go to them and $20 would go home to their families. The CCC built the amphitheater at Red Rocks. They were nicknamed the tree army, because they also planted a ridiculous number of trees and build a ridiculous amount of trails in national parks. National parks pretty much wouldn't be the same without the CCC. My specific AmeriCorps program is called NCCC, pronounced N triple C, which stands for National Civilian Community Corps. NCCC is kind of modeled after the CCC. Oh look, a link if you want to know more. I think it's pretty cool. Also, my maternal grandfather was in the CCC back in the day, which I didn't know until after I already decided to join NCCC. End tangent.) The CCC camp had also served as a chapter of CCC alumni. We didn't get to meet anyone, but we did get to look around and see lots of pictures and read stories and stuff. It was really pretty cool.
Finally Friday was B's day at Habitat. The house was mostly done, there was just little indoor finishing work to do. I spackled and caulked all day. It's tedious and boring work, but I don't mind it that much. I alternated between working with other people and getting to talk and working by myself and getting to zone out and turn my brain off. Not a terrible day.
On Saturday, while group C was at the Red Rocks thing, A and B went to a different volunteer day, the Platte River Sweep. It was pretty cool. There was a bunch of free swag, which is always nice. Most of the volunteers were just picking up trash, but our group got to do some landscaping and painting railings and stuff. At the end, they raffled off like 30 things. I think like 10 of us won something. I won an umbrella. Someone else won a mini-grill/cooler combo. A couple of us won backpacks. A couple won lottery tickets (they didn't win). And we only had to work a half day.
That night was Oktoberfest in Denver. Your guess is as good as mine why it was in September, but whatever. It was fun.
Sunday was spent doing absolutely nothing productive except thinking about writing a blog post. Obviously, that didn't work out.
Which brings us to today. We had to check in all the equipment we checked out for the spike then do a debrief for the staff. Also, all the office team leaders had to sign in to their desktop computers for the first time and watch the boring video that tells us how to be secure with computers that are on a government network (like our desktops are). It was super complicated to get into, but then the video was boring.
In the afternoon, we had the first four of our twelve hours of Supervisory Skills. 1-5pm today, then all day tomorrow. Not much to say about that. It was fairly boring, but the guy leading it probably did as well as was possible.
And now it's almost bedtime. Good night!
Saturday, September 18, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Team Leader Training!
Hello readers! I hope all 3.5 of you have been doing well since my last post. As you may or may not know, I'm back in Denver for a second year of AmeriCorps, but this time as a team leader! (More specifically, as a Unit Development Assistant [or because the government loves acronyms, a UDA], but more about that at a later date. You know, when I actually know what that job entails.) Even though I am an office team leader, right now ALL of the team leaders are in the same training, to learn how to lead a team. I'll have specific UDA training in a few weeks I think, but right now I'm with everyone else.
I feel it is important to note that I now get to wear a color! TLs wear the exact same uniform as Corps Members, except that TL shirts are green instead of gray. Have you seen gray and khaki together? It's not attractive. Getting to wear a color in general is exciting, but green also happens to be one of my favorite colors to wear.
So how's TLT (Team Leader Training, of course) going? Well, the other TLs are wonderful so far. I have of course met them all, but haven't had a chance to talk much with some of them still. I'm in the Sun Unit again, and the other Sun TLs are great. I am with TK (who you may remember was on my team last year) again, as well as Ashley (who will be in the office with me as a Support Team Leader, but more on that later as well) and Matt, who were both Sun Corps Members last year on different teams. We also have Brandon, Meg, Cody, Lupita, and Stephanie, all of whom have never been in AmeriCorps before. It is my understanding that most of the Sun TLs from last year didn't like each other very much, so I'm happy to report that I think this year will be MUCH better in that regard.
So what have I been doing? I arrived in Denver last Monday night and was able to stay with Amy, my fabulous tentmate from my shuffle team in Big Bend last year. She lives in Denver with her sister. The next morning I picked TK up from the airport and we went to campus, where we were apparently early and no one knew what to do with us. Meg arrived right after we did, so it was nice to meet another from our unit so soon. That day, we didn't do much besides check into our rooms and unpack. AmeriCorps also took us all to dinner at Old Country Buffet, because we're classy like that.
Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot to talk about right now. It's all been fairly boring meetings so far. There's been learning about the rules of living in the dorm, learning how to use government-issued laptops that are full of people's personal information safely, registering personal vehicles that people (like me!) may have driven to campus, learning the role and responsibilities of TLs, and of course the always enjoyable TB and drug tests. I'm TB free! (Also drug free, but that doesn't rhyme.)
The only interesting "official" activity so far was yesterday, when we went to a ropes course in Genesee Park. It's at a higher elevation than Denver, so obviously it was gorgeous. After a silly version of freeze tag in the morning, we had a pretty interesting activity. There were ropes laid out on the ground in like a plus sign, but then we found out it was really an x and y axis with a whole spectrum in between. Remember math class? First, we put ourselves along the x axis. One end of the spectrum was for people who go with the flow, are happy to do what everyone else wants to do, don't usually state their needs, that sort of thing. The other end was for people who are really opinionated, state their needs, make decisions quickly, etc. After we had plotted ourselves along that line based on where we think we are in the spectrum, we moved on to the y axis. One end of that spectrum was for people who tend to think logically and gather as much information as possible before making decisions, while the other end was more emotionally charged and made decisions based on feelings. Staying where we were along the x axis, we moved along the y to where we thought we should be for that second spectrum. So now all the TLs were plotted into four different quadrants. Interestingly, most of the Sun Unit was in the same quadrant. We were called Architects and Analysts, people who go with the flow and also make decisions logically.
We then split off into our units and did some group problem-solving activities. In one, three people were blindfolded. Four other people could talk but could not see the blindfolded people, and four others could see the blindfolded people but not talk. That last group had to communicate to the group who could talk what the blindfolded people had to do, and the talkers had to instruct the blindfolded people. I think all of the tasks were just walking around and picking up objects scattered around on the ground, but it was fairly challenging.
After that, we moved to where there were like eight rows of five large flat-ish rocks laid into the ground. We had to get the entire team from one side to the other on top of the rocks, but they had to be in the right order. We went one at a time. If someone guessed a wrong rock, they had to go to the end of the line and the next person had to start from the beginning. It wasn't that hard. It was just trail and error until we figured out the pattern, and then we had so many people that it wasn't hard to remember it.
After that, we went to where the ground was lava, and we had to get all of us from one spot to another using tree stumps and six boards. If we dropped a board or if someone fell into the lava, "something strange or wonderful would happen." We dropped several, causing us to go down to three boards and losing the use of a few arms, but then we got a board back later. That one was cool. We worked pretty well together, and our facilitator told us we took a path she hadn't seen before. Also, I don't think anyone in AmeriCorps has much of a personal space bubble, but we broke through those bubbles pretty quickly with people squished together on stumps and whatnot.
After lunch was the high ropes part of the day. I unfortunately didn't actually go up on any of the three activities due to a couple not-so-good knees and a history of stress fractures in my right foot. I have no desire to have my knees or foot hurt anytime soon. But I was still able to be a spotter, help belay, and cheer people on.
At the end of the day, we got back in our units with that x and y axis. Ali, our facilitator, told us to go back to the quadrant where we were in the morning. She then had the group decide if they thought anyone should move to a different position. Most people stayed about where they were, but they said I should move closer to the middle, where the two axes meet. I think I'll take that as a compliment, that I am pretty balanced.
Tomorrow we get to do the wonderful day of driving tests. I think I heard we might be driving to Rocky Mountain National Park or somewhere cool like that, but it's still several hours in a van.
I still haven't put any pictures from Big Bend or Saguache on this thing, have I? I'll try to do that sometime soon. Apologies for laziness.
Oh! But look on the side! I figured out how to make a nifty little text box on the left side that I will fill with those beloved-by-the-government acronyms as I think of them.
Also, I just noticed that this is blog post number 101. I posted on this thing 100 times in the past year. Crazy.
I feel it is important to note that I now get to wear a color! TLs wear the exact same uniform as Corps Members, except that TL shirts are green instead of gray. Have you seen gray and khaki together? It's not attractive. Getting to wear a color in general is exciting, but green also happens to be one of my favorite colors to wear.
So how's TLT (Team Leader Training, of course) going? Well, the other TLs are wonderful so far. I have of course met them all, but haven't had a chance to talk much with some of them still. I'm in the Sun Unit again, and the other Sun TLs are great. I am with TK (who you may remember was on my team last year) again, as well as Ashley (who will be in the office with me as a Support Team Leader, but more on that later as well) and Matt, who were both Sun Corps Members last year on different teams. We also have Brandon, Meg, Cody, Lupita, and Stephanie, all of whom have never been in AmeriCorps before. It is my understanding that most of the Sun TLs from last year didn't like each other very much, so I'm happy to report that I think this year will be MUCH better in that regard.
So what have I been doing? I arrived in Denver last Monday night and was able to stay with Amy, my fabulous tentmate from my shuffle team in Big Bend last year. She lives in Denver with her sister. The next morning I picked TK up from the airport and we went to campus, where we were apparently early and no one knew what to do with us. Meg arrived right after we did, so it was nice to meet another from our unit so soon. That day, we didn't do much besides check into our rooms and unpack. AmeriCorps also took us all to dinner at Old Country Buffet, because we're classy like that.
Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot to talk about right now. It's all been fairly boring meetings so far. There's been learning about the rules of living in the dorm, learning how to use government-issued laptops that are full of people's personal information safely, registering personal vehicles that people (like me!) may have driven to campus, learning the role and responsibilities of TLs, and of course the always enjoyable TB and drug tests. I'm TB free! (Also drug free, but that doesn't rhyme.)
The only interesting "official" activity so far was yesterday, when we went to a ropes course in Genesee Park. It's at a higher elevation than Denver, so obviously it was gorgeous. After a silly version of freeze tag in the morning, we had a pretty interesting activity. There were ropes laid out on the ground in like a plus sign, but then we found out it was really an x and y axis with a whole spectrum in between. Remember math class? First, we put ourselves along the x axis. One end of the spectrum was for people who go with the flow, are happy to do what everyone else wants to do, don't usually state their needs, that sort of thing. The other end was for people who are really opinionated, state their needs, make decisions quickly, etc. After we had plotted ourselves along that line based on where we think we are in the spectrum, we moved on to the y axis. One end of that spectrum was for people who tend to think logically and gather as much information as possible before making decisions, while the other end was more emotionally charged and made decisions based on feelings. Staying where we were along the x axis, we moved along the y to where we thought we should be for that second spectrum. So now all the TLs were plotted into four different quadrants. Interestingly, most of the Sun Unit was in the same quadrant. We were called Architects and Analysts, people who go with the flow and also make decisions logically.
We then split off into our units and did some group problem-solving activities. In one, three people were blindfolded. Four other people could talk but could not see the blindfolded people, and four others could see the blindfolded people but not talk. That last group had to communicate to the group who could talk what the blindfolded people had to do, and the talkers had to instruct the blindfolded people. I think all of the tasks were just walking around and picking up objects scattered around on the ground, but it was fairly challenging.
After that, we moved to where there were like eight rows of five large flat-ish rocks laid into the ground. We had to get the entire team from one side to the other on top of the rocks, but they had to be in the right order. We went one at a time. If someone guessed a wrong rock, they had to go to the end of the line and the next person had to start from the beginning. It wasn't that hard. It was just trail and error until we figured out the pattern, and then we had so many people that it wasn't hard to remember it.
After that, we went to where the ground was lava, and we had to get all of us from one spot to another using tree stumps and six boards. If we dropped a board or if someone fell into the lava, "something strange or wonderful would happen." We dropped several, causing us to go down to three boards and losing the use of a few arms, but then we got a board back later. That one was cool. We worked pretty well together, and our facilitator told us we took a path she hadn't seen before. Also, I don't think anyone in AmeriCorps has much of a personal space bubble, but we broke through those bubbles pretty quickly with people squished together on stumps and whatnot.
After lunch was the high ropes part of the day. I unfortunately didn't actually go up on any of the three activities due to a couple not-so-good knees and a history of stress fractures in my right foot. I have no desire to have my knees or foot hurt anytime soon. But I was still able to be a spotter, help belay, and cheer people on.
At the end of the day, we got back in our units with that x and y axis. Ali, our facilitator, told us to go back to the quadrant where we were in the morning. She then had the group decide if they thought anyone should move to a different position. Most people stayed about where they were, but they said I should move closer to the middle, where the two axes meet. I think I'll take that as a compliment, that I am pretty balanced.
Tomorrow we get to do the wonderful day of driving tests. I think I heard we might be driving to Rocky Mountain National Park or somewhere cool like that, but it's still several hours in a van.
I still haven't put any pictures from Big Bend or Saguache on this thing, have I? I'll try to do that sometime soon. Apologies for laziness.
Oh! But look on the side! I figured out how to make a nifty little text box on the left side that I will fill with those beloved-by-the-government acronyms as I think of them.
Also, I just noticed that this is blog post number 101. I posted on this thing 100 times in the past year. Crazy.
Friday, August 6, 2010
From the Continental Divide to Casa Bonita
As always, continuing where I left off…
That Thursday, our last night in Saguache, we had a barbecue for like everyone we had ever met in town. We were also joined by an AmeriCorps team from the Fire Unit. Their project had been in Denver but they ran out of work like a couple weeks ago. They had been going around to different places working, and they ended up in Saguache. We were leaving on Friday so they were going to work with the BLM for their last day of round 4. It was fun. We hung out in the park for a long time after everyone was done eating, then Heather, Jess, and I went to the Oasis with Matt and Miles. It was a pretty nice last night in Saguache.
We had found out like a month ago that our team got volunteered for an extra project after the Saguache project ended. Instead of leaving Saguache to go back to Denver on Saturday the 17th, which was when all the other teams were getting back, we left on Friday the 16th to go to Leadville, CO. There apparently had been a week-long project through the Continental Divide Trail Alliance (CDTA) and we were being sent to help for the last two days of it. The information we got about it said that it was some kind of youth project. I think we all agreed that it sounded like a cool project (minus the part where we thought we were going to do trial work with a bunch of teenagers), but we just didn’t want to do it that weekend. It was making us get back to Denver late and take away our entire second to last weekend of AmeriCorps. Well, we got there and were quite pleasantly surprised. It was absolutely gorgeous there. We were at an altitude of about 10,500 feet. It wasn’t a group of teenagers. There were three guys with the Forest Service, one guy from the CDTA, and several random volunteers of all ages. One of these random volunteers had actually hiked all 3,100 miles of the Continental Divide. I think I heard it took her like five months, which is better than the average six months it takes people. It was a pretty cool group. We arrived and set up camp on Friday evening so we could start work bright and early on Saturday morning. I learned from my fabulous teammate Heather’s blog that the CDTA sets out to complete only about 400 feet of trail per 5-day volunteer period. Why so little? Because the section they’re working on near Leadville has no trail at the moment. There is a flag line set out where they want the trail but there’s really not a trail currently. Our job was mainly to remove the bajillion rocks and the stumps and roots of trees that have been cut down from where the trail will go. A few people were also searching up the mountain for giant rocks that could be used for building a wall to hold the trail’s dirt in some sections. I was on rock-removal duty. It was really kind of nice to swing a pick mattock again. I hadn’t used one since Big Bend. It was really satisfying work. Most rocks weren’t too difficult to get out. Except, of course, for the iceberg-like ones that look like just a regular rock sticking out of the ground a little bit but are secretly giant boulders buried deep below the surface. Those are a bit more difficult. I think most of us enjoyed this little extra project. No one wanted to go at first but it ended up being a really nice way for my wonderful team to end its time together. We even got a goody bag complete with a super soft T-shirt out of it.
We worked Saturday and Sunday morning then set off for Denver. We arrived on campus and had about 15 minutes to shower and get ready for our last team dinner. (We always get a team dinner during spike travel included in our budget. Thanks AmeriCorps!) Haha, yeah right. It turned into like 40 minutes. Come on, no one had showered since Friday morning. This team dinner was extra special because we were going to Casa Bonita. In case anyone isn’t aware, an entire episode of the ever-popular South Park was devoted to the ridiculousness of Casa Bonita. (In case you’re curious, you can watch it here. Thanks again, Heather’s blog! And yes, we gathered to watch that episode before leaving.) Now let’s be clear. Casa Bonita is NOT known for its food. Actually, its food is known to be Mexican food that is as greasy and disgusting as possible (with the possible exception of the never ending delicious sopapillas). No, Casa Bonita is known for its cliff divers, Black Bart’s Cave, puppet shows, a mariachi band, and various other performers and ridiculousness. It’s pretty much Denver’s own mini amusement park posing as a restaurant. You stand in one of those lines that parks have where you go back and forth through the railings before arriving at the cash register where you place your order. (You grab a paper menu on your way into the line so you’re prepared.) I learned the hard way that you are not allowed to alter your order in any way. (Courtney: “And could I please get that with no sauce?” Cashier: *Points to giant lit sign with fast food-esque pictures of the food* “It comes like that. You can scrape the sauce off.”) I found out the reason for this soon enough. After passing the cashier, you wind through more of the line before grabbing your cafeteria tray and silverware. You move along the line to where the food is waiting under a red heat lamp. You tell the person what you ordered and they plunk it on your tray. You are then led through the maze of different rooms and levels to your table. After dinner we explored the various wonders of Casa Bonita. It was as ridiculous as the South Park episode promised. It was lovely. Oh! And Lindsey and Marquis also got to come with us. It was a dinner for everyone who has ever been on Sun 4. Christina also had a gift for each of us. It was a copy of Oh, the Places You’ll Go complete with a sparkly cover and nice note from Christina inside about how wonderful we are. We turned them into a Sun 4 yearbook and signed each others’ because we’re just that adorable.
That Thursday, our last night in Saguache, we had a barbecue for like everyone we had ever met in town. We were also joined by an AmeriCorps team from the Fire Unit. Their project had been in Denver but they ran out of work like a couple weeks ago. They had been going around to different places working, and they ended up in Saguache. We were leaving on Friday so they were going to work with the BLM for their last day of round 4. It was fun. We hung out in the park for a long time after everyone was done eating, then Heather, Jess, and I went to the Oasis with Matt and Miles. It was a pretty nice last night in Saguache.
We had found out like a month ago that our team got volunteered for an extra project after the Saguache project ended. Instead of leaving Saguache to go back to Denver on Saturday the 17th, which was when all the other teams were getting back, we left on Friday the 16th to go to Leadville, CO. There apparently had been a week-long project through the Continental Divide Trail Alliance (CDTA) and we were being sent to help for the last two days of it. The information we got about it said that it was some kind of youth project. I think we all agreed that it sounded like a cool project (minus the part where we thought we were going to do trial work with a bunch of teenagers), but we just didn’t want to do it that weekend. It was making us get back to Denver late and take away our entire second to last weekend of AmeriCorps. Well, we got there and were quite pleasantly surprised. It was absolutely gorgeous there. We were at an altitude of about 10,500 feet. It wasn’t a group of teenagers. There were three guys with the Forest Service, one guy from the CDTA, and several random volunteers of all ages. One of these random volunteers had actually hiked all 3,100 miles of the Continental Divide. I think I heard it took her like five months, which is better than the average six months it takes people. It was a pretty cool group. We arrived and set up camp on Friday evening so we could start work bright and early on Saturday morning. I learned from my fabulous teammate Heather’s blog that the CDTA sets out to complete only about 400 feet of trail per 5-day volunteer period. Why so little? Because the section they’re working on near Leadville has no trail at the moment. There is a flag line set out where they want the trail but there’s really not a trail currently. Our job was mainly to remove the bajillion rocks and the stumps and roots of trees that have been cut down from where the trail will go. A few people were also searching up the mountain for giant rocks that could be used for building a wall to hold the trail’s dirt in some sections. I was on rock-removal duty. It was really kind of nice to swing a pick mattock again. I hadn’t used one since Big Bend. It was really satisfying work. Most rocks weren’t too difficult to get out. Except, of course, for the iceberg-like ones that look like just a regular rock sticking out of the ground a little bit but are secretly giant boulders buried deep below the surface. Those are a bit more difficult. I think most of us enjoyed this little extra project. No one wanted to go at first but it ended up being a really nice way for my wonderful team to end its time together. We even got a goody bag complete with a super soft T-shirt out of it.
We worked Saturday and Sunday morning then set off for Denver. We arrived on campus and had about 15 minutes to shower and get ready for our last team dinner. (We always get a team dinner during spike travel included in our budget. Thanks AmeriCorps!) Haha, yeah right. It turned into like 40 minutes. Come on, no one had showered since Friday morning. This team dinner was extra special because we were going to Casa Bonita. In case anyone isn’t aware, an entire episode of the ever-popular South Park was devoted to the ridiculousness of Casa Bonita. (In case you’re curious, you can watch it here. Thanks again, Heather’s blog! And yes, we gathered to watch that episode before leaving.) Now let’s be clear. Casa Bonita is NOT known for its food. Actually, its food is known to be Mexican food that is as greasy and disgusting as possible (with the possible exception of the never ending delicious sopapillas). No, Casa Bonita is known for its cliff divers, Black Bart’s Cave, puppet shows, a mariachi band, and various other performers and ridiculousness. It’s pretty much Denver’s own mini amusement park posing as a restaurant. You stand in one of those lines that parks have where you go back and forth through the railings before arriving at the cash register where you place your order. (You grab a paper menu on your way into the line so you’re prepared.) I learned the hard way that you are not allowed to alter your order in any way. (Courtney: “And could I please get that with no sauce?” Cashier: *Points to giant lit sign with fast food-esque pictures of the food* “It comes like that. You can scrape the sauce off.”) I found out the reason for this soon enough. After passing the cashier, you wind through more of the line before grabbing your cafeteria tray and silverware. You move along the line to where the food is waiting under a red heat lamp. You tell the person what you ordered and they plunk it on your tray. You are then led through the maze of different rooms and levels to your table. After dinner we explored the various wonders of Casa Bonita. It was as ridiculous as the South Park episode promised. It was lovely. Oh! And Lindsey and Marquis also got to come with us. It was a dinner for everyone who has ever been on Sun 4. Christina also had a gift for each of us. It was a copy of Oh, the Places You’ll Go complete with a sparkly cover and nice note from Christina inside about how wonderful we are. We turned them into a Sun 4 yearbook and signed each others’ because we’re just that adorable.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Last Week in Saguache
We had been told that for our last week, we would be split up. Half would be camping near Stone Cellar Monday and Tuesday working on trails and using the horses to bring tools to another Southwest Conservation Corps group working up there. The other half would work with Dwight on that fence we had started on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, the campers would return and join the other half to pull weeds with Clayton Wednesday and Thursday. Christina, TK, Jess, Becky, and Alex did the horses and camping while Tomm, Heather, Michala, Rob, and I stayed back. Let me tell you, I think we chose right. Michala was still working in the office because of her tailbone. Rob had not used any of his days off so he worked Monday then took the rest of the week off. Monday was pretty nice. Tomm, Heather, Rob, and I went back up that ridiculously bumpy road to Dwight’s fence. Remember how the last time we were there we had to reroute the road a little bit to get around some mud? The rerouted road went up a slight incline into the grass. Even with the gas pedal on the floor, the van wouldn’t make it up the hill. Dwight, Heather, Rob, and Tomm all had to get out and push the van while I floored it to get it up there. I of course found it hilarious and felt quite triumphant when I finally made it. The entire day was spent digging holes for H-brace posts and saw the digging of The Most Perfect Post Hole Ever by Heather and myself. We had a perfect area to dig in with hardly any rocks. Heather used the rock bar to loosen dirt and I removed it with the post hole digger. We were done in like 10 or 15 minutes and the hole was perfectly round and not much wider than the post. Perfection is a pretty nice way to start a day, don’t you think? I remember that on Monday we didn’t get much done because with the exception of that perfect post hole, everywhere else we needed to dig was full of rocks. That was also the day we found out that Dwight is a Beast. We knew him as this super nice and friendly slightly elderly man with white hair and a pleasant smile. What we didn’t know was that he can wield a rock bar like no one else. (There are slight variations on what a rock bar looks like exactly, but mostly it’s just a 6-foot metal staff that tapers at the end and weighs probably 15 pounds or so. It’s used to either pry rocks out of the ground or break rocks.) We kept running into soul-crushing rocks like Becky, Tomm and I did the last time we were up there with Dwight. We would take turns with the rock bar with varying techniques of trying to break the giant rock or trying to archaeology it out (I don’t know why we started saying that, but it’s when we would try to get the rock out by digging around it, not breaking it). Dwight would come over and juts wail on the rock with these beastly slams of the rock bar. He would be panting and sweating and we each independently planned what we would do if he hurt himself, but he broke some ridiculously huge rocks. It was insane.
That night, we had a lovely evening of sitting around in the quiet house. I grew up in a family of four. After my brother transferred to a college in Louisiana almost four years ago, usually when I am at home it’s just my parents and myself. And yet, after almost a year of AmeriCorps, having only five people home seems really quiet and empty.
On Tuesday it was only Heather, Tomm and I at work with Dwight. I made it up that grassy hill on my first try this time. Turns out you need to floor it from the beginning. Even with fewer people that day, we got so much more done. We dug more post holes than the day before and put in the cross beams for six H-braces. (Part of the reason that went so fast is because we had always had to do it with a hand saw, but Dwight is a chainsaw-wielding Beast. Goes much faster that way.) Also, at about 2:30, it started to rain really hard. Dwight told us to just take a break until it stopped. He sat in his truck and we sat in our van. It ended up raining for about an hour. After it stopped we worked for another 20 minutes or so, then Dwight called it a day. So even with fewer people and an hour-long break, we got SO MUCH done.
That night Heather, Tomm, and I watched Memento. We marveled at the fact that we all got a good seat in the living room and there was hardly anyone talking. (We don’t mind when people talk during non-dialogue parts, but we all hate it when people talk during dialogue. And that seems to happen a lot when there are eight of us or so watching a movie.) I love my team, but it was really nice to have some peace for a couple days.
The others were supposed to come back Wednesday morning and come join us wherever we were working on weeds with Clayton, but is anyone surprised that didn’t happen? Nope, not a bit. I would have been surprised if that actually happened. It wasn’t their fault though. I think there was some kind of problem with the horses or something. Since it was only Heather, Tomm and me again, we rode in Clayton’s truck. We pretty much just drove around until we would see a henbane plant or two along the road, then hop out and grab it. We ended up near some property Clayton’s family owns around lunch time. We stopped to fill up our water bottles at a stream on his property (delicious!) then had lunch at picnic tables outside of their adorable mountain house. No one lives their permanently anymore but it was really cute. At the end of the day we had the pleasure of accompanying Clayton to take the weeds we had pulled to the dump. This trip was actually highly amusing, but I think I’ll wait to say why until Tomm sends me the picture we took.
The others got back around 5:00 that evening with tales of rain and cold night in tents. We definitely chose the right job for the week.
And that brings us to our last day of work in Saguache. Clayton had a meeting or something in the morning so he just sent us to an area where he knew there were TONS of weeds in a gulch. We found it and split up to cover more ground. Becky and I were walking along the gulch from the far end when we found we needed a shovel. Becky went to find one. I stayed down there alone pulling whatever weeds I could get just with my hands. I ended up being down there for a pretty long time. I yelled to see if anyone was nearby a couple times but no one answered. I started getting paranoid. If there would ever be a time in my life when I would get bitten by a rattlesnake, I was sure it would be right then. I filled my bag with weeds, so there wasn’t really anything else I could do. I started trudging back up the gulch to where we had parked the van. I actually passed Becky and Tomm on the way. They were heading back to where Becky and I had ended up with a shovel and another bag or two. When I got back to the van, everyone else had finished their areas and were ready to move on. I told them about Becky and Tomm and we decided to wait for them so they wouldn’t be left wondering where we were. We ended up waiting about an hour and a half. They had found a huge bunch of weeds. A couple people even walked about a mile down the gulch but didn’t find them. We actually started to get worried. It was a little silly. They came back near lunch time so we just decided to go ahead and eat. Clayton had rejoined us by that time and he brought us Pulling For Colorado T-shirts. He had already given us water bottles with the same logo. The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. We went to another area of the gulch and split into two groups. My group accidentally went into private property pulling weeds. Oops.
That night, we had a lovely evening of sitting around in the quiet house. I grew up in a family of four. After my brother transferred to a college in Louisiana almost four years ago, usually when I am at home it’s just my parents and myself. And yet, after almost a year of AmeriCorps, having only five people home seems really quiet and empty.
On Tuesday it was only Heather, Tomm and I at work with Dwight. I made it up that grassy hill on my first try this time. Turns out you need to floor it from the beginning. Even with fewer people that day, we got so much more done. We dug more post holes than the day before and put in the cross beams for six H-braces. (Part of the reason that went so fast is because we had always had to do it with a hand saw, but Dwight is a chainsaw-wielding Beast. Goes much faster that way.) Also, at about 2:30, it started to rain really hard. Dwight told us to just take a break until it stopped. He sat in his truck and we sat in our van. It ended up raining for about an hour. After it stopped we worked for another 20 minutes or so, then Dwight called it a day. So even with fewer people and an hour-long break, we got SO MUCH done.
That night Heather, Tomm, and I watched Memento. We marveled at the fact that we all got a good seat in the living room and there was hardly anyone talking. (We don’t mind when people talk during non-dialogue parts, but we all hate it when people talk during dialogue. And that seems to happen a lot when there are eight of us or so watching a movie.) I love my team, but it was really nice to have some peace for a couple days.
The others were supposed to come back Wednesday morning and come join us wherever we were working on weeds with Clayton, but is anyone surprised that didn’t happen? Nope, not a bit. I would have been surprised if that actually happened. It wasn’t their fault though. I think there was some kind of problem with the horses or something. Since it was only Heather, Tomm and me again, we rode in Clayton’s truck. We pretty much just drove around until we would see a henbane plant or two along the road, then hop out and grab it. We ended up near some property Clayton’s family owns around lunch time. We stopped to fill up our water bottles at a stream on his property (delicious!) then had lunch at picnic tables outside of their adorable mountain house. No one lives their permanently anymore but it was really cute. At the end of the day we had the pleasure of accompanying Clayton to take the weeds we had pulled to the dump. This trip was actually highly amusing, but I think I’ll wait to say why until Tomm sends me the picture we took.
The others got back around 5:00 that evening with tales of rain and cold night in tents. We definitely chose the right job for the week.
And that brings us to our last day of work in Saguache. Clayton had a meeting or something in the morning so he just sent us to an area where he knew there were TONS of weeds in a gulch. We found it and split up to cover more ground. Becky and I were walking along the gulch from the far end when we found we needed a shovel. Becky went to find one. I stayed down there alone pulling whatever weeds I could get just with my hands. I ended up being down there for a pretty long time. I yelled to see if anyone was nearby a couple times but no one answered. I started getting paranoid. If there would ever be a time in my life when I would get bitten by a rattlesnake, I was sure it would be right then. I filled my bag with weeds, so there wasn’t really anything else I could do. I started trudging back up the gulch to where we had parked the van. I actually passed Becky and Tomm on the way. They were heading back to where Becky and I had ended up with a shovel and another bag or two. When I got back to the van, everyone else had finished their areas and were ready to move on. I told them about Becky and Tomm and we decided to wait for them so they wouldn’t be left wondering where we were. We ended up waiting about an hour and a half. They had found a huge bunch of weeds. A couple people even walked about a mile down the gulch but didn’t find them. We actually started to get worried. It was a little silly. They came back near lunch time so we just decided to go ahead and eat. Clayton had rejoined us by that time and he brought us Pulling For Colorado T-shirts. He had already given us water bottles with the same logo. The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. We went to another area of the gulch and split into two groups. My group accidentally went into private property pulling weeds. Oops.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Week 8. Nearing the End!
That Thursday night, we all made a trip to Alamosa. The girls all saw Eclipse, the third Twilight movie, while the boys saw The Last Airbender. Funny how the second and third Twilight movies both came out during AmeriCorps, and the girls on my team got to see them together.
On Friday, we had planned to have another barbecue in the park to celebrate the Fourth of July. We love our barbecues here. We had invited pretty much everyone we know and were really excited about it. Unfortunately, it was rainy all day and pretty chilly. Only a few people showed up, including Will (one of the fire guys), Sarah (who works in the office), and some fire guys we hadn’t met yet who are here temporarily from Wyoming. We didn’t get rained on because the park has an area with a roof and picnic tables. It was cold but we still had fun.
On Saturday, I believe we watched more World Cup. At least some of us did. I don’t remember who played right now. TK and Heather have watched pretty much every World Cup game from the same table at the Oasis (the only restaurant/bar in town, conveniently located less than a block from our house). I’ve watched most games with them, and a few other people come occasionally. That night, Heather, Jess, TK, and I all went back to the Oasis (or as the cool kids call it, The O) that night when it was being a bar instead of restaurant. We had heard that nights when there are Ultimate Fighting Championship fights are the busiest there, and Saturday was fight night. Will, Miles (a fire guy who lives at the bunkhouse), and Matt (an AmeriCorps VISTA with the BLM who also lives at the bunkhouse) were all there as well. It was pretty fun. When the O is being a bar, it doesn’t really have a set closing time. If there are no people, it closes early. If people are there, it’ll stay open. The seven of us were there playing pool and playing crappy songs on the jukebox way later than anyone else, but Travis the bartender didn’t seem to mind.
On Sunday, the Fourth of July, we went to Salida. We had seen posters for the activities on the Fourth, including a parade and a band. The parade was ok but nothing like parades in Alton. We had planned to stay for the band but it was kind of lame. We also found out that we were invited to a gathering at Josh’s house (he’s yet another fire guy) so we left Salida early. Heather, Jess, Michala and I went to Josh’s, where we got to see Miles, John (a fire guy who used to live at the bunkhouse but then moved to Alamosa to do fires at Sand Dunes) and Kent (yep, another fire guy). It was pretty fun. We hadn’t seen any of the fire guys in like a month because there was a huge fire near the Sand Dunes. It was especially nice to see John, since he moved away.
We had Monday off since everyone at the BLM did. Most of us went to the Sand Dunes to sunbathe. We checked the weather and saw that it wasn’t supposed to be windy like it was last time we were there. Unfortunately, it seems we are not able to have a pain-free trip to the Sand Dunes. Instead of sand blowing into our legs like a thousand tiny knives like last time, the ridiculously hot sand burned our feet. Oh my goodness, it was painful. You couldn’t walk barefoot because it was just too freaking hot. Keeping flip flops on made it really awkward to walk through the sand and was still super hot. It was also really rocky where we were walking and rocks kept getting between my feet and flip flop. We walked until we came to the first dune so we could lie on a slope. We were all super sweaty just laying there. It was kind of pleasant though. When we were on our way out we saw John in the parking lot. He and another fire guy were standing outside their fire truck in the Dunes parking lot to just talk to people about the fire near there. It had been something like 500 acres but they’ve gotten it a little more under control.
Tuesday began our weed removal adventure. We would be working with Clayton, who turned out to be really cool. The weed that needed removing was Black Henbane. It is an annual plant that has probably about 20 seed pods on each stalk, with roughly 1,000 seeds in each pod. While the plant is green and alive, it poses no threat. When it dies and dries out, those millions of seeds just blow away in the wind. They are then able to germinate for the next 35 years. This plant also grows really quickly. It is also poisonous to humans and to cows. Apparently eating the seeds produces a mild hallucinogenic effect. And it’s not native to the area. You can see why this is a problem. So Clayton just took us along the road (he in his truck and us following in the van) until he spotted an area with a lot of these plants. We would stop and hop out to rip them out by the roots. We quickly realized that this was not usually a job for all seven or so of us who were in the van, so we split into two groups and alternated who got out at each spot. Clayton said he wanted it to be a chill day since it was getting back to work after such a long weekend. Not bad at all.
That Wednesday I took one of my allotted days off that I had not yet used. I chose to use one that day because it was Spain playing Germany in the World Cup semifinals. (Hey, I can use my days for whatever I want!) TK was also taking that day off. During halftime when I went to the restroom, Christina appeared in the restroom. Then when I came back out to the table, there was Heather. Apparently the team was pulling weeds not too far away and requested to come back into town for lunch. Also, it looked stormy out, so they were waiting to see what the weather would do before going back out. They ended up going back to work for only like another hour or so before the storm came.
Thursday was another day of pulling weeds, but it was a really short day. The BLM wanted to have a barbecue for us to thank us for all we’ve done and scheduled it for that Thursday at like 3:00. So we pulled more weeds with Clayton all morning but finished the areas he wanted to get done at about lunch time. He then decided to give us a little treat and take us to Penitente Canyon which was way out near La Garita. I think. He said there are really cool places to hike around there and you can climb up the canyon walls. Unfortunately, by the time we got there we only had about 20 minutes to look around. Clayton didn’t want to make us late for our own party. It was really cool there though. The barbecue was delicious. It was fajitas again, at a newish campsite we hadn’t been to yet called Big Springs. Again, one big wok full of meat (this time is was pork, which I didn’t eat, but the rest was delicious), another full of potatoes and onions, and another for warming tortillas. Mmm, yummy. It was really nice. Almost everyone who works at the BLM came to thank us.
That weekend we did…something. The only day I can remember clearly is Saturday. We had our Day of Service, which we are required to organize and do both second and fourth rounds. We went back to Alamosa (where we had worked in the homeless shelter and community garden before). There was this thing called Restaurant Walk going on that day and the food bank was part of it. (There’s a whole network of places that all benefit La Puente, the homeless shelter, like a coffee shop, a thrift store, the food bank, and some kind of place for kids. It’s actually pretty cool. All those places are staffed by volunteers and AmeriCorps people, like the AmeriCorps Directs with Habitat in New Orleans.) For the Restaurant Walk, you pay like $10 or something then get to walk around to a bunch of different restaurants and get samples of food. Sally, the AmeriCorps person in charge of us for the day, split us into two groups. Michala, Jess, Becky, Tomm, and I all worked at the food bank in the morning. Sally had made chili for the food bank to give out for restaurant walk but we were only supposed to sit at a table with a bunch of AmeriCorps information for when people come in. Pretty much no one was interested. Which means that we just had to sit there for a few hours. Super easy. Since no one was there, we got to split up and take turns walking over to the coffee shop for a beverage and to listen to the live music going on for a bit. And we got hours for it. The other group was pulling weeds in the community garden all morning. The two groups swapped after lunch. Pulling weeds wasn’t too bad. There were so many that we all just sat in a group and talked while we pulled the weeds we could reach, then just scooted over a bit. The day was cut short by the appearance of a huge thunderstorm later in the afternoon. Not a bad day of work at all.
That evening after dinner, several of us decided to go enjoy some beverages in the park (don’t worry, it’s legal). Eventually, the rest of the team joined us. It was extremely enjoyable. It was also some pretty good bonding, just the 10 of us hanging out. When everyone started deciding to go home, Heather, Jess and I went over to the bunkhouse. Heather had mentioned to Miles that we might come over sometime that night since it was our last full weekend in Saguache. We went to the house and no one was home, so we decided to go to the O. Oh look, there are Matt, Miles, Travis the bartender, and no one else. Matt and Miles started on this whole thing about how they were at the O to drown their sorrows that we hadn’t come over. Matt said Miles had made hors d’oeuvres for us (300 mozzarella sticks, he said) and then ate them all because we didn’t come. A 40 square foot cake was supposedly also made, but they had to eat that too. It was hilarious. They’re both really funny.
I’ve asked Becky, Michala, and Jess what else we did that weekend and none of us can remember. I don’t think we really did anything else interesting. Memorable last weekend, huh?
Pictures are coming soon! I promise! (Maybe not until after I get home, but soon!)
On Friday, we had planned to have another barbecue in the park to celebrate the Fourth of July. We love our barbecues here. We had invited pretty much everyone we know and were really excited about it. Unfortunately, it was rainy all day and pretty chilly. Only a few people showed up, including Will (one of the fire guys), Sarah (who works in the office), and some fire guys we hadn’t met yet who are here temporarily from Wyoming. We didn’t get rained on because the park has an area with a roof and picnic tables. It was cold but we still had fun.
On Saturday, I believe we watched more World Cup. At least some of us did. I don’t remember who played right now. TK and Heather have watched pretty much every World Cup game from the same table at the Oasis (the only restaurant/bar in town, conveniently located less than a block from our house). I’ve watched most games with them, and a few other people come occasionally. That night, Heather, Jess, TK, and I all went back to the Oasis (or as the cool kids call it, The O) that night when it was being a bar instead of restaurant. We had heard that nights when there are Ultimate Fighting Championship fights are the busiest there, and Saturday was fight night. Will, Miles (a fire guy who lives at the bunkhouse), and Matt (an AmeriCorps VISTA with the BLM who also lives at the bunkhouse) were all there as well. It was pretty fun. When the O is being a bar, it doesn’t really have a set closing time. If there are no people, it closes early. If people are there, it’ll stay open. The seven of us were there playing pool and playing crappy songs on the jukebox way later than anyone else, but Travis the bartender didn’t seem to mind.
On Sunday, the Fourth of July, we went to Salida. We had seen posters for the activities on the Fourth, including a parade and a band. The parade was ok but nothing like parades in Alton. We had planned to stay for the band but it was kind of lame. We also found out that we were invited to a gathering at Josh’s house (he’s yet another fire guy) so we left Salida early. Heather, Jess, Michala and I went to Josh’s, where we got to see Miles, John (a fire guy who used to live at the bunkhouse but then moved to Alamosa to do fires at Sand Dunes) and Kent (yep, another fire guy). It was pretty fun. We hadn’t seen any of the fire guys in like a month because there was a huge fire near the Sand Dunes. It was especially nice to see John, since he moved away.
We had Monday off since everyone at the BLM did. Most of us went to the Sand Dunes to sunbathe. We checked the weather and saw that it wasn’t supposed to be windy like it was last time we were there. Unfortunately, it seems we are not able to have a pain-free trip to the Sand Dunes. Instead of sand blowing into our legs like a thousand tiny knives like last time, the ridiculously hot sand burned our feet. Oh my goodness, it was painful. You couldn’t walk barefoot because it was just too freaking hot. Keeping flip flops on made it really awkward to walk through the sand and was still super hot. It was also really rocky where we were walking and rocks kept getting between my feet and flip flop. We walked until we came to the first dune so we could lie on a slope. We were all super sweaty just laying there. It was kind of pleasant though. When we were on our way out we saw John in the parking lot. He and another fire guy were standing outside their fire truck in the Dunes parking lot to just talk to people about the fire near there. It had been something like 500 acres but they’ve gotten it a little more under control.
Tuesday began our weed removal adventure. We would be working with Clayton, who turned out to be really cool. The weed that needed removing was Black Henbane. It is an annual plant that has probably about 20 seed pods on each stalk, with roughly 1,000 seeds in each pod. While the plant is green and alive, it poses no threat. When it dies and dries out, those millions of seeds just blow away in the wind. They are then able to germinate for the next 35 years. This plant also grows really quickly. It is also poisonous to humans and to cows. Apparently eating the seeds produces a mild hallucinogenic effect. And it’s not native to the area. You can see why this is a problem. So Clayton just took us along the road (he in his truck and us following in the van) until he spotted an area with a lot of these plants. We would stop and hop out to rip them out by the roots. We quickly realized that this was not usually a job for all seven or so of us who were in the van, so we split into two groups and alternated who got out at each spot. Clayton said he wanted it to be a chill day since it was getting back to work after such a long weekend. Not bad at all.
That Wednesday I took one of my allotted days off that I had not yet used. I chose to use one that day because it was Spain playing Germany in the World Cup semifinals. (Hey, I can use my days for whatever I want!) TK was also taking that day off. During halftime when I went to the restroom, Christina appeared in the restroom. Then when I came back out to the table, there was Heather. Apparently the team was pulling weeds not too far away and requested to come back into town for lunch. Also, it looked stormy out, so they were waiting to see what the weather would do before going back out. They ended up going back to work for only like another hour or so before the storm came.
Thursday was another day of pulling weeds, but it was a really short day. The BLM wanted to have a barbecue for us to thank us for all we’ve done and scheduled it for that Thursday at like 3:00. So we pulled more weeds with Clayton all morning but finished the areas he wanted to get done at about lunch time. He then decided to give us a little treat and take us to Penitente Canyon which was way out near La Garita. I think. He said there are really cool places to hike around there and you can climb up the canyon walls. Unfortunately, by the time we got there we only had about 20 minutes to look around. Clayton didn’t want to make us late for our own party. It was really cool there though. The barbecue was delicious. It was fajitas again, at a newish campsite we hadn’t been to yet called Big Springs. Again, one big wok full of meat (this time is was pork, which I didn’t eat, but the rest was delicious), another full of potatoes and onions, and another for warming tortillas. Mmm, yummy. It was really nice. Almost everyone who works at the BLM came to thank us.
That weekend we did…something. The only day I can remember clearly is Saturday. We had our Day of Service, which we are required to organize and do both second and fourth rounds. We went back to Alamosa (where we had worked in the homeless shelter and community garden before). There was this thing called Restaurant Walk going on that day and the food bank was part of it. (There’s a whole network of places that all benefit La Puente, the homeless shelter, like a coffee shop, a thrift store, the food bank, and some kind of place for kids. It’s actually pretty cool. All those places are staffed by volunteers and AmeriCorps people, like the AmeriCorps Directs with Habitat in New Orleans.) For the Restaurant Walk, you pay like $10 or something then get to walk around to a bunch of different restaurants and get samples of food. Sally, the AmeriCorps person in charge of us for the day, split us into two groups. Michala, Jess, Becky, Tomm, and I all worked at the food bank in the morning. Sally had made chili for the food bank to give out for restaurant walk but we were only supposed to sit at a table with a bunch of AmeriCorps information for when people come in. Pretty much no one was interested. Which means that we just had to sit there for a few hours. Super easy. Since no one was there, we got to split up and take turns walking over to the coffee shop for a beverage and to listen to the live music going on for a bit. And we got hours for it. The other group was pulling weeds in the community garden all morning. The two groups swapped after lunch. Pulling weeds wasn’t too bad. There were so many that we all just sat in a group and talked while we pulled the weeds we could reach, then just scooted over a bit. The day was cut short by the appearance of a huge thunderstorm later in the afternoon. Not a bad day of work at all.
That evening after dinner, several of us decided to go enjoy some beverages in the park (don’t worry, it’s legal). Eventually, the rest of the team joined us. It was extremely enjoyable. It was also some pretty good bonding, just the 10 of us hanging out. When everyone started deciding to go home, Heather, Jess and I went over to the bunkhouse. Heather had mentioned to Miles that we might come over sometime that night since it was our last full weekend in Saguache. We went to the house and no one was home, so we decided to go to the O. Oh look, there are Matt, Miles, Travis the bartender, and no one else. Matt and Miles started on this whole thing about how they were at the O to drown their sorrows that we hadn’t come over. Matt said Miles had made hors d’oeuvres for us (300 mozzarella sticks, he said) and then ate them all because we didn’t come. A 40 square foot cake was supposedly also made, but they had to eat that too. It was hilarious. They’re both really funny.
I’ve asked Becky, Michala, and Jess what else we did that weekend and none of us can remember. I don’t think we really did anything else interesting. Memorable last weekend, huh?
Pictures are coming soon! I promise! (Maybe not until after I get home, but soon!)
Friday, July 9, 2010
Weeks 6 and 7
Week 6:
That week was kind of strange. We were working with Lisa on a barbed wire fence up near Stone Cellar again. The first plan was to come back to town at like noon on Wednesday because we had a short project here we could work on. We would then drive back up Thursday morning to ride horses (a “service learning day,” but really it was just for fun because the BLM people are nice to us). It was nice to be back at the cabin. It’s so pretty up there. So we made the 1.5-hour drive up there on Monday with both our van and cargo truck. As soon as we unloaded the truck, Becky and Michala drove it back down because they both had doctor appointments. Becky has had a cough for a while and unbeknownst to me, Michala’s tailbone had been hurting pretty bad for like two weeks even though she hadn’t fallen down or anything. They didn’t get back to the cabin until that evening. Becky had gotten an inhaler and Michala had found out some news. She had a cyst on her tailbone that has been there since birth, but all the bouncy car rides we’ve been doing made it inflamed or something. Apparently this happens to soldiers a lot when they ride around in Jeeps all the time. So she had an appointment on Wednesday to get it drained and they said she’d probably have surgery to have it removed on Friday. Eek. Christina drove her back down to our house that night since she couldn’t do the work at the cabin and wanted her to work in the BLM office on Tuesday. We found out Christina’s plan on Tuesday. She found out when she was in town that our Wednesday afternoon project was cancelled so there was no reason for everyone to go back to town before Thursday and riding horses. TK and Heather were both taking a day off on Wednesday to watch the USA/Ghana World Cup game. Tuesday after work, TK, Heather, and I would drive down to Saguache. On Wednesday, they would watch the game and I would take Michala to the doctor in Salida in Christina’s car. After the game, TK and Heather would drive back up to the cabin bringing with them all the food needed for those extra days at the cabin and things needed to ride horses since everyone expected to be back in town before that. I would stay at the church with Michala Wednesday and Thursday. Whew. So confusing. Michala’s doctor appointment was fairly traumatic because the local anesthesia shot they had given her didn’t work. She also found out that she can wait another month until she’s back home after AmeriCorps is over to have the removal surgery. She also found out that she needed to get one of those donut-shaped pillows to sit on until she has the surgery. So we went to the medical supply stores and started looking around. We couldn’t find the pillows so we found a person. Michala said “Do you have any of those donut-shaped pillows?” and the lady said “Sure! Do you want chocolate or glazed?” Gotta love a medical supply lady with a sense of humor. She showed us the options, which were not what we expected. We expected like a clear plastic inflatable thing. What they had were fabric-covered foam things in either red plaid or navy blue. We both agreed that she should get the plaid because it was so silly looking and it’s silly enough to need a butt pillow anyway. We laughed about it for the rest of the day. It looks like a Scottish dog bed. It looks especially silly on our couches, which are kind pastel and floral. When the others came home and saw it, Becky immediately decided it needed a Scottish name and called it MacDougall. So that’s how MacDougall the Butt Pillow came into our lives. Luckily Michala had already decided to laugh about it instead of being embarrassed by it.
I’m going out of order here. Monday of that week while Becky and Michala were gone, the rest of us built a new barbed wire fence about a 20 minute drive up a terrifying rocky mountain from the cabin. Building a new wire fence is WAY easier than repairing an old one. Only the middle two wires needed to be barbed. The top and bottom wires could be smooth. My favorite part was pounding in the metal posts. Post pounders are fun. They’re kind of like a metal tube that is closed on one end with handles on the sides. You put the open end of the tube over the post and pound away so the top of the post hits the closed end of the tube until the post is in the ground enough. We finished that fence on Tuesday. I’m not entirely sure what everyone else did Wednesday while I was with Michala. They rode horses on Thursday. (I didn’t mind missing out to stay with Michala because while I’m much more comfortable being near horses after that training we had, being on a horse still makes me nervous. And they were going to be riding like five miles.)
That Friday night most of us went to see Robin Hood at the two-block-away movie theater. They’re only open Friday through Sunday and show one movie per weekend. We were not impressed with it as a Robin Hood story, but it was pretty good as a Medieval action movie.
On Saturday, the five girls on the team all went to Salida. We had a delicious dinner at the Boathouse Cantina, went to one other bar, then came home pretty early. AmeriCorps has turned us all into old people.
Week 7:
Week 7 started with my two least favorite days of my entire AmeriCorps experience thus far. We were scheduled to be surveying baby trees all week. We had been told something about how we’d have to use maps and a GPS to find these trees and document them or something. It sounded like it might be kind of cool. Oh how wrong we were. On Monday we were missing Michala (who would be working in the office all week to avoid bumpy car rides), Becky (who had been randomly selected for a drug test), and Christina (who had to take Becky for the test). The rest of us were sent to work with Sarah and Kevin. We drove out to the woods and were put into two groups. I was with Tomm and Alex, led by Kevin. Oh my goodness, the work was boring. You have to use the GPS to find a set of coordinates that were already programmed in. Then one person holds the end of a tape measure on that spot while another person pulls the tape out to 11.8 feet. That person then circles the spot while still holding the tape and counts all the baby trees in the circle. Someone else documents the findings. We developed a system. I would find the spot with the GPS (which I got pretty good at by the end of the day). Tomm and Alex would come do the circling and counting while I took off to find the next spot. Kevin documented. I feel bad saying this because he seems like a nice enough guy, but Kevin is possibly the dullest person I’ve ever met. I tried to make conversation and be cheerful but it just didn’t work. A bad omen for the day: When the groups first separated and we were walking down the road to our first spot, I realized I didn’t know Kevin’s name. I asked and he said Kevin. I said “Oh, I’m Courtney. Nice to meet you.” He said nothing. He didn’t say it was nice to meet me. He didn’t ask Tomm or Alex’s names. Nothing. Every time I tried to ask conversation-starting questions, he would just answer the question and that was the end of it. Very frustrating. With boring work like that, you need to make it interesting somehow. It just didn’t happen for us that day. And it wasn’t just a horrible job because it was boring. I’ve had boring jobs before. It was also physically pretty hard. The reason the baby trees needed to be counted was that they were in areas of prescribed burns. So everywhere we had to walk was literally covered in dead tree trunks and branches. Sometimes when you step on them they would be sunk into the ground and stay still and sometimes they would roll out from under you. You never know which it will be. The area was also really hilly. There was little shade and it was pretty warm that day. If something is hard, it’s usually also interesting. If something is boring, it’s usually also easy. Nope, neither of these were true for that day. Adding to the misery of the day was the fact that we HAD to wear pants, long sleeves, and hard hats. To count baby trees. I would have wanted to wear pants anyway because we had to walk through a lot of brush but I don’t think anything touched my arms all day. And hard hats? Seriously? What do our heads need to be protected from? Partially due to my compulsion to ask WHY for everything we do here and partially in an attempt to make conversation and get Kevin to talk, I asked a few different times why we had to wear these things. I did not get an acceptable answer. The long sleeves were apparently to protect our arms from getting scratched by branches. Heat stroke and overheating sound less safe to me than a few scratches on my arms (which, PS, I’ve had many of already). One time, after asking about the hard hats yet again, Kevin said he’s been hit in the head with branches a few times. (He’s been doing this for several years.) I said but I’m not that tall. (He’s tall.) He said no, from stuff falling out of trees onto his head. I would rather face the highly unlikely possibility of something falling out of a tree onto my head than be awkwardly top-heavy all day and have my scalp covered in sweat. By the end of the day I was just carrying my stupid hard hat around most of the time.
Heather, Rob, Jess, and TK, who were with Sarah for the day, didn’t mind it much at all. They loved chatty outgoing Sarah and even invited her to the barbecue we’re having on Friday to celebrate the Fourth of July. Blah blah blah.
On Tuesday morning before work, the only thing keeping me going was the thought that surely we would switch up the groups and I would not be with Kevin again. Also because the plan was that since we all knew how to do it now, we could go out in pairs with each other, not groups with Sarah or Kevin. Unfortunately this was not the case. The only people from the team who would be out there that day were Heather, Rob, Tomm, Jess, and I. When we met at the BLM office in the morning like always, Sarah came out and said that Heather and Rob would be with her and Tomm, Jess, and I would be with Kevin. I immediately feared for my sanity. I think Tuesday was even worse. It began with the crushing blow of not switching groups. We were also in a different area that day which was much hillier, making the hiking much harder. I was doing the GPS part again for most of the day. It was much harder to navigate there because there were a lot more adult trees that I would have to go around which made it way harder to keep a straight course to the next point. Ug. At least it’s over now. Kevin told us that day that he heard we would be working on a fence somewhere Wednesday and Thursday (that was the previous Wednesday afternoon’s cancelled project). Thank goodness.
Tuesday night we watched another gem from one of Tomm’s horror movie four-packs. The cover said it was called The Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep. When TK put the DVD in his laptop, he clicked on the thing that said The Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep. When the movie started and it showed the title screen, the title was Deadly Waters. We were confused. A little ways into the movie we realized that the description on the back of the DVD case for The Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep matched the movie we were watching. The star was Charlie O’Connell, Jerry O’Connell’s brother. He had three different faces that I could tell: there was angry face, happy face, and flirting-with-the-blonde-main-character face. The plot wasn’t quite as awful as Raging Sharks but the acting was worse. It was pretty ridiculous. I’m starting to forget what a good movie looks like. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one.
(I wasn’t feeling well on Wednesday so I didn’t go to work. The rest of the team did indeed build a fence with Dwight. It was a log fence, which we haven’t done before. I don’t know much about that day though.)
On Thursday, we were with Dwight again. Our task was to put in the wood corner posts for a soon-to-be-built barbed wire fence. He didn’t even bring any wire because the only goal was to put in the H-braces that would go on each corner of the square fenced-in area. We set off to the far away location of this future fence. First Dwight and Dave (who I later learned is an actual shaman, but I did not get to talk to him at all that day) in the BLM truck, then Alex and TK in our truck, then the rest of us in the van, driven by me. We drove down the highway as usual then turned off onto a dirt road, also as usual. The dirt road turned into gravel, which then turned into rocks. The rocks got bigger and bigger. Soon we were bouncing along so violently that we wondered if the van would actually fall apart on us this time. As has been happening more and more frequently during ridiculous situations on this project, I got a laughing fit. The road was just SO BUMPY and there was nothing I could do about it. It didn’t help that I could see the rest of the team bouncing up and down in the rearview mirror. Also, as the road got bumpier, it also got narrower. This meant that I couldn’t avoid scraping past tree branches every few seconds. I had tears running down my face I was laughing so hard. Then it got worse. We got to a part of the road that went fairly steeply upward and was covered in mud. The BLM truck made it up ok, but our truck couldn’t. If our truck couldn’t, there’s no way Gertrude could make it. Alex and TK made several tries up in the truck, even trying going off the road into the grass a bit after Dwight and Dave had cut down trees to make room. It just wouldn’t happen. We were told that the worksite was only about a half-mile from where we were and we could just walk, but for some reason we decided not to do that. The whole team got out of the van and helped clear brush next to the road. Dwight got out his chainsaw and cut up the huge fallen trees in the way. That’s right, we were rerouting the road. I think we would have just walked the rest of the way but Dwight and Dave were worried about other people getting stuck there. Then we backed up our vehicles to go on our new road. The truck almost got stuck again trying to get up onto the grass, but I learned from their mistake. Apparently you just have to go fast. I was randomly chuckling for the rest of the day just thinking about how silly the drive to work was.
Once we finally got there, we began The Day That Stole Our Souls. We were in groups of two or three on each corner on the future fence. Becky, Tomm, and I were a group. There were two unclaimed corners. We started at one but discovered it was really rocky. Since we didn’t have a rock bar at the time we decided to go to the other one which was down a little hill and nearer a creek. Big mistake. We started digging our hole and ran into a huge rock about eight inches down. We knew we couldn’t get past it so we just moved over and started a new hole. Same thing happened. So we moved over again. Turns out the third time is indeed a charm. We managed to dig our 30-inch deep post hole in our third location and finished right before lunch. After lunch, since three wood posts would need to go there eventually, we each carried an eight-foot, six-inch diameter wood post the long-enough distance from the truck. We got that first post in without much problem. We then moved in to our next post hole. About ten inches in, we hit another rock. It was jutting out from the edge of the hole and went about halfway across it. We couldn’t just start a new hole like we did before because this one had to be a certain distance from the first, otherwise the cross piece for the H-brace wouldn’t fit. We thought since we could expose one side of the rock, surely we could get it out. We then spent the next two and a half hours or so having our souls sucked out by this rock. Imagine the frustration. We tried just slamming it with a rock bar (which we had gotten by this point) to break it up. We tried widening the hole to find the other side of the rock. We tried prying it up. Nothing worked. Luckily everyone else finished early-ish and we got to leave at about 4:00. Also luckily, my soul was mostly restored as I laughed my way down the bouncy road back to the highway.
That week was kind of strange. We were working with Lisa on a barbed wire fence up near Stone Cellar again. The first plan was to come back to town at like noon on Wednesday because we had a short project here we could work on. We would then drive back up Thursday morning to ride horses (a “service learning day,” but really it was just for fun because the BLM people are nice to us). It was nice to be back at the cabin. It’s so pretty up there. So we made the 1.5-hour drive up there on Monday with both our van and cargo truck. As soon as we unloaded the truck, Becky and Michala drove it back down because they both had doctor appointments. Becky has had a cough for a while and unbeknownst to me, Michala’s tailbone had been hurting pretty bad for like two weeks even though she hadn’t fallen down or anything. They didn’t get back to the cabin until that evening. Becky had gotten an inhaler and Michala had found out some news. She had a cyst on her tailbone that has been there since birth, but all the bouncy car rides we’ve been doing made it inflamed or something. Apparently this happens to soldiers a lot when they ride around in Jeeps all the time. So she had an appointment on Wednesday to get it drained and they said she’d probably have surgery to have it removed on Friday. Eek. Christina drove her back down to our house that night since she couldn’t do the work at the cabin and wanted her to work in the BLM office on Tuesday. We found out Christina’s plan on Tuesday. She found out when she was in town that our Wednesday afternoon project was cancelled so there was no reason for everyone to go back to town before Thursday and riding horses. TK and Heather were both taking a day off on Wednesday to watch the USA/Ghana World Cup game. Tuesday after work, TK, Heather, and I would drive down to Saguache. On Wednesday, they would watch the game and I would take Michala to the doctor in Salida in Christina’s car. After the game, TK and Heather would drive back up to the cabin bringing with them all the food needed for those extra days at the cabin and things needed to ride horses since everyone expected to be back in town before that. I would stay at the church with Michala Wednesday and Thursday. Whew. So confusing. Michala’s doctor appointment was fairly traumatic because the local anesthesia shot they had given her didn’t work. She also found out that she can wait another month until she’s back home after AmeriCorps is over to have the removal surgery. She also found out that she needed to get one of those donut-shaped pillows to sit on until she has the surgery. So we went to the medical supply stores and started looking around. We couldn’t find the pillows so we found a person. Michala said “Do you have any of those donut-shaped pillows?” and the lady said “Sure! Do you want chocolate or glazed?” Gotta love a medical supply lady with a sense of humor. She showed us the options, which were not what we expected. We expected like a clear plastic inflatable thing. What they had were fabric-covered foam things in either red plaid or navy blue. We both agreed that she should get the plaid because it was so silly looking and it’s silly enough to need a butt pillow anyway. We laughed about it for the rest of the day. It looks like a Scottish dog bed. It looks especially silly on our couches, which are kind pastel and floral. When the others came home and saw it, Becky immediately decided it needed a Scottish name and called it MacDougall. So that’s how MacDougall the Butt Pillow came into our lives. Luckily Michala had already decided to laugh about it instead of being embarrassed by it.
I’m going out of order here. Monday of that week while Becky and Michala were gone, the rest of us built a new barbed wire fence about a 20 minute drive up a terrifying rocky mountain from the cabin. Building a new wire fence is WAY easier than repairing an old one. Only the middle two wires needed to be barbed. The top and bottom wires could be smooth. My favorite part was pounding in the metal posts. Post pounders are fun. They’re kind of like a metal tube that is closed on one end with handles on the sides. You put the open end of the tube over the post and pound away so the top of the post hits the closed end of the tube until the post is in the ground enough. We finished that fence on Tuesday. I’m not entirely sure what everyone else did Wednesday while I was with Michala. They rode horses on Thursday. (I didn’t mind missing out to stay with Michala because while I’m much more comfortable being near horses after that training we had, being on a horse still makes me nervous. And they were going to be riding like five miles.)
That Friday night most of us went to see Robin Hood at the two-block-away movie theater. They’re only open Friday through Sunday and show one movie per weekend. We were not impressed with it as a Robin Hood story, but it was pretty good as a Medieval action movie.
On Saturday, the five girls on the team all went to Salida. We had a delicious dinner at the Boathouse Cantina, went to one other bar, then came home pretty early. AmeriCorps has turned us all into old people.
Week 7:
Week 7 started with my two least favorite days of my entire AmeriCorps experience thus far. We were scheduled to be surveying baby trees all week. We had been told something about how we’d have to use maps and a GPS to find these trees and document them or something. It sounded like it might be kind of cool. Oh how wrong we were. On Monday we were missing Michala (who would be working in the office all week to avoid bumpy car rides), Becky (who had been randomly selected for a drug test), and Christina (who had to take Becky for the test). The rest of us were sent to work with Sarah and Kevin. We drove out to the woods and were put into two groups. I was with Tomm and Alex, led by Kevin. Oh my goodness, the work was boring. You have to use the GPS to find a set of coordinates that were already programmed in. Then one person holds the end of a tape measure on that spot while another person pulls the tape out to 11.8 feet. That person then circles the spot while still holding the tape and counts all the baby trees in the circle. Someone else documents the findings. We developed a system. I would find the spot with the GPS (which I got pretty good at by the end of the day). Tomm and Alex would come do the circling and counting while I took off to find the next spot. Kevin documented. I feel bad saying this because he seems like a nice enough guy, but Kevin is possibly the dullest person I’ve ever met. I tried to make conversation and be cheerful but it just didn’t work. A bad omen for the day: When the groups first separated and we were walking down the road to our first spot, I realized I didn’t know Kevin’s name. I asked and he said Kevin. I said “Oh, I’m Courtney. Nice to meet you.” He said nothing. He didn’t say it was nice to meet me. He didn’t ask Tomm or Alex’s names. Nothing. Every time I tried to ask conversation-starting questions, he would just answer the question and that was the end of it. Very frustrating. With boring work like that, you need to make it interesting somehow. It just didn’t happen for us that day. And it wasn’t just a horrible job because it was boring. I’ve had boring jobs before. It was also physically pretty hard. The reason the baby trees needed to be counted was that they were in areas of prescribed burns. So everywhere we had to walk was literally covered in dead tree trunks and branches. Sometimes when you step on them they would be sunk into the ground and stay still and sometimes they would roll out from under you. You never know which it will be. The area was also really hilly. There was little shade and it was pretty warm that day. If something is hard, it’s usually also interesting. If something is boring, it’s usually also easy. Nope, neither of these were true for that day. Adding to the misery of the day was the fact that we HAD to wear pants, long sleeves, and hard hats. To count baby trees. I would have wanted to wear pants anyway because we had to walk through a lot of brush but I don’t think anything touched my arms all day. And hard hats? Seriously? What do our heads need to be protected from? Partially due to my compulsion to ask WHY for everything we do here and partially in an attempt to make conversation and get Kevin to talk, I asked a few different times why we had to wear these things. I did not get an acceptable answer. The long sleeves were apparently to protect our arms from getting scratched by branches. Heat stroke and overheating sound less safe to me than a few scratches on my arms (which, PS, I’ve had many of already). One time, after asking about the hard hats yet again, Kevin said he’s been hit in the head with branches a few times. (He’s been doing this for several years.) I said but I’m not that tall. (He’s tall.) He said no, from stuff falling out of trees onto his head. I would rather face the highly unlikely possibility of something falling out of a tree onto my head than be awkwardly top-heavy all day and have my scalp covered in sweat. By the end of the day I was just carrying my stupid hard hat around most of the time.
Heather, Rob, Jess, and TK, who were with Sarah for the day, didn’t mind it much at all. They loved chatty outgoing Sarah and even invited her to the barbecue we’re having on Friday to celebrate the Fourth of July. Blah blah blah.
On Tuesday morning before work, the only thing keeping me going was the thought that surely we would switch up the groups and I would not be with Kevin again. Also because the plan was that since we all knew how to do it now, we could go out in pairs with each other, not groups with Sarah or Kevin. Unfortunately this was not the case. The only people from the team who would be out there that day were Heather, Rob, Tomm, Jess, and I. When we met at the BLM office in the morning like always, Sarah came out and said that Heather and Rob would be with her and Tomm, Jess, and I would be with Kevin. I immediately feared for my sanity. I think Tuesday was even worse. It began with the crushing blow of not switching groups. We were also in a different area that day which was much hillier, making the hiking much harder. I was doing the GPS part again for most of the day. It was much harder to navigate there because there were a lot more adult trees that I would have to go around which made it way harder to keep a straight course to the next point. Ug. At least it’s over now. Kevin told us that day that he heard we would be working on a fence somewhere Wednesday and Thursday (that was the previous Wednesday afternoon’s cancelled project). Thank goodness.
Tuesday night we watched another gem from one of Tomm’s horror movie four-packs. The cover said it was called The Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep. When TK put the DVD in his laptop, he clicked on the thing that said The Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep. When the movie started and it showed the title screen, the title was Deadly Waters. We were confused. A little ways into the movie we realized that the description on the back of the DVD case for The Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep matched the movie we were watching. The star was Charlie O’Connell, Jerry O’Connell’s brother. He had three different faces that I could tell: there was angry face, happy face, and flirting-with-the-blonde-main-character face. The plot wasn’t quite as awful as Raging Sharks but the acting was worse. It was pretty ridiculous. I’m starting to forget what a good movie looks like. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one.
(I wasn’t feeling well on Wednesday so I didn’t go to work. The rest of the team did indeed build a fence with Dwight. It was a log fence, which we haven’t done before. I don’t know much about that day though.)
On Thursday, we were with Dwight again. Our task was to put in the wood corner posts for a soon-to-be-built barbed wire fence. He didn’t even bring any wire because the only goal was to put in the H-braces that would go on each corner of the square fenced-in area. We set off to the far away location of this future fence. First Dwight and Dave (who I later learned is an actual shaman, but I did not get to talk to him at all that day) in the BLM truck, then Alex and TK in our truck, then the rest of us in the van, driven by me. We drove down the highway as usual then turned off onto a dirt road, also as usual. The dirt road turned into gravel, which then turned into rocks. The rocks got bigger and bigger. Soon we were bouncing along so violently that we wondered if the van would actually fall apart on us this time. As has been happening more and more frequently during ridiculous situations on this project, I got a laughing fit. The road was just SO BUMPY and there was nothing I could do about it. It didn’t help that I could see the rest of the team bouncing up and down in the rearview mirror. Also, as the road got bumpier, it also got narrower. This meant that I couldn’t avoid scraping past tree branches every few seconds. I had tears running down my face I was laughing so hard. Then it got worse. We got to a part of the road that went fairly steeply upward and was covered in mud. The BLM truck made it up ok, but our truck couldn’t. If our truck couldn’t, there’s no way Gertrude could make it. Alex and TK made several tries up in the truck, even trying going off the road into the grass a bit after Dwight and Dave had cut down trees to make room. It just wouldn’t happen. We were told that the worksite was only about a half-mile from where we were and we could just walk, but for some reason we decided not to do that. The whole team got out of the van and helped clear brush next to the road. Dwight got out his chainsaw and cut up the huge fallen trees in the way. That’s right, we were rerouting the road. I think we would have just walked the rest of the way but Dwight and Dave were worried about other people getting stuck there. Then we backed up our vehicles to go on our new road. The truck almost got stuck again trying to get up onto the grass, but I learned from their mistake. Apparently you just have to go fast. I was randomly chuckling for the rest of the day just thinking about how silly the drive to work was.
Once we finally got there, we began The Day That Stole Our Souls. We were in groups of two or three on each corner on the future fence. Becky, Tomm, and I were a group. There were two unclaimed corners. We started at one but discovered it was really rocky. Since we didn’t have a rock bar at the time we decided to go to the other one which was down a little hill and nearer a creek. Big mistake. We started digging our hole and ran into a huge rock about eight inches down. We knew we couldn’t get past it so we just moved over and started a new hole. Same thing happened. So we moved over again. Turns out the third time is indeed a charm. We managed to dig our 30-inch deep post hole in our third location and finished right before lunch. After lunch, since three wood posts would need to go there eventually, we each carried an eight-foot, six-inch diameter wood post the long-enough distance from the truck. We got that first post in without much problem. We then moved in to our next post hole. About ten inches in, we hit another rock. It was jutting out from the edge of the hole and went about halfway across it. We couldn’t just start a new hole like we did before because this one had to be a certain distance from the first, otherwise the cross piece for the H-brace wouldn’t fit. We thought since we could expose one side of the rock, surely we could get it out. We then spent the next two and a half hours or so having our souls sucked out by this rock. Imagine the frustration. We tried just slamming it with a rock bar (which we had gotten by this point) to break it up. We tried widening the hole to find the other side of the rock. We tried prying it up. Nothing worked. Luckily everyone else finished early-ish and we got to leave at about 4:00. Also luckily, my soul was mostly restored as I laughed my way down the bouncy road back to the highway.
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