I like Friday evenings in a warm home filled with family. Marissa and I are baking cookies to take to Moveable Feast tomorrow as an in-kind donation (they’re oatmeal-chocolate chip) and hanging out with Rene and Maria (Rene’s adding another dread to Maria’s hair) in the living room. The rest of the girls are up in bed resting up from a busy week. We’ll be up there too soon enough.
Sean was indeed an interesting instructor for First Aid and CPR, telling us about one time when he started choking in a restaurant and was too self-conscious to alert the four CPR-trained TLs sitting at the table with him. His storytelling style is incredibly engaging and humorous; we laughed through his whole recounting of the escapade.
Sean was co-instructing with Amanda from the program office. They went through the material efficiently so I maintained some level of engagement even already knowing all the material. I was, however, rather exhausted by hour five or six.
This evening was very relaxed. We returned to the Village before 5, I tried oatmeal with peanut butter and melted chocolate chips (a bit too sweet but also delicious) in continuing my recent pattern of two bowls of oatmeal a day, Sean joined for an hour of reflection on the week and team dynamics and such, Jamie and I chatted a bit about recent life events (we have a history of good conversations sitting on the floor of her room), Josh and Sean came over from two doors down for breakfast burritos made by Marissa, and I went for a run then posted on my blog at the Wolf Den. That was followed by the beginning of cookie time a bit under two hours ago.
During cookie time, Jamie, Marissa, and I brought a circle of chairs into the kitchen from the living room and sat and had storytime while we baked. It’s been a good night. This is one of my favorite kinds of Fridays.
Day 20 – Saturday February 27, 2010
I took my first AmeriNap today. It was fabulous. After a rushed morning (the rush mostly centering around my choosing to make a rather complicated lunch and running a bit low on time as a result), Jordanna, Marissa, and I headed to Baltimore with ten fellow Village people for another great ISP day at Moveable Feast. We returned home very tired and all three of us decided to nap, my chosen location being one of the couches in our living room. It was a wonderful life choice.
Moveable Feast once again proved an enjoyable place to spend four hours on a weekend. We did lots of cleaning in the kitchen, freezers, storage areas, and loading dock. My arms got an excellent workout from all the scrubbing with bristly brushes, rags, and steel wool. I’ll probably feel the burn tomorrow if we end up doing many of the same activities (a likelihood). Marissa and I brought in the cookies we had baked and left those for distribution.
After Moveable Feast and my nap, I headed down to a path which leads along the Chesapeake Bay from the Village. I called Kate and got to talk to her for about an hour, which was fabulous. I returned home in time to see a couple of roommates off for various escapades then headed over to the Wolf Den with Rachel after dinner. We ended up riding to Havre de Grace with Daniel in his van since he was on duty and had to pick a couple of people up from a late-night ISP. We returned recently and I proceeded to send my darlingest sister my best wishes for an amazing Purim with her adorable children. I look forward to pictures.
Other than lingering tiredness, all is well here. We’ll be back at Moveable Feast tomorrow for another Baltimore afternoon. The snow has mostly melted and the weather is obligingly nice. AmeriCorps continues to be exceedingly happy.
Day 21 – Sunday February 28, 2010
Tonight was awesome. Today was too.
The morning began rather later than planned. I slept through my 6:40 AM alarm and woke up around 7:30 instead. I had asked Jamie to wake me up, but she had decided to let me sleep in and wait to start our baking a bit further into the morning. Once I was up and moving, we mixed up two batches of boxed brownies to take down to Moveable Feast with us. We baked them and I cut them into squares while she headed off to support Sadie, her TL, in taking the firefighting pack test. (Sadie had been planning to take it earlier but ended up taking it this afternoon – Jamie, Maria, and Rene had made her a ‘Wolf 3 loves Sadie’ cake on behalf of their team. Since her test was pushed back, they didn’t see it but she did pass when she finally tested.)
After the brownies were done, my uniform was on, and lunch was bagged (tuna and veggie sandwich, cut vegetables, a yam), we headed out the door to the pickup point. Most of our house was going today (Jamie, Jordanna, Rene, Maria, Rachel, Marissa, and I – Casey is still resting up her ankle) and we joined six friends in TL Jamie’s van with him and Daniel, both of whom would hang out in Baltimore while we did our ISP.
Moveable Feast work was lots of fun. We had finished up all the needed cleaning yesterday so got to help out with food prep! Jamie, Rachel, our friend Katie (who studied Classics and used to play rugby), and I chopped lots and lots of cabbage, which would later be cooked and added to meals for clients (the clients being people in the Baltimore area homebound with HIV/AIDS). After an hour of cabbage-chopping and a lunch break, we did some light cleaning around the kitchen in the late afternoon but no heavy scrubbing. We also transferred about seven big bins worth of frozen soybeans, kale, carrots, and spinach from cardboard freezer boxes into… well, big plastic bins. It was lots of fun and I enjoyed (and was teased by my roommates about) dealing with immense amounts of frozen spinach.
We returned to Perryville around 4 and I used the next couple of hours to eat my second bowl of oatmeal of the day, hang out with Rene, Maria, and Jamie, and write up my specialty role statement of interest for the first round to tell Melissa what sort of team specialty role I want to do (more on that when we get our assignments). I had a relaxing two hours before heading over to team dinner at Lindsay’s house on Third Street.
Team dinner ended up being fantastic. Melissa began by announcing to the team that I’d been selected for a focus group with a Congressional delegation tomorrow. Sadie had told Jamie that she would be in the focus group a couple of days ago so I’d figured I hadn’t been chosen. It was awesome to find out that I had been picked after all and I get to dress up in the morning – black BDU pants instead of khaki and a grey AmeriPolo with my black steel-toed boots – for the special occasion.
Melissa had ordered pizza for dinner – two veggie and one cheese – and Sabrina had made a delicious salad with lettuce and chickpeas. Lindsay had made brownies and (slightly burnt) chocolate chip cookies for dessert. After we ate, we all sat around and finished our earlier (as in a week ago) game of Hot Seat, in which one of us is ‘in the hot seat’ and everyone else gets to ask one question for that person to answer. I had already taken my turn; I loved getting to learn more about my teammates through the game. Melissa then announced that she had made a dessert and passed out small foil-wrapped objects. Someone asked if they related to our first round spike, but she repeated her earlier line that she hadn’t yet learned our project and would tell us later. As it turned out, it was indeed about spike : )
We unwrapped the foil to find that each of us held a homemade fortune cookie. Melissa had put a construction-paper fortune in each and every one contained a clue about our spike location. Mine, for example, said, “If immigrants didn’t go through Ellis Island they might have come through this city.” We each read our clue aloud then tried to put all the pieces together as a team. After a couple minutes of discussion, Melissa announced the answer. We’re going to work with Parks & People in Baltimore! Parks & People (parksandpeople.org) sounds like an awesome organization. It seeks to engage the citizens of Baltimore with the parks and other green spaces of the city and to expand and improve those spaces. We’ll get to do a range of projects – keeping things interesting – including removing invasive species (i.e. weeds), doing things with school groups, and dedicating trees. We’ll be at the site for Earth Day, Arbor Day, and Maryland Arbor Day so it’s a wonderful round for an environmental spike. We’ll be working Tuesday through Saturday (spikes almost always have five work days per week with some sort of “weekend”) and we’ll be there from March 13th to May 5th. Melissa’s enthusiasm for the project was contagious and we’re going to have an awesome round.
Until spike starts in two weeks, I’ll be keeping plenty busy. We start mini-spike on Tuesday but tomorrow (Monday) alone I have PT at 6, house inspection at 7:30, the Congressional focus group, and a full day of all-corps training up at the University of Delaware (to which us focus-groupers will be arriving a bit late). I’m pretty stoked; it’ll be amazing.
Day 22 – Monday March 1, 2010
Today was indeed quite busy, but we did get some nice down time amidst all the happenings. The day began before 6 AM and finally wound down over 12 hours later after a series of new adventures and learnings.
I woke up at 4:48 AM, mystifyingly stirring twelve minutes before my PT-day alarm. I didn’t get up until 5, of course, but still haven’t figured out how I managed to wake up before that. Since I was fairly awake, I was ready to go before 5:30 so decided to jog over to the gymnasium. Jamie joined me and we headed out into the cool, pre-dawn darkness for the ten-minute commute. We arrived at the gym as the first vans rolled in, having timed it perfectly to fit in a cooldown walk.
UL Sean kept PT fairly short because it was inspection day and morning training was starting fairly early up at the University of Delaware. We began with the usual body-part rotations and series of stretches before doing three rounds of only three exercises. The first was a skiing-in-place simulation, the second and third timed push-ups and timed sit-ups. For the latter two, we did ninety seconds the first time through, sixty the second, and thirty the third. In case it wasn’t clear to you, 30 is far less than 90. The third round of exercises felt pretty good.
After the post-exercise stretching set, Jamie and I ran back to the Village from the gymnasium. This time, about 8 fellow Wolves ran back too. Healthy competitive attitudes may have contributed to this sudden spike in running; our last two jogs home (Jordanna and I then Jamie and I) had been awfully quiet.
We passed inspection, which was nice. It was also expected since our house was super-clean from baseboards to ceilings. Melissa, who did our inspection because she’s our house mom, did not mark us down on a single point. I had learned at PT that 1) Jamie and I were actually doing different focus groups and 2) mine didn’t meet until 10:45 this morning at B-15. This meant that I had three hours of unscheduled time between inspection and my focus group. What a concept!
I ended up feeling fairly productive about my free time in spite of major post-PT tiredness. I ate breakfast and chatted with my housemates until they had to head out around 9. I then took a refreshing shower and prepared an afternoon snack to bring to training. I ended up sitting outside reading on our front porch shortly after ten because I’d knocked on the door across the street (STL Jessie had stopped by to pick up our recycling and mentioned that someone there was in the focus group) but no one answered. I later found out that Tori was in the group with me when she reached B-15. As I read, our UL Chris walked up. He’d stopped by to talk to some construction workers fixing the roof of the TL house across the street and offered to drive me over to B-15 since he was headed back there for a meeting. Along the way to B-15, he pointed out the yellow house on Avenue B (in the Village) where a horror movie was filmed in recent years. Apparently, it’s a pretty bad movie. Nobody lives in that part of the Village this year.
Chris and I parted ways at B-15 as he headed off to his meeting and I settled in to wait. Eventually, after a bit more reading, all nine CMs and two TLs (Wolf TL Ethan was one of them) gathered for a briefing with STL Gretchen. She told us that we’d be meeting with Congressional delegates who were visiting with the primary purpose of learning more about NCCC. They work in offices associated with funding the program so want to learn a bit about all the amazing stuff we do and put names and faces to the statistics they receive about hours completed, houses constructed, miles of fencing put up, and the like. About twenty minutes later, we got to head into the meeting room.
Over a lunch of gourmet sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies, we met with ten campus guests. Our visitors were fairly even split in origin between various Congressional offices and the Corporation for National and Community Service headquarters in DC. Our Congressional guests asked all the questions, engaging us in conversation about why we chose NCCC, how we would recommend engaging other youth in service, what sorts of projects we’ll be doing, and what we look forward to about the upcoming year. I loved every moment. It was awesome to get to share our experiences with our campus visitors and to hear each others’ stories about finding the NTrip. I had an absolutely phenomenal time; that sort of meeting is exactly what I want to do with (some part of) my life.
Fortunately, I’ll get to spend lots more time talking up the NTrip these next couple of months because I’ll be one of my team’s two CAP representatives for round one. Each CM is assigned a specialty role every round (except sometimes TLs choose to assign one person two roles at their discretion). The media representative contacts the local media and our hometown papers to help get all the fantastic work NCCC does in the news. The Service Learning Initiator (SLI) helps the team think about the impact and significance of the project and connect it to life beyond the service day. The Team Trainer (TT) helps keep team morale high and often spearheads coordinating PT. Project Outreach Liaisons (POLs) seek to identify potential project sponsors in the local community and encourage organizations to apply for NCCC teams for future rounds. The Assistant Team Leader / Vehicle Safety Tools (ATLVST) aids the team leader and is there to step in and lead should the TL ever need to be away or should the team be split between two project sites for any period of time. (We’re lucky to have Jeff, who served in Denver in Class XIII, as our first-round ATL.) Finally, the Corps Ambassador Program Representative (CAP rep – that’s me!) does outreach to identify and engage potential future NCCC CMs to apply for Class XVII and beyond.
After the focus group ended, Ethan drove the nine of us CMs to the University of Delaware for our afternoon training. Our training was divided by specialty roles and conducted in two waves. I had an hour and a half of learning about the CAP rep position – goals such as working at least three events per round, resources available to us including our CAP box of fliers and such, and information about what to focus on in talking up the NTrip – then an hour and a half of free time to chill, talk with friends, and pace around the building atrium. The training was informative and it was nice to have some down time after an activity-filled PT morning.
We returned to the Point around 4:30 and all headed to B-15 for travel reimbursements from our trips here at the start of the training year. I had a quiet walk back to the Village but was soon surrounded by the bubbly chatter of housemates returning home for the evening. We had a warm night in the Vault talking and relaxing. I was gone for over an hour cleaning the Wolf Den with my team (well under twenty minutes), taking some microwaves and lamps to 9H for STL Drew Larson with Traci and Chris (maybe half an hour because Drew drove us in his pick-up truck – he also gave us yummy Girl Scout cookies), and sitting in the Wolf Den with Amanda catching up on email and talking with Chris Quaka (our UL, who loves storytelling even when on his way home at the end of a long day). All in all, it was a great night.
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