Day 46 (barely) – Thursday March 25, 2010
It’s bordering on the 26th, but I think I can count this one as in under the wire after a fun night out on the town in BMore.
We had a surprisingly long work day today after a rather late (comparatively) start. We headed out at 8:20 to begin work at the Parks & People office at 9. (It’s just under 20 minutes away, but being on time is understandably important and getting into and out of the van always manage to take a couple of minutes.) We spent the entire day doing inventory for the SuperKids Camp, a summer program P&P runs which focuses on literacy and math skills. Kids heading into 2nd and 3rd grade can participate in the six-week camp for a total cost of $60 (and many of the families are still on scholarship), making it affordable to families for which summer camp would otherwise be completely out of reach. The kids go on field trips around the city and also practice reading and math skills. The practice seeks to help them maintain or even improve in areas which otherwise often see a drop-off, especially among the target groups for this program, over summer break. SuperKids recently got a national award for Best Practices in its educational program. It’s a pretty great camp.
My entire SuperKids inventory time was spent counting books. The campers have designated reading levels: yellow, yellow yellow, green, green green, blue, blue blue, red red (yes, the double comes first in this case), red, orange, brown, black, or white.
Day 47 – Friday March 26, 2010
Moving plants can be even more enjoyable that moving excessive mulch. That is a lesson learned today.
I’ll begin by noting that I was astounded by how easily mulching came to us yesterday after just over a week with Parks & People. After that morning spent with the lovely trees of Franklin Square Park, we know how to get the mulch job done. We’re kinda legit with the mulch. This 1) is awesome and 2) makes me appreciate the day-to-dayness of our round with P&P. Even if we sometimes don’t know until 9 PM where we need to be the next morning and what we’ll be doing (and we almost never know when the service day will end), it’s totally counterbalanced by the plethora of learning opportunities this type of schedule affords us. When we have different projects every couple of days, we don’t get that same sense of seeing a long task through to completion (though I’m sure that will come in later rounds), but we do get to see a ton of places – urban neighborhoods and sprawling woodlands – and learn new tasks every single day. I love that.
Our work today was with one of P&P’s wonderful partner organizations, the Herring Run Watershed Association. The Association works on water cleanliness and conservation, tree planting, and community engagement in nature in the Herring Run Watershed (a watershed, again, being an area which drains into a particular body of water, in this case the Chesapeake Bay, by a common route, e.g. all the water drains into one river which runs into the Bay). We began our morning at the Association’s office building, where Darren, our enthusiastic supervisor for the next two days, gave us all free Herring Run nalgene bottles and told us a bit about the organization. Darren also talked about the NTrip crews he worked with last year, how great they were and how he’d love to have another crew during tree-planting season this fall. He’s incredibly friendly and enthusiastic about having us there.
Darren led us across town to the Herring Run Nursery, stopping along the way for a few of us to load up some tools and supplies into the bed of his truck. Once at the nursery, we commenced our day’s work of preparing for this Sunday’s seedling planting, which we’ll actually get to participate in as an ISP. The seedling planting will involve 20 volunteers, most of Wolf One included, potting between 7,000 and 8,000 seedlings. We sorted seedlings, most of which were around 2 feet tall including a nicely developed starter root system, recorded which size pot each should go in (one of my jobs was writing the size Sabrina determined down on a clipboard checklist), put the seedlings in soil for storage (all together in loose bunches, not neatly potted as they will be) and attached labels marking each type of plant, sorted other more developed plants from stacks into rows on giant tarps, and made labels for the seedlings-to-be-planted with common name on one side and scientific on the other. It was fun to do a whole range of tasks within one day. I especially enjoyed ending the day with half an hour writing out plant names on plastic marker cards because I got to see lots of cool plant names and transcribe the Latin-derived scientific names. It reminded me how much I love biology and Latin.
We returned to the mansion at 5, stopping along the way for a bunch of people to get coffee at a place Darren recommended as best in Baltimore (Zeke’s). We began PT at 5:20, doing circuits for the first time. Circuits were a nice change in routine and intensity from our standard course of PT. We did a round of ten exercises three times through, twice with 1 minute on and 10 seconds off then once with 50 seconds on and 10 seconds off. I timed all the intervals on my watch, an enjoyable way to stay engaged in the process (and always know how much time was left on a plank or wall sit). PT ran close to an hour because the circuit rounds took 35 minutes. Afterwards, I made dinner with/for Melissa and Amanda. They were my sous chefs as I mixed lots of frozen green veggies and some fresh white/clear foods (onions, tofu, mushrooms) with olive oil and spices to make deliciousness. Lots of curry powder and cumin blended well with a hearty dash of cinnamon.
I haven’t done much since except sit down to write. It’s been nice to have a quiet night before yet another busy weekend full of P&P and ISPness. Though I generally enjoy it, we are still adjusting to having a Sunday-Monday weekend. As Amanda said recently, Monday becomes like Sunday and Sunday just isn’t quite as awesome as Saturday. I like having a weekend day and a weekday off though, since it does increase our opportunities for both ISPs and exploration. Baltimore is an amazing and educational city thus far.
Day 48 – Saturday March 27, 2010
I had my most fun work day yet today. I got to supervise a crew of volunteers and I had a blast.
Our work with Darren at the Herring Run Nursery continued today in the form of us helping run the annual Great Seedling Shuffle. Basically, we made sure things ran smoothly as about 30 volunteers potted tons of plants from ‘tubelings’ (those flats of 30+ baby plants you can get at the garden store) or bare root form (one or two feet of young stalk and roots, not in soil or such). Some of our team wrote label signs to designate different types of plant; others directed volunteers to place finished plants in optimal locations; Lindsay and I supervised. The volunteers were split up between two big dirt piles, which I believe contained slightly different types of soil, and the plants associated with each. Each pile had two tables of volunteers and each table had a volunteer coordinator. Lindsay worked the ‘up’ pile with Cathy from Herring Run while I worked the ‘down’ pile with Ashley, another Herring Run staff member and the guy responsible for the name Great Seedling Shuffle (which apparently has boosted event attendance since the name change a couple of years back). Ashley had about 4-10 volunteers most of the day (more were present at the morning shift) at his table; I had two tables pushed together and began with 13 volunteers, hovering around that number fairly consistently all day.
My volunteers were awesome. I encouraged them to come up with a team name after I heard Ashley and his crew discussing the same and they did almost immediately. They settled on Team Mickey because most of them were there for the Disney “Give a Day, Get a Day” volunteer challenge. That they were part of the Disney challenge meant they were there all day, so I got to keep my group (though a bunch rotated in and out to weed plants for part of the morning) while others traded every couple of hours. This made me happy; I had some very hard workers, a whole group that attended church together, and a great mix of ages and planting experience.
My primary job was to keep things running smoothly. Mostly, I made sure we (Melissa, specifically, as my de facto helper after she wandered over task-less early in the day) conducted a demonstration of proper potting technique every time we acquired new volunteers or switched between bare roots and tubelings for the first time in a shift, found and brought over a new type of tubeling from my checklist whenever a set was almost done, announced cheerfully to my volunteers what type of plant each new one was and got answers to their questions about whether the plants were perennials and such (yes, all were trees or shrubs), ran pots when we needed more 300s or 400s or 1000s (we didn’t use the 600s much at our table), reminded Darren every couple of hours that it was time to give all our volunteers a water break, coordinated with Ashley to track what down-soil plants had been potted and which we each planned to do next, chose a sensible order for potting plants based on what pot size we currently had out and whether we were working with bare roots or liners, checked in with my volunteers and reminded them multiple times how much amazing work they had done (especially when we finished potting the last of the down-soil tubelings mid-afternoon), and felt cool holding my clipboard. Simple, really. Honestly, though, it all came naturally to me and I had a ton of fun. It was a great day.
Melissa and I bid farewell to Team Mickey at 4 PM (we’d arrived at 8; they’d started planting at 9) and we all headed back to the mansion after what Lindsay and I agreed (though some of team seemed less pumped from their tasks) was a less-long-than-expected day. As Melissa had commented midday, Saturday does nicely generally seem to be our easy day. Darren had warned us it’d be long, but it ended up feeling much shorter than many, especially after we already had a 7 PM day this week. Five just isn’t that late anymore.
We had PT twenty minutes after we got back to the mansion. It was free PT, which we’ll have once a week, for which we stretch together at the start and end but can do whatever PT exercises we want in the middle. Chris, Melissa, and I all ran/walked while everyone else did circuits in the ballroom. It was great walk/run weather and I enjoyed the abundance of fresh, crisp air I got today.
In the evening, Traci, Melissa, Roy, and I started our weekend off right with a trip to the Paper Moon Diner. It was my second trip there and the second on which I’ve laughed so hard I cried. There’s something about that place. We had an absolute blast and enjoyed replacing dinner with appetizers and dessert. Never not a good decision. I drove there and back to continue my adjustment to the Vanimal. A 15-passenger van is much bigger than my ‘personal vehicle’ (more AmeriLingo), but I do love that it’s the only black van in the fleet. Pretty awesome.
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