Day 52 – Wednesday March 31, 2010
We learned a new skill today! Specifically, we learned how to survey a street for potential street trees. It was good times. Street tree surveying allowed us to a) spend the entire day outdoors in 65 sunshine-y degrees and b) rest our bodies a bit from the past two weeks full of shoveling and raking. Needless to say, it was quite enjoyable.
Traci, Roy, and I comprised one survey group (“Team Troybert”) out of four. When we arrived at a street, the whole team hopped out of the van and each of our four groups headed to a different corner of the block. Each group then worked down its side of the street until it met the other group on that side in the middle. Along the way, our job was straightforward. We filled out a sheet (or two or three) for each street listing the houses by house number and marking the tree situation in front of each. For example, house 1100 might have concrete out front, eight feet in width from stoop to street. House 1102 could have a 4-foot-by-5-foot tree pit with a living tree in it, 1104 and 1106 more concrete, 1108 a 5-by-5 pit with a tree stump, and so on. We mostly encountered living trees among those that existed, which was good. In my group, Traci rattled off the situation in front of each of the row houses, Roy measured tree pit squares (using the highly scientific boot-length-is-about-one-foot method), and I got to write on the clipboard. I like paperwork so my task suited me well. I also helped choose our route with Melissa (our shotty for the day in the Vanimal) from street to street within each neighborhood – we only counted on pre-determined streets and we drove between locations – so I got to do map stuff too. All in all, I had a great time.
After work, we had a free evening for once since there was no PT tonight. Lindsay’s two friends visiting, Chris and Bart, were still at the mansion and had amazingly made us all dinner. We sat down for our first family dinner in quite some time, a delicious meal of jalapeno-and-cheddar scones and chicken or vegetarian curry with brown rice. It was nice to have a meal all together; that said, I love the freedom to make what I want when I want all the rest of the nights. I rounded out the night with a walk-run with Melissa and a wonderful conversation with Jordanna about how life is going for her team down in NOLA.
Day 53 – Thursday April 1, 2010
We began our day with an early-morning PT session. It wasn’t 5:30 early like back at the Point, but it was 7:45 early, ruining any chance of a weekday sleep-in. (The upside is that we did do PT today rather than pushing it off until tomorrow due to tiredness after a late service day.) We headed back upstairs from the ballroom (yes, days at the mansion include calisthenics in our downstairs ballroom) at 8:30 and rolled out an hour later for the Parks & People office.
Abby provided us with a new stack of papers when we arrived to help us in our tree surveying efforts. The most helpful was a two-page handout on how to request that a street tree be planted outside your house. The handout included the request form property owners (or renters) can send in to the city to request that a tree be planted; Amanda and I ended up handing out about five of those forms to interested residents as we surveyed today (and we talked to fewer than fifteen groups of residents total). In general, the city would make property owners pay to break up the concrete sidewalk for a new tree pit if they want a tree (costs run about $100 per tree pit), but the housing department is considering paying for ground-breaking on lots of new tree pits. Our survey data goes to the housing department in the hopes that it will indeed choose to make a whole bunch of new tree pits.
Surveying continued to be enjoyable. It was warm and sunny, many of us wore our AmeriShorts for the first time, and we got out into urban Baltimore for a bit. The streets today were generally shorter so we got into less of a flow – more van time, less time counting feet of concrete – but I still had a most relaxing time. As a special treat, we took our lunch break at the Lexington Market, which Abby had highly recommended we stop at for lunch the day before, and enjoyed sugary-sweet smoothies and a solid 45 minutes of wandering time (with buddies/groups, as always).
Our surveying continued into the middle of the afternoon when we simultaneously a) finished our second-to-last neighborhood, the last being far from all the rest, and b) heard from Abby that Leafgro was ready for us at two nearby schools. We thus switched over to our second task of the day, two hours of Leafgro time.
Leafgro is, as its website boasts, an organic compost which has the distinction of having been used, among other lawn products, at both Oriole Stadium and the US vice presidential residence. The Maryland Environmental Service produces it so it’s no surprise that we were using it for our project here in Maryland. Our task, as Abby set it, was to begin spreading Leafgro around two sizeable schoolyards, probably measuring about half a city block each. The public schools are on spring break this week and she hopes to have the Leafgro piles safely distributed before school returns to session at the beginning of next week.
Each schoolyard has just been aerated and new grass seeds have been planted. To facilitate growth of the grass, we sprinkled Leafgro lightly across the entire yard, putting extra on bare patches of dirt. We used wheelbarrows and shovels to transport it around the yard, then shovels, rakes, and pitchforks to scatter it. We managed to finish most of the first yard in the two hours we had before ending time at 6 PM. I’d love to find out how much the Leafgro helps growth in the areas on which it is sprinkled.
We headed home by way of Parks & People, hopping out of the van for a brief ten minutes to help Abby unload tools and wheelbarrows into the P&P storage shed. We were all worn out from a long day, but enjoyed some pump-up music on the way home (our team favorite right now is “Kids” by MGMT) which re-energized us for the evening. I proceeded to do very little for a couple of hours, making pasta with Melissa then hanging out and writing until now. Since we didn’t even get back until 7, this lack of actual activity is not unreasonable. Tomorrow, in the variability that is life with P&P, it looks like we’ll finish up at 4 so probably be home by 5. What a nice schedule.
Day 54 – Tuesday April 2, 2010
My hours are up to date on the AmeriCorps portal, Brown Women’s Rugby is ranked #1 in the nation, I just finished my 80th (and final required) independent service hour for the NTrip, and tomorrow we’ll be canvassing neighborhoods offering free trees in mid-70s sunshine. Life is good.
The 80th ISP (Independent Service Project) hour is the big news of the day. Before I began life as a CM, I thought 80 hours sounded like an awful lot. I wondered how tough it’d be to fit so many in beyond our already busy service weeks. Now here I am having finished all 80 by late in the third week of round one. It’s rather absurd. To the credit of all my fellow CMs who still have hours to do, Jamie and I will both have finished ridiculously quickly. We entered first round with over 50 hours each because we loved Moveable Feast so much that we did 40 hours of service with them (the maximum creditable ISP hours with any one organization) during the final four weeks of CTI. Nobody did ISPs the first week, since we had no sense of how they worked or even, in most cases, what they were.
Basically, ISPs are service projects you do outside the work week with almost any organization except your sponsor for that round. They’re generally awesome. Every CM needs to do 80 hours of ISPs and today I became the first CM at the Point to finish for Class XVI. Kinda fun. It’s unclear how many hours Jamie has (the portal has more logged for her than she has for herself), but she might even finish this weekend so we can still be done at almost the same time, just a couple of days off from the original plan. The hope is that we’ll still get recognized as finishing pretty much together. That was the goal way back when we began our hours (when it was as much about getting some done as the awesomeness of each project, that lasting about 10 hours) and it’d be so cool to be the first two done, as we almost certainly will be.
This morning, I raked grass for hours for Parks & People. Actually, we were raking Leafgro, but the motion of raking Leafgro through the firmly planted (and thus unmoving as we raked) grass felt a lot like I would imagine the motion of simply raking grown grass. We did this for about 3 hours: one at Harlem Park Elementary/Middle School, where we’d been working yesterday evening, and two at another school about six blocks away. By 2 PM (well, 2:20 since Abby was late for picking up our tools (her sense of time is quite far off Wolf UL Chris Quaka’s ‘five minutes early is on time, on time is late’ attitude)), we had finished spreading Leafgro over the entire first lawn, sprinkling hay on top of as much as four bales covered (I’m unclear as to the point of that step), and spreading Leafgro over about two-thirds of the second half-city-block schoolyard.
I did ask Abby about the effectiveness of Leafgro at our brief this morning. She wasn’t sure how much it helps grass seeds succeed percentage-wise, but said this was the growing protocol recommended to her by multiple landscapers. That suggests it’s a pretty good one.
After our daily Leafgro time, we headed over to the Herring Run Watershed Association office for more fun time with Darin. He greeted us all warmly, having not seen us since the Great Seedling Shuffle this past weekend, and proceeded to give an hour-long orientation on how to canvass neighborhoods offering free trees. We spent the first fifteen minutes indoors then drove to a nearby neighborhood which I would classify as urban with a suburban feel. The ever-present row houses were replaced with stand-alone homes with actual landscaped yards, small but extant. We spent the remainder of our session there learning the basics of the Tree Baltimore free tree program. This is part of Baltimore’s goal, as executed through Tree Baltimore, to increase its tree canopy to 40% over the next couple of decades. Forty percent is, according to Darin, more than the program will achieve, but there are good steps being taken to add trees, which themselves increase air quality and happiness and other important things.
Tomorrow (and on subsequent Saturdays), we’ll walk around similarly suburbia-feeling neighborhoods offering residents trees. We’ll provide information about the three upcoming tree pick-up/distribution days and suggest they consider adding another tree to their front or back yards. We’ll also have street tree request forms on hand should any resident suggest that the best place for a tree be near the street on a not-yet-full tree lawn. It’ll be another chance to get to interact with Baltimore residents, this time a group which is predominantly middle-class (as described by Darin) and can afford free-standing houses with yards. We’ll probably see far fewer police tomorrow than we do on our average urban Baltimore service day.
PT tonight, conducted directly after we got home, was quite enjoyable. As is our Friday routine, we had ‘free PT’ so we stretched together at the start and end but had the middle half hour free for exercises of our choosing. Four people played soccer, one walked and skipped and danced, at least one other ran. Melissa and I did our usual walk/run. She’s at the stage where her week-to-week improvement is remarkably apparent, which makes her incredibly fun to coach (as that is my informal role). I love seeing the improvements, not only physical but mental, from day to day; her comfort distances keep going up as her threats to stop have near-ceased. (This is, she told me today, not because she doesn’t think about stopping but because she knows I’ll brush off any such comments and make her keep going.) So yes, PT was fun.
Sabrina had set a goal yesterday, knowing I’m always up for helping a teammate satisfy a legitimate goal, of me finishing my 80 ISP hours this week. It was a bit ridiculous, I know, for her to set a goal about me to goad me into action, but I agreed to it anyway since I knew she really did want me to finish. I think her competitive streak runs a bit deeper than mine : ) Since we’d been too tired to finish last night, we agreed on tonight. She was once again too tired after a full day in the sun, but Melissa agreed to do an ISP hour with me in Sabrina’s stead so I committed to finishing tonight. Sabrina’s plan for me was to work around the mansion – she’d gotten approval for us to help our house manager Chris with tasks here for ISP credit – and we ended up helping out by weeding in the garden.
We began weeding shortly before 7:30, that being directly after our late PT, and it was nearly dark by 8. Fortunately, Melissa is lots of fun to hang out with so we had a great time. We laughed a lot about the fact that, thanks to her and Sabrina wanting me to finish my hours so they could have bragging rights (it being unclear why they as fellow Team RIO members want bragging rights for this when I have no such interest), we were spending an hour after a long service day weeding a patch of dirt in the dark (we could barely see the weeds anymore by the end). It was mildly ridiculous. On the upside, we laughed a lot and talked about life and various teams and it was lots of fun. But also mildly ridiculous.
Another skill learned: night gardening. At least there were no plants to rip out accidentally yet. We think. There was one that could have been a good plant; we both weeded one of those and left another when we encountered them. We shared this after we’d done it. Ah, post-gloaming weeding.
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