Day 55 – Saturday April 3, 2010
One wonderful way to spend Easter eve is laughing over cake at the Paper Moon Diner before rolling back into your mansion blasting Bon Jovi from the van at 11:30 PM. A great way to end a great day.
I think Traci best summed up our service day in a comment she made as she, Chris, and I walked back to the Vanimal for lunch at 1 this afternoon after a full morning canvassing streets offering free yard trees: “Hey, guess what! We got people who want trees. And we got hugged by an old lady. And we got a dog!” Yes, that was my morning.
We spent our day walking through the streets around Walter P. Carey Elementary School offering people free trees. We went in groups of three – I was with Traci and Chris in the morning, Traci and Melissa in the afternoon – and each group had a few streets to canvass within the neighborhood. Once on a street, we’d walk one side at a time, knocking on doors and offering free trees. If nobody came to the door, we left a door-hang flier about upcoming tree giveaway days in the neighborhood. If someone answered, we announced that we were working with Tree Baltimore and offered them a FREE TREE for their yard. We offered shade or flowering trees; all those who signed up with my group today selected the smaller flowering trees (they’ll get a redbud or dogwood) over sprawling oaks or maples. I always suggested the flowering trees if asked, both for aesthetics and because most in the neighborhood had smallish lawns. Sometimes we skipped houses because we decided the lawn already had enough or couldn’t fit any trees.
We began at 10. Around 11, we had our old-lady hug (she was probably in her 60s; I didn’t consider her all that old). She was one of the 7 people who signed up with us today to have a tree delivered and (except for one man) planted on the next tree giveaway day. She had an empty tree pit in her front lawn and seemed overjoyed with our offer to fill it with a beautiful flowering tree for her. It’ll be young so she can watch it grow from 2 or 3 feet to 20 or 30. She was so happy we had been sent her way, almost like a sign it seemed, that she signed up for her tree then announced, “Let me give you a hug!” and proceeded to hug each of us. We liked her.
We found our dog around 11:30. We were standing on a porch on the busy main road and so was an adorable chocolate lab mix puppy. Traci began to pet her and the woman who came to the door (not that many answered in the morning, so it was fortuitous that she was home) said she didn’t know whose dog she was but had found her on the porch that morning and fed her and she hadn’t left since. This soon changed as the puppy decided to follow us around for the next two hours. We offered her lots of love, carried her sometimes so she wouldn’t run into people’s houses, and generally adored her. In exchange, she helped us sign two people up for trees with her distracting cuteness.
We initially thought she was a boy, so Traci suggested the name “Dude”. We ended up settling on Rio Dude Dogwood the First (she being our first team mascot, after all). We learned she was a girl when we were at lunch – she had been neutered within the past year – and switched over from calling her Dude to calling her Rio. Rio had a number tattooed on her back thigh marking her from when she was neutered, probably around age eight weeks, we later learned. We decided to use this number to track down her owner since she didn’t have an ID tag on her collar. We ended up having the whole team drive her to the SPCA after lunch then Melissa, Traci, and I take her to the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter (BARCS) after dropping the rest of the team off to continue canvassing. Melissa drove, I navigated with our new GPS (finally! we have a reliable way to get around the city!), and Traci kept Rio occupied in the back (mostly, Rio slept on Traci’s leg). We ended up saying goodbye to Rio at the shelter, where they would keep her until they could track down her owner (or she would find a new owner – almost immediately, apparently, due to her cuteness and excellent training – if they couldn’t find hers within a week). We got a call later in the afternoon that they had linked her tattoo to an ID number and had a call in to her owners. This is great news since she seemed well-trained and well-cared-for. The owners’ only issue was tethering her with a shoelace which she had easily chewed through with her sharp puppy teeth. Overall, Rio (actual name Brownie, we learned when BARCS called) is pretty awesome.
We finished canvassing at 5 then drove back home ready for the weekend. I spent a fantastic evening talking to my dad on the phone, eating quiche made by Sabrina, spinning around the library in rolling chairs, making plans for tomorrow with Rachel, catching up with Marissa a bit (again by phone), painting Traci’s fingernails bright purple, repainting my toenails bright blue, and laughing non-stop at the Paper Moon. It was a pretty fabulous night.
Now it’s officially Sunday, so Happy Easter! We have an awesome ISP planned for the morning so I’m off to get some sleep. It’ll be a fabulous holiday.
Day 56 – Sunday April 4, 2010
We did indeed have an awesome ISP today. We spent the morning and early afternoon (we being all of Team Rio’s CMs except for Jeff, who wasn’t feeling well) at the Baltimore Zoo volunteering at Bunny Bonanzoo. Cheesy, I know. Our tasks were primarily running various stations at the Easter event, which was in its third and final day and seemed to have a target kid age range of 2 to 5. Traci and Lindsay took the Easter Egg Hunt (“hunt” perhaps not providing an accurate image, since there were hundreds of plastic eggs scattered across a small area of flat lawn of which kids could turn in any five for chocolate), Amanda helped with the Moon Bounce bouncy structure, Kathy worked the beanbag toss, Roy and Sabrina helped kids make Easter bunny faces out of paper plates, pipe cleaners, and googly eyes, Chris showed kids how to plant flower seeds in paper cups, and I worked the welcome table.
My job, which I did along with local volunteer Stephanie, was to welcome all the eager children and their parents into Bunny Bonanzoo from the main zoo. We offered them bags for candy if they didn’t have baskets (most did not and almost all of those accepted – some of the ones who didn’t had a parent return for a bag a few minutes later). We directed people over the hill to the egg hunt if they asked where it was, explained what the event was a couple of times, and pointed them in other directions for questions about zoo maps, ATMs, and booth tickets for the stalls requiring them since we’d been at the front gate all morning and really had very little information about the event. We mostly had our friendly, welcoming smiles and our cell-phone-network-sponsored bags for candy. I did love handing out the bags to kids. I also enjoyed observing how parents trained their children to respond with ‘thank you’ with a variety of reinforcement techniques. The kids were generally adorable.
I spent the morning shift (10-12) at the booth with Stephanie, breaking for lunch with Kathy around 11:15, then the first half of the afternoon there alone when she headed home for the rest of the holiday. Roy and Sabrina finished lunch around 1 – volunteers relieved each of us for lunch in shifts – then Roy switched with me to take over the welcome table and get some quality people-greeting practice. (To say that Roy is rather quiet at times would be an immense understatement. He’s generally silent but has amazingly hilarious one-liners.) I ended up at crafts in his stead for all of 5 seconds before I was moved one table over to cover seed planting for Chris. I spent my last hour of ISPness for the day showing small children how to scoop soil into a paper cup, sprinkle a pinch of flower seeds on top, add a bit more soil “to protect them”, then put them in a paper bag, which I encouraged them to decorate with the crayons at hand, for safe-keeping on the journey home. I had a steady flow of children planting but never any sort of rush that late in the event. This allowed me to show each one-on-one how to plant, which I liked. It was lots of fun to sit down with some of the children after a whole day waving them in. Another awesome ISP.
We helped break down the event then headed back to the mansion, arriving shortly after 3. I chilled for an hour, helping Traci with the vehicle inspection and a quick Vanimal clean-out and making my daily sweet potato, before Rachel arrived. Yay for housemate visits! Rachel was able to come down because she finally has her car to drive and she brought Meghan and Sadie, two of her teammates, with her. Marissa wanted to see Rachel and within an hour of her arrival (yes, it took that long), we had managed to coordinate some semblance of a plan. Said plan did ultimately work out, though we had to wait a bit for Wolf Fivers to finish their cleaning chores at the farm.
Our evening unfolded, plan-wise, with Traci, Jeff, Sabrina, and I taking the Vanimal to Wolf Five’s farm with Rachel and friends following in her car. Marissa, Tommy, and Michelle joined us there after chores During their chores, we had ample time to wander around and Rachel and I got to catch up while sitting in the red wooden chairs at the top of the farm hill which mark the highest point in Baltimore and look out over the farm across to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Pretty cool.
All ten of us then headed down to the Inner Harbor and neighboring Fell’s Point for dinner at The Green Turtle, a place we found by effective wandering. The food was delicious and fit our AmeriBudgets so we were all quite content. We spent about two hours at the restaurant, which was the perfect amount of time. Back at the van, we said goodbye to our visitors from the Point (my team, luckily, will get to see them again tomorrow when we go visit them) then headed back to drop off our farm friends and return home. We got back around 10:30, just in time for me to catch the end of the first half of UConn’s final four game (women’s basketball) and watch the second half in real time. UConn won. Now it’s bedtime before a crazy day: no work AND no ISPs! What will I do with myself?! Oh right, go visit Rachel at the Point. Duh. And it’ll be awesome too.
Day 57 – Monday April 5, 2010
Week nine began with a bang. We rolled out of the mansion and headed from Baltimore up to the Point for a full, fun afternoon in the sun. It was fantastic.
After a morning jog and some much-needed laundry time, I hopped into the driver’s seat of the Vanimal shortly before 11:30 for our trip up to Perry Point. My companions were Traci, Chris, Melissa, Jeff, and Sabrina. We headed up 40 and 95 and reached the Point just before one. First stop was B-15, where we all piled into Chris Quaka’s office for a visit with our amazing unit leader. Quaka, as usual, welcomed us in warmly and took 20 minutes out of his schedule to sit and chat with us about our project, recent ISPs, and life. He always makes time for his teams, which is awesome.
From B-15, we CMs raided the drift shed filled with spare AmeriClothes for extra shorts and t-shirts then drove the Vanimal over to its favorite parking spot between the two occupied streets of the Village. Here’s where I got to see Rachel again, which was fabulous. She and I headed out together about twenty minutes later, joined by about half of her team and Chris from my team, for Ercole’s, a local Perryville pizza joint. I’d never been and I had a great time sitting and chatting outside on the sidewalk as we ate our pizza and salads. Traci, Jeff, and Sabrina joined us as we finished and we all headed two blocks towards the Point to the Boxcar, a local ice cream place. It opened for the year late in CTI (it closes every winter) and this was my first time there too. The ice cream was delicious and the company was excellent; it was a great outing.
We headed back to the Point for a couple of hours in the sun. There were kickball and sidewalk chalk. There were music and aviators. There were good times. When we finally had to leave at 5:30 (we did, after all, have grocery shopping tonight), it was sad to say goodbye but I was fully content with an amazing springtime afternoon in and around the Village. I drove us back to the mansion and proceeded to have a chill evening, punctuated by such exciting activities as unloading groceries into the fridge in the basement. That wild, I know.
We begin another busy work week tomorrow, but this time a short one due to spring break next weekend. Three days of trail fun time. Three days of awesome AmeriCorps service. I love life in the NTrip.
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