The 190s

Day 190 – Tuesday August 17, 2010

Duck Derby was fantastic.  So too was the weekend that followed.

After a day full of ducks and auction items, Dad swept me off to Plymouth for a couple of days of team-free relaxation and wanderings.  We enjoyed brunch and mexican (separate meals) along the main street, spent much of Sunday at Plimoth Plantation, imagined the plantation buildings in their original locations from atop Leyden Street, wandered Burial Hill and found the Bradford family plot, went to a movie (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), floated aboard the Mayflower II, and splashed around at the fantastic hotel pool, complete with Plymouth-rock-themed hot tub (yes, we did see the real rock too) and Mayflower-themed spirally water slide.  I had a wonderful time.

My return to the team was quite nice too.  Dad took me to lunch and we went grocery shopping then I settled back in for a lazy Monday-off-work afternoon.  I finally broke open my Ancient Greek textbook – the one Mom had gotten me for Christmas – and was happy to discover that there are very few letters in Ancient Greek which I hadn’t seen in math class.  Who thought math and Classics was a strange combination?  I can already read basic words, such as autonomy and Hippocrates, which makes me happy.

Today was our first day back at Great Neck (Wildlife Sanctuary).  That meant that for Traci, Jeff, Sabrina, and I it was our first day at the Marion Institute.  Glenn, with whom I’ll be paired for the next two weeks, gave us an extensive (think: two hours) orientation and tour in the morning.  Afterwards, Sabrina went off to start working on family programming for the Institute’s upcoming Connecting for Change conference with Lena while the rest of us headed down to the basement for an hour of straightening up the shelves.  We stopped at noon for our hour-long lunch.  Glenn had informed us very matter-of-factly that lunch is an hour so thus it is.  In true AC fashion, we take half an hour of official lunch and half of sponsor-mandated break.  So I refer to it, anyway, as we justify the appropriate time-giving-ness.

In the afternoon, Glenn announced that cookies had been brought and were in the kitchen.  They were giant and Swiss chocolate chip.  I had half of one and it was delicious.  Traci had a full one and felt stuffed.  We also got down to actual work.  My primary task was creating a spreadsheet of all the Connecting for Change speakers (almost all of our work will revolve around the conference) for the bookstore which supplies books for the event.  I entered the books which speakers had said on the form that they’d written then looked up what books other speakers had written so the bookstore could stock those too.  There are going to be lots of speakers.  It looks like it’ll be an amazing conference.

Day 192 – Thursday August 19, 2010

Today officially marks the end of my attempts to write every day.  Well, yesterday did but I didn’t write then.  So today marks the official documentation of yesterday’s cessation of attempts.  Yes, it got to me.  And by ‘it’ I mean AmeriCorps.  I was once an eager soon-to-be-Corps-member, reading blogs and soaking up anything and everything about the NTrip on Facebook.  Quite notable was the dramatic drop in blog posts once people enter NCCC, often down from that idealistic once a week to one or two a month throughout CTI and first round, then one or two in the entire second half of the service year.  Now I haven’t posted on my blog since before Tennessee, but I certainly have a lot to post.  My future service companions will have the option to read hundreds of days’ worth of entries about life in the NTrip.  Or not to, should they be slightly less absurd than myself.  Anyway, I’ll now write on a most-days basis.  Or maybe a many-days basis.  We shall see.

Yesterday, I spent my entire service day at the Marion Institute compiling information on past sponsors of the Connecting for Change conference.  The “Past Sponsors” section of the Marion CFC website has about 8 sponsors on it.  There are, it turns out, over fifty.  I made a ten-page word document with the sponsoring organization name, website, and logo plus a paragraph on each, often some rewording of the organization’s mission statement or website “About Us” section.  I finished just before we ended at 5.  It was fun.  The four of us – Traci, Sabrina, Jeff, and I – all went out to lunch at the Thai place across the street for Jeff’s birthday.  It was also fun.  There were more cookies at the office.

Today, I spent my Marion time on past CFC exhibitors.  The “Past Exhibitors” section of the CFC website has exactly zero exhibitors on it.  There are, it turns out, about seventy.  No logos this time, but I spent my day compiling organization names, websites, and informational paragraphs.  I’ll finish up early tomorrow morning and move on to whatever comes next.  A highlight was editing an email for Glenn.  He had asked Sabrina to and she’d laughed and brought it downstairs to me.  There were only little things – a misplaced comma and a grammatically incorrect sentence – but I do love to edit.  Also on editing, I found a typo on the website of one of the grad programs that has had a table at CFC.  Really, grad school?  Really??  Silly grad school.  There’s no way I’d go there.

I also survived my Team Leader interview today.  I had it at 9 AM, right at the beginning of our service day.  My phone interview, which lasted 47 minutes, was with Chris Quaka and Kat (the wonderful Badger STL).  The TL interview is structured a bit differently from the CM interview.  The CM interview focuses on how you’d do in a team and your views on various subjects such as flexibility and diversity (how would you define it? how do you live it?).  The TL interview starts out with some of the interview basics (e.g. what expectations would I have of the TLs in my unit? how would I help prepare them to fill those? (professionalism and knowing they’re there for each other; set clear expectations, be available, and help them get to know each other so they have each other as resources too)) but then focuses on a series of scenarios.  My scenarios involved spending a week with a team that was struggling, hearing AmeriRumors about one of my best TLs, and a poorly executed transition community meeting.  Afterwards, I got to ask Kat and Chris about their biggest challenges and successes this year.  I liked Kat’s answers.

So what’s next on the agenda?  More awesome service in an amazing program.  These two weeks at Marion are helping make this the best service summer ever, so much more than I’d imagined it would be.  We live in a huge “cottage” by the beach, I have a triathlon in two weeks, the team is performing well, and I get to spend the entire summer in an office.  How fun is that?!  So fun, I know.

In other news, we did a fun teambuilder tonight.  We got a list of 29 items we could take on a camping trip if our group got lost in the woods and had to choose 15 to bring and prioritize those.  Fortunately, the 4 bags of marshmallows did not come.  The gun and ammunition, however, made it on the list at number 5.  I would definitely bring a tent above those.  We already had a water jug, peanut butter, matches, and sleeping bags.  What a good top 4.