Time traveling through canoeing DVDs

4/29/10

Today was a relatively successful workday—free of disasters and random, unforeseeable mishaps— which is always a pleasant surprise. Emily and I were on door duty again, which we finished up pretty quickly before moving onto to nailing trim over the screens on the cabins. We almost finished up all of one unit, and we’ll tackle the rest tomorrow.

After work, we did a team trainer workshop that involved drawing flowers to plan our futures, and afterward we watched clips of canoeing videos featuring Ranger Bob. One of the videos was on VHS, and the others were technically on DVD but might as well have been VHS between the faded, grainy image quality and flickering screens. The videos were somewhat odd and featured long intervals of people canoeing in slow motion on repeat in gigantic rapids set to cheesy background music – it was impressive, but just not something I’d spend hours watching on video. Words really cannot describe, however, the delight we found in seeing a significantly younger Ranger Bob with an Al-from-Home-Improvement beard demonstrating canoe techniques in one video, and Ranger Bob in a frilly white pirate blouse freestyle canoe dancing with his fiance in another. The reason for all of the canoe videos is that we’ll be doing canoe training back at Camp Todd this Sunday to become canoe certified… Yet another sport that I’m nowhere near qualified to teach, but will somehow be certified to teach.

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Why isn’t there a movie called Texas Table Saw Massacre?

Yesterday, Emily and I somehow managed to spend our entire workday cutting 16 foot boards into hundreds of tiny strips on the tablesaw. And by “somehow managed,” what I mean is there was something wrong with the table saw blade so what we thought would be a morning task took about 5 times as long as long as I imagine it should have – not that I would really know the normal time frame for cutting tiny strips of trim on a table saw, considering this was the first time I’d used a table saw in my life. The saw kept losing power and switching off randomly, which Ranger Andy first tried to remedy by flipping the breaker, causing sparks to shoot out into a room full of paint buckets. We quickly abandoned this route, given the flammability of the situation, found a different outlet, and took to hitting the reset button on the saw at increasingly frequent intervals as the machine overheated. Eventually, Ranger Bob decided to install a “more aggressive” blade, despite the fact that the boards we were cutting were flimsy enough to break with our own hands (half of the boards had so many holes in them that they came out of the machine broken and unusable as it was, and tiny pieces kept flying off and hitting us in the face). The more aggressive blade did help, and we eventually managed to finish cutting all of the strips we needed, without even cutting off one of our limbs on the gigantic rotating blade. By the end of the day we were fairly delirious from all of the cutting; between the ear plugs we were wearing to drown out the obnoxious, high pitched screeching noise emanating from the blade, and the safety-glasses-with-built-in-bifocals that Ranger Andy gave us to wear, we were a bit devoid of normal senses and felt slightly disconnected from reality.

Today, Emily and I worked together again, this time hanging doors and installing hinges and stops. We encountered a new set of obstacles and setbacks, but we managed to finish an entire unit and get everything ready to tackle the other unit tomorrow.

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Raven 6 battles the mud, and bridge tolls

4/26/10

Yesterday morning, Diana, Emily and I took the van into Bel Air to visit Best Buy and consult the Geek Squad regarding my computer screen’s new photo-negative-color-scheme, but I didn’t have my receipt and my purchase wasn’t in the system, so that aspect of the trip was basically a fail. However, we did go to Starbucks, where I enjoyed a soy dark cherry mocha and a very berry coffee cake, and Target, where I made a lot of somewhat unnecessary but actually very useful purchases (such as individual 3-in-1 laundry detergent/fabric softener/dryer sheets, and 3-in-1 shampoo/conditioner/body wash… I was really into 3-in-1 purchases, apparently) so in that respect the trip was very successful. On our way back, we had an interesting encounter at the bridge toll, when we went through the EZ-Pass lane (whichallows you to go through without paying for the toll each time) and realized we didn’t know where we kept the pass in our van… We pulled up and blurted out to the incredibly perturbed-looking woman at the toll, “What does the EZ-Pass look like? We know we have one!” Needless to say, she was not amused at all as we frantically tried to call Beth and Rachel, neither of whom answered their phones, and rifled through all of the compartments in the van. Finally, the woman told us she could take a picture of our van and we could go through, but if we didn’t have a pass, we’d be fined. Fearing accumulating fines in a government vehicle on the off-chance that we didn’t in fact have an EZ-Pass, we paid the $5, and drove off as the angry woman continued to angrily scowl at us. It was a very stressful experience, to say the least. We spent the rest of the day hanging out, running, and eating many deviled eggs, until 5:00pm, when we had our project reveal for next round. It turns out we’ll be just outside of Baltimore for 3 weeks (the first half of our 6-week spike) working at a nature center doing similar work to we’re doing now, and we’ll be living in tents and returning to Perry Point on the weekends. Then for the second half of our spike we’ll be going to an all-vegan animal sanctuary in upstate New York! Even though we were hoping (and essentially promised) to be in an urban sitting for this round, I’m pretty excited about our project.

On a less positive note, today was a Monday to nearly match our last Monday where we spent 8 hours framing not even one Adirondack (due, once again, in large part to factors outside of our control). We spent the first 2 hours of our day gathering and retrieving extension cords, checking breakers, and attempting everything possible to get power to our saws and compressors, until finally Ranger Bob remembered that the power was off in the part of camp where we needed power. So, we then tried to use a generator, but the generator was broken. Events continued to transpire not-particularly-in-our-favor, and we abandoned framing our final two Adirondacks and moved onto hanging mosquito netting and doors. It was fairly gray and drizzly all day, but after we got back from lunch, it was pretty much pouring and Beth decided to have us quit early and make up the hours the rest of the days this week. Unfortunately, when she came to pick us up in our support vehicle, she got stuck in the mud, and we spent the next 20 minutes trying, with no success, to dislodge the support vehicle from the mud. We finally abandoned the support vehicle and Ranger Andy drove us back to Cottage in his truck. Then Emily, Diana, Curtis and I went for a run, and I headed over to the office to use wi-fi – and here I am. I can’t believe this spike is nearing completion and we’re getting ready for transition week, but I’m excited to see what happens next, and I’m just trying to enjoy every moment of AmeriCorps—even the not-so-ideal days like today—while I’m lucky enough to be here.

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Just call me Robin Hood… In a contemporary, less skilled, female form.

4/23/10

Wednesday and Thursday, Rachel and I were joined in Adirondack-land by Emily and Steve, our newest team members, so we quad-forced the project and actually got a lot accomplished – so much that Ranger Bob utilized the word “proud” to describe his feelings toward us and our work. It was shocking, to say the least. Today, instead of the usual work day, we had six hours of archery instruction so that our entire team is now “archery certified” – meaning that if the opportunity ever presents itself, we will be qualified to teach a beginning course in archery. (Never mind the fact that we barely can shoot the target ourselves… Those six hours of training qualify us to instruct classes for the next three years. We have cards to prove it.) It’s really a small miracle that we all did pass, considering the test at the end consisted of an outdated collection of multiple choice questions either not covered by the material in the course, differing rather notably from the material in the course, or worded too poorly for us to accurately answer even after learning the material in the course; and a very confusing black-and-white diagram of what was in theory supposed to resemble a bow and arrow, which we were in theory supposed to label.

After archery, we packed up and left Earleville to head back to 9H (again) because the camp needs to use “Cottage” for the weekend. (“Cottage” is the name of the house we’re staying in with the creepy basement shower room and ungodly loud mattresses… All of the other buildings in camp have cutesy names like “Punch Bowl” and “Cookie Jar,” yet Cottage is just the somewhat enigmatic “Cottage.” I guess the camp directors ran out of sugary food items from which to draw inspiration.) I never thought Perry Point would feel like the center of civilization, but considering the town of Earleville literally is comprised of a lot of trees, two pizza places, and two gas stations, I was rather excited to go back “home,” as Perry Point is starting to feel like to us.

Speaking of Perry Point – I realized I never really took the time to give you a thorough picture of the living conditions in 9H, the dorm-building-converted-from-an-old-nursing-home at the VA Hospital where our campus is located. The oddest aspect of 9H isn’t the fact that we’re living in what looks exactly like an old hospital ward (because it is) but the fact that all of the windows are bolted shut and the heating system is broken so that it runs continuously and is impossible to turn off. The effect of these factors is that when we arrived in the midst of the Snowpocalypse, it was so hot in my room that my roommates and I had to get a wrench to force the heater down (the knob is missing so it’s impossible to turn without a wrench) and sleep with our door propped open. Literally every single person I know, except for Kareem, because he’s apparently immune to everything, came down with some kind of cold/illness from being cooped up with a group of people in a humid building with no air flow or way to alter to temperature during training. The newest 9H adventure is that while everyone was gone this round, some type of mold problem erupted in the guys’ wing and ceilings began to collapse or cave in or do something structurally and sanitarily undesirable, the details of which I’m not entirely certain. The important part of the story is that only two rooms are safe to inhabit now, so all of the guys whose rooms are affected have to move to the Village. While my team’s back in Perry Point on weekends, the guys have been sleeping in the Raven’s Nest, the common area on our floor. Another fun 9H fact is that the automatic doors at the front have been broken almost since we arrived, so our means of entering and exiting the building is to manually force them open and closed as though they’re not automatic doors – meaning that they never lock and anybody on the VA campus (where escaped mental patients are not especially unusual) could theoretically, at any time, wander into our building. Then again, I shouldn’t say the doors “never” lock – as my team discovered when we came back today, unloaded all of our bags from the van, tried to go inside, found out the doors were unopenable, and spent the next half hour eating brownies and hoola hooping on the front steps while a few of our teammates went to track down keys. It probably sounds like I’m complaining a lot in this description, but I really don’t mean any of these observations as complaints – more like hilarious experiences that make AmeriCorps the crazy/fun adventure that it is, and I feel I would be remiss in not sharing them.

Along the lines of crazy/fun AmeriCorps adventures (AmeriAdventures? We’ve really taken to adding “Ameri” as the prefix to any word… AmeriClothes… AmeriLove… AmeriRumors…) we found out today that our team will be receiving a new member, Cory, until the end of this round, and possibly for 3 weeks of next round (and they didn’t say so, but I suspect maybe permanently if it works out in these next few weeks…). He was previously on Raven 5, but had some issues on his team, so now our team’s expanding from 11 to 12 (our van, however, still seats only 12, so it looks like we’ll finally be getting a support vehicle, at least for this round). We find out on Sunday where/what our next project will be (Beth already knows, and she told Rachel, because she’s the assistant team leader, but the rest of us get to know this weekend). The good news is we know it will be a city, so no more driving 45 minutes to mooch off wi-fi at McDonalds!

4/24/10

Even though today was technically the beginning of the weekend, by team had an ISP with the Chesapeake Feline Association, so we got up bright and early, made banana pancakes, and headed out around 8:20am. We ended up going to some outlet malls where the 3^rd annual “Paws on Parade” fundraiser was taking place – and by “Paws on Parade,” what I mean is a dog fashion show, complete with crazy owners and a red carpet and all. My favorite entries included a slightly overweight pug in a sundress who stripped into a color-coordinated bikini mid-runway strut; another slightly overweight pug fully clad in Harley Davidson gear, complete with goggles, to match her 60-or-70-something year old Harley Davidson-wearing grandmotherly-looking owner; and, oddly enough, another pug-like dog wearing nothing but a small and very scandalous jean skirt that was protruding vertically into the air because her tail kept hitting it, exposing her back end. There wasn’t a lot for all of us to do, so I spent most of the time learning how to make balloon hats and animals from Rachel, who coincidentally worked as a clown for 8 years and was able to answer “yes” when asked if anyone in our group knew how to make balloon creatures for the kids. I now know how to make a really sweet hat, a giraffe, a dog, a horse, a snail, an octopus, and a rose. Another useful skill I’ve picked up from AmeriLife.

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Sterling vs. the Adirondacks

4/15/10

I don’t know how vivid of a portrait I’ve painted of Ranger Bob thus far, but basically, picture a 63 year old world ranked kayaker who wakes up at 4am every day, doesn’t stop for lunch breaks, has been working with power tools since he was 10 years old, and could beat any member of my team of 20-something-year-olds in any physical challenge, and you have Ranger Bob. Now picture a much less superhuman, more laid back older gentleman with a vague physical resemblance to the grandpa in Arrested Development, and you have Ranger Andy, the ranger at the camp where we’re currently working/staying (Ranger Andy’s response when we told him our lunch break was 30 minutes long: “That’s not nearly long enough, I can’t eat that fast!”). Of course, Ranger Bob is still around as well, but since it’s Ranger Andy’s camp, all decisions/management issues are kind of deferred to him, and the whole work experience has a much more relaxed feel.

Today, Rachel and I were assigned to Adirondacks, so we transported all of our supplies over to the units (the camp is gigantic compared to the other camps we’ve worked at, and requires a map and/or some form of vehicle to travel around it) and began building stair sets. A lot of time was consumed by setting up, cutting wood/getting supplies ready, and learning the process for building the steps, so we only built four stair sets today, but we’ll finish the rest tomorrow. After work, our team gathered around the fire pit and completed some fun challenges to earn Girl Scout patches for Camp Todd and Camp Sandy Pines. (The Girl Scouts are letting us receive patches for all four camps we work at, but in order to do so, we have to complete the same challenges that the Girl Scouts themselves have to do—trivia quizzes about the camps, a 16-legged race [modified for my group from the traditional 4-legged race], learning to build a campfire, etc.) By the end of my spike I’ll have one patch for each camp we’ve been to, and they’ll all fit together to form the shape of the Delmarva Peninsula. Who says you have to be an actual Girl Scout—or mug a Girl Scout—to have a sweet Girl Scout patch collection?

4/20/10

On Friday, Rachel and I finished all of the stairs for the Adirondacks and our group went back early, around 3:00, got in the van, and headed back to our home-away-from-home Camp Todd for the weekend. Saturday night was Shawn’s birthday, so we all went out to a surprisingly expensive restaurant/bar in Easton, where I finally got my pina colada! (That’s the good news; the bad news is the pina colada ended up costing me over $12 after tip… I definitely did not intend to buy a $10 drink.) We then headed over to the Greene Turtle for some more reasonably priced entertainment. On Sunday, our team tried to go to a minor league baseball game in Annapolis, but when we arrived, the game was mysteriously canceled… Our team leader had called the stadium four hours prior about getting Shawn’s name on the screen for his birthday, and everything was okay, but somehow between her calling and us arriving, the entire event was called off. We ended up going to another baseball game instead, so at least we broke our curse of our team arriving at baseball stadiums to nonexistent games.

Yesterday and today Rachel and I worked on framing the fronts of the Adirondacks, which began about as horribly as possible, with everything in the world going wrong (I won’t get into the boring details, but suffice to say, Monday was thoroughly disastrous and by the end of the day we hadn’t even finished framing one of the cabins). Today went significantly better, though, once we began to establish a system and the carpentry gods stopped conspiring to make us fail at our job. In other news, tomorrow Emily comes back from New Orleans, so we’re excited for that! In still other news, my computer screen randomly took on the appearance of a crazy photo negative, so everything is black and difficult to read semi-flickering inverted high contrast colors… I’m currently typing in white letters on an almost all-black screen. I don’t really know when I’ll get a chance to go somewhere and have someone try to fix it, so I guess I better get used to this fun new color scheme.

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Plaid Party in New York

4/7/10

Today was much more successful than yesterday; Rachel and I finished up our remaining work in a little under an hour, and then spent the rest of the day with our team moving brush and raking dirt and gravel piles. It was exhausting, but we finished everything ahead of schedule, which means we get tomorrow off!! Come 8:00 a.m. We’ll say goodbye to Sandy Pines forever and head back to Perry Point to start Spring Break.

In other news, my passport/checks finally arrived in the mail! Unfortunately, the world is not set up as a very check-friendly place… I went to Wal-Mart where I spent way longer than necessary trying to find a way to cash a check to myself, buy a money order, or buy a prepaid visa card. Basically, to do any of these things, I need either a) my bank to exist on the East coast, or b) a credit/debit card with which to pay for my money order/prepaid card… Which would negate the necessity of buying said card. Eventually I went through the line twice and bought two packs of gum, in order to get $40 cash back (the maximum amount over you can write a check is $20). I’m hoping my cards arrive in the mail before I leave for New York on Thursday; otherwise, I might be buying a lot of gum at Wal-Mart.

4/14/10

Once again, I am falling very behind in my blogging… Let me recap the last almost-week of adventures.

Thursday: My team actually finished our work for the week on Wednesday, so Ranger Bob gave us Thursday off and we packed up the van and made the trip back to Perry Point to begin spring break – and by “spring break,” I mean a slightly elongated four-day weekend, but we were ecstatic to have any break, regardless of the length. Nothing too noteworthy occurred during the van ride, save for a brief ride on a tiny ferry for which our van was significantly over capacity, but the attendant running the ferry didn’t seem to notice or care. When we got back to Perry Point I found out my credit card had arrived in the mail, which was fantastic news, as I can now purchase items with other forms of payment besides checks, and not feel like that 80 year old woman holding up the entire grocery line with her checkbook. We were excited to see that a couple of other teams were back at 9H for break, so we actually got to see a few faces other than the 10 we’d been staring at for the past four weeks.

Friday: At 10am, Victoria, Diana, Mike, Curtis and I embarked on our exciting New York spring break adventure, which began in a not-so-exciting way with a lot of sitting in various forms of transportation, as most travel adventures do. Jay, Victoria and Mike’s team leader, was nice enough to drive us to Philly where we could catch a train to Trenton, New Jersey, and then to New York. Before catching our first train we decided to stop in a restaurant for some authentic Philly Cheesesteaks, which in my case consisted of a Philly Cheese – it was actually just a grilled cheese sandwich in no way resembling or marketed as a Philly Cheesesteak, but I decided to call it a Philly Cheese. There was a brief scare when we arrived at the train station and Diana realized she had lost her ticket just as we were about to board; she was preparing to buy a new one when a strange man, who was apparently an employee, approached her and asked her to verify the last four digits of her credit card number. Apparently, he had found her ticket—and her receipt from her credit card—on the ground, and was waiting for a confused and frantic-looking person to approach the ticket buying machine. The situation resolved itself miraculously, in a way that situations such as that one almost never do, and we were able to catch our train and arrive in New York around 5:30pm, where Kareem was waiting to meet us. We checked into our hostel, which consisted of a very small, tall apartment building with creaky stairs that made stampeding elephant sounds when a group of people walk up or down them, a bathroom that was literally a small closet, and a very cramped room containing 3 bunk beds and a door that neither closed nor locked. After checking in, we went to Union Square, where Victoria and Kareem impulse-bought some African instruments, and we had dollar pizza for dinner. Afterward we walked around Times Square and ogled at the bright lights and fancy stores, and Diana and Curtis accidentally spent $10 and $20, respectively, on bulk M&Ms at the M&Ms store. We then visited Diana’s aunt, who was coincidentally also visiting New York from California, and returned to our hostel.

Saturday: Saturday morning, Mike, Diana, Victoria and I went to Fordham University in the Bronx to volunteer at the Special Olympics for an ISP (Kareem and Curtis couldn’t join us because they decided to come on the New York trip after us and Victoria had only signed up the four of us). Our roles were pretty simple; Victoria and Mike worked with a group of basketball players who aren’t yet ready to compete, while Diana and I doubled as “assistant coaches”/cheerleaders for the Staten Island All Stars. The coach was a really incredible woman who had been volunteering with the Special Olympics for 50 years, and she had been working with this particular team since most of the players were 10 years old. The whole experience was really fun and inspiring; one man, Dennis, gave Diana and me approximately 500 hugs throughout the night, and had us take pictures of him with his medal at the end of the day (unfortunately, our team lost both games—the second game only by one point—but they still received medals). Two of the players were identical twins named Chris and Kris—as if being identical didn’t already make it confusing enough to distinguish between two people. After the Special Olympics, we went back to Union Square where I went in the most gigantic Whole Foods I’ve seen in my life; ate at Life Cafe, a very vegetarian and vegan-friendly restaurant that appears in the musical RENT, and unsuccessfully tried to order a pina colada but instead settled for a frozen margarita (I was recently inspired by some really amazing pina colada flavored Orbit gum and have made it my new mission to try an actual pina colada); went to Strand Books, where I felt like I was back in Portland at Powell’s; and got coffee at Cosi Cafe. After coffee, everyone except Curtis, Diana and me went back, but the three of us got drinks and spent the rest of our evening/night wandering the streets of New York, unsuccessfully trying to find pina coladas, and looking for nonexistent public restrooms.

Sunday: Somewhat intentionally, 4 out of the 6 of us ended up wearing plaid shirts on Sunday, so we decided to begin our day by taking a group photo outside of our hostel. As we did so, an adorable old man walked by in a plaid shirt and Victoria invited him to join our photo; we then proceeded to spend the rest of our day looking for plaid-clad people around the streets of New York with the vague intention of taking pictures of/with them, but we never actually did so. Our next destination was S’mac, a macaroni and cheese restaurant that our friend Amanda had told us about. After we’d had our fill of greasy cheese covered pasta, we walked to Central Park, people watched for awhile, and spent a very long time trying to find each other after splitting into two groups (phrases like “I’m in a big field” and “I’m next to the bike trail” become rather unhelpful when you’re surrounded by 80 blocks of park). Once we were finally reunited, we took a ferry to Staten Island and briefly caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty from very far away. I bought a requisite tourist “I ♥ NY” shirt from a street vendor, and we walked through China Town where I got some falafel. We then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, wandered around Brooklyn for awhile, returned to Times Square and looked for inexpensive food but failed miserably because it was Times Square (Kareem inquired as to the price of a cheesecake at one restaurant, and the response was $80), went back to Union Square and tried to eat at the dollar pizza place but failed because it was closed, and ended up at another restaurant where we split a cheese pizza and a slice of cheesecake. By the end of the night we were delirious with exhaustion and returned to our hostel to crash, but were delayed slightly when our key got stuck in the front door and we spent about 20 minutes trying to get it out before finding the manager, who also couldn’t get it out, and told us to just leave it. It’s a very comforting thought to be staying in a hostel in Harlem with a key lodged in the main door, and a door to your own room that doesn’t close.

Monday: Having only a few hours in New York, we sought out a very important destination that we had as of yet not frequented during our time in New York – Magnolia cupcakes. After eating fancy, overpriced cupcakes, we sat in Central Park for awhile, said goodbye to Kareem who had to catch a flight back to New Orleans, stopped by Times Square so Victoria could buy a souvenir patch for her sweatshirt, and returned to the train station. We got back to 9H around 6pm, cooked a potluck dinner consisting of mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, and tomato soup (basically all of the food we could scrounge up between my group and Raven 4) and hung out with some of our friends from the other groups for the rest of the night.

Tuesday: Yesterday we said goodbye to spring break and hello to AmeriLife again. Our group met up at 2pm, packed our van, and headed to Earleville, where our newest camp is located. After we dropped off our stuff, we immediately did PT and headed out to find internet. Beth looked up Wal-Mart in the GPS and found the closest one an hour away (we’re really out in the middle of nowhere) so we drove through miles upon miles of farms and fields until we arrived at what was supposed to be Wal-Mart, but was in reality a Wal-Mart distribution center. We eventually found a McDonalds in Dover, Delaware, where Diana and I became friends with an old man who eats at that McDonalds every day and seemed very excited to see new people. When we got home, I decided to take a shower in our creepy basement shower room, but was dissuaded by a) the ice cold water in both stalls, and b) the proliferation of gigantic spiders everywhere. I ended up washing my hair in the sink upstairs, instead. I then went to bed on the world’s loudest mattress pad; every time anyone rolled over—or for that matter, breathed—it sounded as though they had wrapped themselves in tarp and were thrashing around in the midst of some type of natural disaster. It was a very interesting night of sleep.

Wednesday: We woke up early and made the hour-and-a-half drive to City Center, where we cleared brush at another camp to get it ready for a group of Girl Scouts to spend the night. Apparently, a lot of the Red Oak trees are diseased and recently had to be cut down, so we went through and cleared the tree carcasses out of areas where Girl Scouts will be frolicking and could trip and fall. It was Ranger Bob’s birthday so we had cupcakes with lunch, and we ended up finishing our work early and were able to leave by 3:00.

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Bye, Sandy Pines… I barely knew you.

4/6/10

Yesterday began our first (and only) week at Camp Sandy Pines. Our living arrangements here consist of one gigantic room with a bunch of mattress pads and sleeping bags stacked on the ground, divided by an imaginary line into the “girls’ side” and “guys’ side,” and an attached bathroom and kitchen. We started the day with some morning PT in the middle of our sleeping room, and then Ranger Bob met us at 8:30 to assign us our projects for the week. I’m working with Rachel on building four structures for the challenge course, three of which we completed yesterday, minus some final touches – a log on some posts, a zigzaggy wooden structure for kids to walk across, and a 3×3 platform. While working, we also discovered the largest spider I’ve seen in my life – unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera to take a picture, but it was brown and huge and furry and horrifying. Curtis also found an enormous hissing cockroach, as well as an entire cockroach colony. (Moments such as these make me grateful for my sheltered childhood in the Pacific Northwest, where the most terrifying creature I’d encounter would be a spider half the size of the one I saw yesterday.) Later we went to Panera for internet, where I spent my last dollar on the same cookie I bought when I lost my wallet… Just for the irony of it.

Today, all Rachel and I had left to do was build was the teeter totter, screw down some metal straps on the log, add a support beam to the 3×3 platform, and put some more screws in the zigzaggy structure, which we thought we could easily finish in a day… That is, before everything that could slow us down did slow us down. First, we were told to cut through a metal pipe with a hacksaw and drill through some metal straps, both of which sound like reasonable tasks until you actually start doing them and realize how tedious and verging-on-impossible they are (I also managed to break a titanium drill bit in the process). Next, a tree fell on our zigzaggy structure so we had to fix two of the boards. A slew of other difficulties ensued until finally, we thought we were done with the teeter totter and went to put it up on the posts, only to discover that the structure was over a foot in the air, and the post was supposed to be flush with the ground – apparently, placing Girl Scouts on a precarious, moving structure a foot and a half in the air is some kind of a safety hazard. We ended up having to re-cut the posts twice, and still have some cutting left to do and some boards to screw tomorrow. So, our work is cut out for us.

4/7/10

Today was much more successful than yesterday; Rachel and I finished up our remaining work in a little under an hour, and then spent the rest of the day with our team moving brush and raking dirt and gravel piles. It was exhausting, but we finished everything ahead of schedule, which means we get tomorrow off!! Come 8:00 a.m. We’ll say goodbye to Sandy Pines forever and head back to Perry Point to start Spring Break.

In other news, my passport/checks finally arrived in the mail! Unfortunately, the world is not set up as a very check-friendly place… I went to Wal-Mart where I spent way longer than necessary trying to find a way to cash a check to myself, buy a money order, or buy a prepaid visa card. Basically, to do any of these things, I need either a) my bank to exist on the East coast, or b) a credit/debit card with which to pay for my money order/prepaid card… Which would negate the necessity of buying said card. Eventually I went through the line twice and bought two packs of gum, in order to get $40 cash back (the maximum amount over you can write a check is $20). I’m hoping my cards arrive in the mail before I leave for New York on Thursday; otherwise, I might be buying a lot of gum at Wal-Mart.

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From Denton to Fruitland

4/4/10 (Easter!)

A breakdown of the last couple of days:

Thursday: Nothing too eventful happened on Thursday; I finished putting up orienteering signs (I couldn’t find two of the signs, even though I went to the right place on the map, because the little bright pink flags somehow managed to camouflage themselves against the brown-and-green shrubbery surrounding them; of course, Ranger Bob made fun of me for this, but whatever, I traipsed through creeks and along trails and over hills and behind vines and most likely through poison ivy and tick-covered flora to successfully find the 24 other signs sprawled across camp). We ended work at 3:00 and Ranger Bob’s fiance, Karen, took us canoeing and kayaking. First she gave us a demonstration of freestyle canoeing, which is hard to describe but basically is like ice skating or ballet, but with a canoe… (She did things in a boat that I never thought were possible, and somehow didn’t end up face first in the water. It was pretty incredible.) Then we went out on the water in kayaks—except for Steve and Diana, who decided to canoe—and later we had Bob and Karen over for pasta dinner.

Friday: Each week, my team leader and sometimes another member from my team go grocery shopping to get groceries for the rest of the week. So there’s always one day when we’re suddenly overloaded by food choices and giddy at the meal options available to us, and by the end of the week we’re scrounging around for whatever is left from the good old days when we had a plethora of food in our refrigerator and cupboards. However, it’s never really gotten dire; we always have enough food that we don’t have to worry about starving or turning to the streets. However, this week we managed to run entirely out of bread, fruit, most of our cereal, and basically any other food besides condiments, by Thursday night. We were a bit worried about what was going to happen come Friday morning, but we pushed our fears out of our minds and woke up prepared to pack ketchup and rice for lunch. What we didn’t realize, though, was that as an April Fool’s joke, our team leader had tricked us and hidden a bunch of the food to make us think we ran out way earlier than usual; she packed us lunches with PB&Js, animal crackers, pretzels, and bananas that were waiting for us on the counter in the morning.

As for the rest of the day – Friday was off to a bad start when one of my teammates discovered a live mouse with its foot and/or tail caught in a mouse trap, flailing around on the living room floor. Poor Leroy 😦 😦

I then went to work, where Ranger Bob asked me to replace all of the silver screws in the shower room with white aluminum screws. However, the aluminum screws were incredibly soft and I ended up breaking off about half of the heads before deciding that I was going to destroy the shower room and run out of screws before I could complete the wall. So I spent the rest of the day raking leaves and moving sticks and brush, then packing up our van at around 4:00 and heading off with my team to Shady Pines, another Girl Scout camp, located in Fruitland, near Salisbury, Maryland. While we were driving to the camp we passed by a live reenactment of Jesus on the cross (or rather, Jesuses on the cross, there were a lot of them…) which was probably one of the more disturbing things I’ve seen in my life.

EDIT: I almost forgot to mention the most important part of my day: later at dinner at a Mexican restaurant, after we finished our meal, the owner of the restaurant came around and shot wine from some kind of flask-meets-squirtgun like contraption into all of our mouths. It was really weird but at the same time completely amazing… But mostly really weird.

Saturday: For as bad of a day as Friday was (I shouldn’t really complain about Friday, anyway; Leroy’s day was significantly worse…), Saturday made up for it in its amazingness. My team began our weekend with an ISP (individual service project, in case I haven’t explained that acronym yet) picking up garbage at a park, but there wasn’t a lot to pick up, so we just walked around with trash bags cleaning up cigarette buts and enjoying the sunny day (we did find a large pile of folded up diapers though, which was kind of weird). When we finished our ISP, we drove to Ocean City to go to the beach, where, according to Ranger Bob, it was supposed to be 80 degrees. In reality, it was about 50 degrees and windy, and I was wearing two sweatshirts to keep warm. Despite my freezingness, I decided it was a good idea to eat ice cream, so Diana and I bought sundaes at Dumser’s Drive In. We then sat on the beach until it was too cold to sit on the beach, walked around for awhile, and found a T-shirt store with 2 for $10 sweatshirts and $1.99 T-shirts. Not being able to pass up this shopping opportunity, Diana and I bought matching tie-dyed sweatshirts that say “Senior Week 2008” and “Senior Week 2009,” respectively, as well as sweet Star Trek T-shirts. We changed into our new gear and met our team at Seacrets, a nearby Jamaican-style bar that was overpopulated by a lot of drunk 60 year olds, one of whom told me that I looked like I was 13 and had a fake I.D. She then proceeded to complain about the fact that there are “no Americans” left in California, and that nobody there speaks English. She looked at me and said, “I can just tell you’re a liberal. You look like a liberal. It’s okay. You’re young.” I smiled awkwardly and escaped the conversation before it became more uncomfortable than it already was. Later on, Diana, Curtis, Steve and I walked to the beach and watched the waves while we speakerphoned Kareem in New Orleans. Speaking of which, Kareem will be joining Victoria (one of my roommates), Mike (a guy on Victoria’s team), Diana and me in New York for Spring Break next weekend! Kareem’s from New York, so I told him to show me all of New York in 3 days… I think it’s very doable.

Now it’s Sunday and I’m at a laundromat with my team waiting for my laundry to dry, because we don’t have washers or dryers at the new camp. We tried to go to a baseball game this morning but arrived at the stadium and discovered that, alas, home games don’t start until next week, so we went to Wal-Mart instead (the same Wal-Mart where I returned my speakers when Shawn, Jon and I accidentally drove to Salisbury, and the creepy woman at customer service told me I needed to get a yellow sticker to do so). After this  we’re going back to camp for an Easter “surprise” (a.k.a. Easter egg hunt) and Easter dinner.

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“I’m so glad I ordered the four-legged chicken.”

[I’m splitting these entries into two posts to make them slightly more manageable for reading]

3/29/10

This morning I finished up mattress repairing with Curtis (another team member – whenever I randomly introduce a new name with no explanation, he/she is probably a team member… I don’t think I ever actually introduced the names of my team members, so I’ll do that at the end of this post). After mattress repairing we went over to Choptank to work on miscellaneous tasks such as cleaning windows, which sounded like a relatively pleasant task until I discovered the abundance of spiders, spider webs, and spider eggs covering each window; painting trim and a small wall; and replacing shower curtains. Ranger Bob then sent me over to the shower house, where I drilled large holes to put up shower curtains. I left work around 6pm, had tortellini soup for dinner, and watched Watchmen with a few of my teammates while the rest of my team went to Panera. (Funny Watchmen-related fact: if you watch the movie with closed captioning on, at one point Dan and Laurie are having a serious conversation over dinner, when suddenly an extra’s faint background comment appears as a subtitle at the bottom of the screen: “I’m so glad I ordered the four-legged chicken.” I wonder if the closed-caption-writers consciously decided to include that? And more importantly, what is a four-legged chicken?)

Anyway, a way overdue list of my teammates so I don’t have to introduce them as “my teammate” in future blog posts, and/or cause confusion by omitting any introduction entirely and assuming that you know exactly who I’m talking about (I realize I list of names doesn’t really offer any further insight into my team, but at least you’ll recognize the names now):

-Beth (my team leader)

-Curtis

-Diana (also one of my roommates)

-Emily (also one of my roommates, and currently away in New Orleans on a composite team, but will be rejoining us in a couple of weeks)

-Jon

-Lesley

-Nick (currently away on a firefighting composite team, but will be rejoining us next round)

-Rachel

-Shawn

-Steve

03/30/10

Hey look, I’m actually updating this daily! (Too bad I can’t upload it daily, so it still ends up being one gigantic word explosion…) Today I finished installing shower rods and curtains in the shower room (I got to drill holes in cinder block, whooo) and then super glued gigantic patches onto a ripped couch, because apparently working on the mattresses for the past two days now qualifies me as a master fabric patcher. Once I finished with the couch, I helped Rachel clean up and move some furniture in Choptank, and then Ranger Bob showed me how to put up the rest of a fence he’d started. All of the wood was cut and ready to assemble, so I just had to measure out the distances, dig ditches, and put the pieces together (with some help from Diana and Lesley to lift them into place). When I was finished assembling the fence, Ranger Bob showed me how to use a drill to reinforce all of the pieces with screws. At first I kept stripping the screws because I wasn’t aligning the drill properly, but once I got the hang of it, the job went pretty quickly. It was raining and cold so Beth had us finish work an hour early, and to make up for the lost work time we’re starting work at 7:30 tomorrow morning. Supposedly after I finish piling dirt around the bottoms of the fence posts I’ll be digging holes for orienteering signs, so hopefully I don’t get lost trying to navigate my way to each location… It will be an adventure, as always.

3/31/10

I FOUND MY WALLET!!!!! Well, actually, Lesley and Diana found my wallet when they went to Panera tonight and asked an employee to look in the lost and found. I don’t understand why the employees I talked to when I called Panera (several times) didn’t check the lost and found, but basically, my teammates are amazing. Unfortunately, I still have no money because I canceled my credit and debit cards… But at least I don’t have to carry around my passport everywhere as my only form of I.D. From now on, I’m never letting my wallet out of my sight.

In other news, my team leader found a mouse in our house last night!! I thought I saw something running across the kitchen one night, but when I went to look nothing was there and I figured I imagined it. I guess it’s just a really sneaky, speedy mouse. Rachel has given it the name Leroy – so when we eventually do meet, we can address him (or her?) by name.

In other, more important news, today I spent my workday walking around camp with a wheelbarrow full of screws and nails and hammers and drills and sign pieces, replacing old distance marker signs and attaching orienteering signs to stakes. I think I stripped approximately 10 millions screws trying to attach the wooden blocks to the posts, but after I got the hang of it the job started to go faster. I got about half of the camp done today, so I’ll be finishing the rest tomorrow. After work my team went on a 2 mile run for PT – because what better way is there to end a 9 hour workday than with a 2 mile run?

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RPGs, lost wallets, and more painting

3/24/10

It’s inconvenient not having internet and relying on Panera and the library to upload blog entries, because they end up becoming really sporadic and not very current. I also end up with days like today, where I just upload two blog entries into one post and overwhelm you with my long-winded accounts of minor events. But I’ll try to be quick with this one since I’m not sure how long I’ll be at Panera.

This morning Diana and I finished some touch up painting, completed a second coat of sealing on the floors, swept, and moved various objects into the kitchen. (As a side note, one of the objects was a large rack full of trays of assorted dust-covered odds and ends, including a lot of ancient-looking Motorola walkie talkies and some equally ancient-looking corded phones. As we were preparing to move the cart, Diana and I smelled a horrible, deathly, sulphur-mixed-with-dog-poop-esque scent. Thinking one of us had tracked something into the room, we checked both of our shoes, surveyed the area, found nothing, and eventually went back to work. Awhile later, after moving the cart into the kitchen from an adjoining room, we realized the deathly smell was emanating from some cast iron plates and dinnerware in one of the trays. Apparently, rancid oil on cast iron smells exactly like a stink bomb. We alerted Ranger Bob of this situation and removed the dinnerware from the kitchen, so fortunately, no Girl Scouts will die from rancid dinnerware-induced illness.)

After we finished up these tasks and were ACTUALLY FINALLY OFFICIALLY DONE WITH THE KITCHEN, I helped Ranger Bob spray myrrhic acid (I’m not sure how that’s spelled, or if that’s even the right word) on a brick fireplace to remove the black and white marks all over the surface. I wasn’t able to finish though, because at 3:00 we stopped work early to get zip-line training! Ranger Bob showed us how to set up the equipment, use the zip-line, and rescue someone with a rope in the unfortunate event that they get halfway down the line and become stuck. Overall, it was a pretty good day at work – but when your day involves spraying acid at bricks and playing in zip-lines, there’s really no way it can be bad.

3/28/10

Events from the past few days:

-I learned how to geocache: In case you don’t know what geocaching is (you may know, but I didn’t know, so I’ll explain it anyway) it’s basically a form of hiking where you use a GPS to locate a set of geographical coordinates. The version I tried wasn’t so much “hiking” as it was a short walk across camp, but it was geared toward six year old girls, so I suppose it’s fitting. Once I arrived at the correct location, I hunted around for a camo-colored container and filled it with toys for when the Girl Scouts find it. On a similar note, today my team will be going orienteering, which is similar to geogaching but involves going out into the woods with a map and a compass and trying to find your way to a given destination. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, considering a) my absolute lack of any inherent (or learned) sense of direction, b) my inability to read a map or compass, and c) the fact that T-Mobile gets service in about two spots in all of Denton, so I will most likely be unable to contact anyone to rescue me should I become stranded in the middle of the woods. It will be exciting!

-More painting and cleaning, and some raking too: On Thursday I finished up fireplace cleaning and proceeded to spend the last six hours of my workday raking leaves, which is way more exhausting than it sounds – it basically felt like six straight hours of PT, but more tedious and devoid of the militaristic chanting. Speaking of PT, after we painted and cleaned the inside of Choptank on Friday, we did “gorilla drills”—or maybe “guerilla drills,” I’m a bit unclear on the spelling—for which we divided into two teams and did a relay-race type contest involving crab walks, sprinting, bear walks, bunny hops (maybe it’s “gorilla drills,” they seem to like the animal names…) and many other extremely difficult and simultaneously ridiculous-looking exercises. We all pretty much collapsed from exhaustion afterward, and one person threw up. But it was fun nevertheless, and my team won, so our team leader cooked us breakfast the next day as a prize. On Saturday we ended up having to work too, but instead of painting or cleaning we were setting up gigantic tents and then helping to clean up the camp with a couple of local Girl Scout troops – my job was to go around inspecting mattress pads and patching them up with pieces of tarp and super glue. At the end of the day we all got Girl Scout patches, so now I just need to flash my patch and everyone will believe I’m a Girl Scout. I’m not sure what the advantages to that are yet, but I’m sure there must be some.

-My team is basically famous: As the team Media Reps, Rachel and I are responsible for sending out press releases to local newspapers and radio/TV stations to get NCCC in the news. Yesterday we found out that our efforts are finally starting to pay off, because our team got a short article in the Times-Record! (First the Times-Record; next… The New York Times.)

-Things I am currently without: Any form of I.D., money, credit/debit card, checks, or access to a U.S. Bank… Somehow, between Panera and Camp Todd, I managed to lose my wallet. (Diana’s theory is that a woman who approached us at Panera asking where she could find free wi-fi secretly stole my wallet… My theory is that God is punishing me for being gluttonous and ordering a second cookie that night – the last time I saw my wallet was when I paid for the cookie.) Anyway, I checked the van and house, called Panera, and went back and checked the booth where I was sitting (and accidentally weirded out a girl who was done with her meal and about to leave… I paced around the area while casually trying to look under her table, but I’m pretty sure the entire scenario came across as incredibly creepy and made her leave much faster than she would have otherwise. In retrospect, I probably should have explained what I was doing, rather than acting like a creeper). It will be a minimum of 7 days until U.S. Bank can send a new debit card to my permanent address, which will then have to be sent to Perry Point and forwarded to my spike location… And I can’t get a new Washington photo I.D. while I’m out of state, but don’t have the necessary proof of residency to get a Maryland I.D. Fortunately, my mom can send me my passport, so I’ll just have to guard it with my life once I get it. It’s a rather unnerving feeling to have absolutely no way of going anywhere or buying anything, but I suppose it could be much worse… And at least my food and housing are paid for already, so I don’t have to worry about ending up on the streets of Denton.

Still 3/28/10

Orienteering wasn’t nearly as disastrous as I imagined it would be, but that’s mostly because Diana and I stayed in the back of the group and followed everyone else as they orienteered their way through camp. It was fun though, and I now know how to use a compass to find my way to a point on a map – a skill that actually would be very useful to possess if I carried either maps or compasses on me on a regular (or even occasional) basis. After orienteering, Diana and I cooked vegan shepherd’s pie using a recipe we found in Scott Pilgrim vol. 2, and it was a huge success – despite (or perhaps because of) having to guess at ingredient amounts and improvise our way through somewhat vague instructions such as “Add some soy milk and stir so everything’s a bit saucy!” and “Add the fake meat stuff!” Once dinner was over, one of my teammates, Steve, led a group of us in a game he created called “1914.” Essentially, it’s a role playing game set in an alternate reality in the year 1914, wherein a group of heroic super power-indued historical figures from the era must defeat a group of evil, equally super power-indued historical figures from the era. It was our first time playing, after having spent the last couple of weeks creating characters. My character is Willis Haviland Carrier, the engineer and inventor considered the “father” of the modern air conditioner (my super powers include shooting ice needles at my foes, freezing people in place, and creating ice barriers around my body to protect myself). I could ramble on for much longer about the rules of the game, but I’m still slightly unclear about the rules of the game myself— there are a lot of cards and dice and stat sheets involved—although I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.

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