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End of the year and graduation

My year with AmeriCorps Cape Cod came to an end this past weekend. It's hard to believe it's actually over. It was hard to say goodbye to people but not as hard as I thought it would be because I know that it's not goodbye forever. I've made many life-long friends from this experience and I know I will see them before too long. The last few weeks of the program were sort of a blur of finishing projects, doing things for the last time, and packing and cleaning to prepare to leave, but I will give some of the highlights that have happened since I last posted.

One event I went to during my IP was the grand opening of the new bathhouse at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown. A cool thing about that event for me is that I got to see the prototype of a sign I helped design that is located next to the water bottle filling station. I'm all about refillable water bottles, so I was excited to be involved in a project like that to encourage people to be more green. Here are some pictures from the grand opening celebration.

New bathhouse viewed from the beach

Live music

Water bottle filling sign

Me next to the sign and the filling station

Bathhouse from the front

The next noteworthy thing is that we finished the mural! Even though it got rained out at Highlands Fest, we were able to go 2 additional days and finish painting it, and I was really happy with how it came out! Here it is.

Other than those things, we just tried to pack as much fun and new things into the last few weeks as we could. We went bowling as a group again, which we've done a few times throughout the year, some of us went to a Cape League baseball game, we went to see a sunrise over the ocean (although I overslept and missed the actual rising of the sun, but it was still pretty), we went paddleboarding (we were able to borrow 2 paddleboards from someone at Suzanne's IP and we went to Pleasant Bay in Harwich and took turns on them), and we went to the beach pretty much every day for the last few days. I was also able to complete the number one item on my Cape Cod bucket list, which was biking the entire Cape Cod rail trail, which runs 22 miles from Dennis to Wellfleet. I couldn't find anyone who wanted to do it with me for the whole year, but then when my dad came to the Cape for vacation he did it with me! It was a lot of fun and I felt very accomplished. It was definitely the longest bike ride I've ever done.

Then there was graduation. It was a nice ceremony, and there were 3 speakers instead of just one keynote speaker, which I liked. It was pretty surreal trying to grasp that it really was the end of the AmeriCorps year, and I got a little choked up a few times while people were speaking. It was an amazing year and I made so many good friends, it was hard to leave that all behind. But I know we will stay in touch and that when we see each other again it will feel like no time has passed. And I'm excited for Nevada, although now it seems like even though I have 2 weeks until I fly out there that I have so much to do to get ready that 2 weeks doesn't feel like enough. So even though I was sad to leave this chapter of my life behind, I'm excited for what's coming next.

Summer time and job update!

It's definitely summer time on Cape Cod! The weather is getting hot and the tourists are flocking here in huge numbers. Driving has gotten harder because of all the cars on the roads, but luckily I haven't gotten caught in any really bad traffic yet (although I'm sure that will change soon, especially since this weekend is 4th of July weekend). My time here is winding down (there's a little less than a month left), which is sad because I don't want to leave everyone, but I'm trying to take advantage of the rest of my time here as much as I can. Here are some of the cool things I've done and places I've gone in the past few weeks:

Pilgrim Monument

A few weekends ago, one of my roommates and I went to Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown and climbed to the top. The climb wasn't as hard as I was expecting, and the view from the top was awesome! You can see really far from the top, and on really clear days supposedly you can see Boston. But it was pretty hazy that day so we only saw as far as Plymouth, which is still pretty good.

The monument!

View of downtown from the top

View from the top

View from the top

Fishing for crabs

One of my roommates brought a crab trap back with her a few weeks ago, so she and I and another of our roommates went out to the pier in Wellfleet to set it up and see what we could catch. We only caught 3 crabs (and threw them back in afterwards) but it was a fun time since I had never done anything like that before. Here is a picture of our first catch:

Highlands Fest

Highlands Fest is an event that I helped plan at my IP which celebrates arts, sciences and education at the Highlands Center in Truro, which is the old air force station that the National Seashore acquired in the 90s. The activities this year included live music, mural painting, loading of the wood-fired kiln, informational videos about science at the seashore (including one about the climate research facility that has been at the Highlands Center for the past year), and a demonstration of a weather balloon launch at the climate research facility. The weather was pretty rainy most of the day, and the part of the mural that we got painted in the morning got washed away once the rain started, but all things considered we got a pretty good number of people to come. The music was a big draw I think, and people were really interested in the climate research aspect of the day. 

Painting the mural

Watching the climate research video

View of the climate research facility

The balloonist getting ready to release the weather balloon

View of the Highlands Center from the climate research site

Long Point

Last weekend, 3 members of the Bourne house came to visit us and I went with them to hike Long Point in Provincetown, which is the very tip of Cape Cod. It involves walking across a jetty, which you have to time right because it is submerged at high tide, and then walking along the beach to the end. It took about 3 hours to do the whole hike, and it was tiring because walking on sand gets really hard after a while, but it was lots of fun. And it feels like an accomplishment to say I walked to the farthest point on the Cape. 

Walking across the jetty

View back towards Provincetown from the jetty

Me at the tip!

Long Point Lighthouse

And last but certainly not least, my job update! Last week I was offered a position with the Nevada Conservation Corps and I accepted it. So I'm moving to Nevada at the end of the summer! The program is based out of Las Vegas but I'll be working on conservation projects outside the city throughout the southern part of the state. It will be sort of similar to what I'm doing now except it is focused specifically on the outdoor land management work, whereas my program now has the outreach and IP components, and most of the time we'll be camping for several days at a time while we are completing projects. So in many ways it will be a big change for me, but I'm excited for the challenge, and since I'll most likely drive there, I'm going to make it into a road trip to go to some places I really want to see, like New Orleans and the Grand Canyon. So even though I'm sad about my year on Cape Cod coming to an end, at least I have something new and exciting to look forward to afterwards!

Some updates from the past month

Hello, and welcome back to my blog! I know I haven't been writing very often, but most of my weeks now have pretty much the same routine and I get caught up in it and don't have too much new stuff to share. However, several out of the ordinary things have happened in the past few weeks, so I figured I would share them all at once.

First, I went on my first whale watch a few weekends ago! It wasn't as exciting as I had hoped for because we only saw one whale and it was right at the end, so we rode around on the boat for several hours without seeing much of interest. But just being on the boat was fun because I don't think I'd ever been on a boat that big and I've realized this year that I'm a big fan of boats. The seas were a little rough the day we went out, which they warned us about beforehand, but I wasn't really expecting what that would be like. Within the first 20 minutes of leaving the dock, I got hit a few times with spray that splashed onto the upper deck where we were sitting when the front of the boat hit a wave, and it got really hard to walk around the boat at one point because it was moving so much. But all of that was fun, and added excitement to the experience.

Another noteworthy thing that happened recently was that I gave a presentation to the Wellfleet Conservation Commission with one of my roommates. Each of us are supposed to do one of these presentations before the end of the year, and since Joelle and I have IPs in Wellfleet we got to do this one, which is the first that happened so we got it out of the way early. Many of the towns on Cape Cod (maybe all of them?) have Conservation Commissions, which are groups of people from that town, including the town conservation agent, who meet a few times a month to talk about conservation issues in the town, discuss things that need to be done, and make decisions about applications landowners submit if they want to make changes on their land that require Conservation Commission approval. We just did a brief presentation about AmeriCorps to them so that they know what we are capable of doing for them and the town, and we gave examples of projects we have both worked on through our IPs this year. I got pretty nervous about it beforehand like I always do for presentations, but it wasn't that bad. I also have gone to their meetings before and my service partner is on the committee, so they knew me already which I think made it easier.

Then, once we though we were all done with Wet Fests, the educational water festivals in schools that we did a lot of in the fall and winter, we had another one! This one was part of a statewide water festival in Holyoke last week, so it was a little bit different than what we would usually do, first and foremost because it was several hours away. Luckily they chartered a bus for us so none of us had to drive all the way there, and we had to get up super early to leave the Cape at 5:00 am. Another way it differed from our normal education days was that there were tons more students there. It took place at Holyoke Community College, and there were elementary school students from many schools in the area, which added up to many hundreds of kids. And instead of doing about twenty 5-10 minute booths for groups of 4-6 students, we had 4 different activities that we turned into 20 minute lessons for entire classes at a time. Since I have learned this year that education is not what I want to go into, I opted to be part of a skit about water pollution instead of being part of a group that taught a lesson. I played the part of the judge in a case to decide who was responsible for polluting a bay. We did the skit probably around 10 times, so I was ready to stop by the time we ended, but it was more fun than I thought it would be and the kids really seemed to enjoy it. Then we got back on the bus for the ride back, and a few hours later made it home, very tired but knowing that we were done with Wet Fest for good.

Then another aspect of my life that I don't think I've mentioned yet is my current job search for next year. My plan is to do another year of AmeriCorps, but do a different program in another part of the country, ideally out west somewhere. So far I applied and was waitlisted for a position as a team leader for AmeriCorps NCCC in Denver, CO, I applied and was rejected from a conservation program in TN, and currently I'm pursuing a conservation program in Nevada. I actually have an interview for it tomorrow! I usually get nervous about interviews, and surprisingly I'm kind of excited about this one. I guess because I'm pretty excited about the program. I would love to live in Nevada for a year, and this program involves camping for several days at a time while doing projects, which seems like it would be a really cool experience. So I'm optimistic about it, and I would be so excited if I got accepted. And I'm sure I'll be plenty nervous tomorrow right before they call me.

That's it for now, I'll keep you all updated on how the job search progresses (hopefully it won't go on too much longer if this program works out). And sorry for the lack of visuals in this post, I'll try to add some pictures to my next one to spice it up a little.

AmeriCorps Week and the start of the summer tourist season

I just looked back at my last post and realized it's been over a month since I last posted anything on this blog! Since then the service we've been doing has been fairly routine as far as I can recall, which would explain why I haven't had anything special to write about. The weather has been really nice and I've been getting pretty tan from working outside. :) One  cool thing about it being warmer is that we've been doing more shellfishing projects, which I really like. There was one that we had to get up really early for because we had to get there at 6:00 am in order to get the right part of the tide. Here is a picture I took of the area we were working, with sun barely over the horizon.

But more recently, there have  been some exciting things going on. This past week was AmeriCorps Week, which along with MLK Day and Canal Clean-Up is one of the signature events of the year that different groups of members are responsible for planning. It seems like this one is the hardest to plan because instead of just one day, it was a whole week, although it was mostly the same projects each day, they  just took longer to accomplish than the projects for the other events. AmeriCorps week was in Mashpee this year, which was a bit of a haul for those of us who live in Wellfleet because it's about an hour away, and the projects were planting pollinator gardens, building bird boxes and pollinator boxes, and doing shellfishing projects. I was assigned to the shellfishing projects for the 3 days out of the week that I was at AmeriCorps week, so for 2 of the days I was building oyster cages and the other day I was making and filling bags with clam shells to help with growing shellfish seed. The tasks were pretty monotonous but it was fine because I tend to like shellfishing work better than the gardening tasks that the other groups were doing. 

The other two days of the week I was supposed to go to my IP like I do on a normal week, but I only ended up going there for a half day on Wednesday. On Monday night, a thunderstorm caused a power surge that blew out our water pump, so we were without running water until Wednesday morning. Then on Wednesday I was one of 4 of us in the house that helped dig a trench through the yard to connect to the new electrical wire to power the water pump in the front yard. We spent the morning digging and then I went to my IP in the afternoon, and was actually pretty productive because I had been up and moving around for the morning. Then the next day I was supposed to just stay at the house for the morning and finish digging the trench, and then fill the hole in when the electrician got the wire fully installed, but filling the hole back in ended up taking a lot longer than we thought and I didn't get done until 4:15 that afternoon after shoveling all day. I was pretty sore after that, but I was glad I was able to help get the house back into working order. Here are some pictures I took of the process. 

It looked like a huge mole was tunneling through our yard. 

We had to go almost to the road so it was a pretty long ditch. 

Then on Friday, the power had gone out when I woke up in the morning, but luckily that was fixed by the time we got home that afternoon. And we also still had a port-a-potty in our driveway from when the running water had been out, so that worked out haha. This house has so many issues, it's pretty rare to have everything working at once. But I like it, it has a lot of character and it's a nice place to live besides all it's issues. 

Other than that, the excitement recently has been increased traffic as the summer season approaches, and it has been so much busier this weekend since it's Memorial Day weekend, so this is basically when the tourist season starts. I'm excited that everything will be open now and there will be more to do, but I'm not excited for all the people and all the traffic. I bet the summer is going to be a lot of fun though, we'll get to go to the beach whenever we want!

I think that's all the excitement for now, things will probably get even more exciting as the summer progresses.

Busy weekend

This past weekend was a busy one for me. Two of the events I had been planning and working up to for several months both happened back to back on Friday and Saturday, which meant that I had a lot to think about throughout the week, but it also now means that the stress I had from having to think about both of those things at the same time is now over.

The first of the two events was Highlands Center Clean-Up Day on Friday, which I was working on through my IP. The Highlands Center is a place in Truro that used to be an air force station during the cold war, but many years ago it became part of the National Seashore. Nothing was done with it for a while, but now the Seashore is working on refurbishing it and turning it into a center for arts, science and education. Right now there are several partner organizations that are involved in getting things going there, including a theater company that does performances at their tent there in the summer, an art center that has a wood-fired kiln on the site, and a lab and classroom used for research, among a few others things. Most of the buildings are still empty though, and many of them aren't fit to be used because they are either too rundown or have asbestos in them. So the Seashore Planning Department, where my IP is, does an annual clean up, and planning it is one of the responsibilities of the AmeriCorps member each year, along with Lauren, my service partner, and with input from the Highlands Center Partner organizations. We did a bunch of different things, including painting the facades of 3 of the buildings, which was my main project for the day. I really wanted that to happen because the buildings look so old and rundown with all the peeling paint, and I thought a fresh coat of paint would help them look much nicer, which it did! There were several other groups doing other tasks like general debris pick up, fixing vandalism damage, doing plantings, and helping clear out some of the buildings that are used for storage. It was a good day, and the weather was relatively nice, a little cloudy but warm. It felt good that something I had had a large part in planning went so smoothly and was so productive.  I only have one picture from that day because I was too busy running around checking on how different groups were doing, but here it is:

How many AmeriCorps members does it take to fold a tarp in the wind? haha

Then on Saturday we had Canal Clean-Up, which is the community outreach and volunteer engagement event that my COD Day was responsible for planning. It took place in Buzzards Bay (part of Bourne) along the Cape Cod Canal, and we recruited volunteers to help with several projects, including general trash collection along the canal, replanting some garden beds, clearing fallen trees, trail maintenance, putting up signage, and a few other assorted tasks. The weather was not so great that day, it was kind of cold and it rained in the morning and stayed cloudy for most of the event, but it didn't deter people from showing up to help, which was great to see. For me the day was kind of stressful especially in the morning. That was partly because while I was working at my project on Friday, everyone else from my COD Day was in Bourne preparing and setting things up for Saturday, so I missed out on an entire day of the planning and just had to jump right into things on the day of the event. Add in the fact that the supervisor was late and we didn't get a chance to prepare much before all the other AmeriCorps members got there, and the morning started off pretty hectic for me. I was responsible for registration, and by the time we got to the site to start setting up, volunteers were starting to show up early and I wasn't ready to deal with them because I still had to familiarize myself with the forms and how the process was going to work. But luckily I had a great team signed up to help me with registration and once I told them what they needed to do, they just jumped right in and got things done, which was a huge weight off my shoulders because I could then oversee other aspects of set up and getting the area ready for the official start of the event. Once the initial registration rush died down I was much less stressed, and I was able to relax more and take in what was going on around me. Even though the weather was less than ideal, the volunteers I talked to all seemed to have a good time, and all the AmeriCorps members did a great job with the tasks we had assigned for them. So although not everything went perfectly smoothly, I think the end result was good. And now I don't have a big event again until the end of June, when I have another one for my IP called Highlands Fest. It's also at the Highlands Center, but focuses more on getting the public to the site and engaged in what happens there as opposed to specifically cleaning up the site. I will write about that when it happens as well.

Here are pictures from Canal Clean-Up:

Registration area at the beginning of the day

Crafts and booths tent

Volunteers setting out to pick up trash

Jared was very popular with the kids when he started making popcorn

The Falmouth Fiddlers, who played at the event

A train went over the railroad bridge while we were there so it got lowered, which was cool because I'd never seen that happen before. 

Then on Sunday, one of my roommates and I went on a walking tour of the 3 Sisters Lighthouses in Eastham. It was a free tour led by a National Seashore volunteer, and he gave us some history of the lighthouses and then we walked over to where they are now (they've been moved several times) and got to go up into the top of one of them. It was really cool, and it's nice to learn more of the history of the area I'm living in. 

This week is Orleans Green Week, a week-long set of projects that two of the members organized through their IPs in Orleans that involves getting volunteers involved in things like plantings and trail maintenance. Yesterday we worked with a group of high school students to plant shrubs on a conservation site, and today we invited the general public to help us with trail work and building a foot bridge over a wet part of the path on a trail. It rained pretty much the whole day so not many volunteers showed up, but we still got a lot done. The culmination of the week will be planting gardens at the middle school in Orleans, and we've done some work the past two days to prepare for that as well. Here are some pictures:

The beginnings of the footbridge we built

In progress

Finished!

Well, that's all the updates I have for now. I'm about to go celebrate my birthday with my housemates. We're going to a Mexican restaurant in Orleans, so it should be fun! 

Post-spring break awesomeness!

So it's been a week since we got back from Spring Break, and we've had some great projects in that time, and mostly great weather for those projects! Spring is definitely setting in now, and I'm loving it!

The first day back from Spring Break, we had a project with my IP doing some erosion control work at ponds in Wellfleet. The weather was gorgeous, and we got a lot done, so my service partner and I were very happy. It was great to see all the planning we put into the project come to fruition. We spent the morning at Dyer Pond laying down jute netting to catch soil from storm runoff on the paths, planted native plants to slow erosion, and installed fencing to direct visitor use to specific areas. In the afternoon we went to two other ponds, Spectacle and Slough, and installed more fencing at those areas. I didn't take many pictures that day, except for one of Suzanne with her arm in a hole we dug for a fence post:

Our next group service on Friday, I was part of a group that went to Orleans to plant beach grass. It was the third time I was supposed to go to this project, but the first two times it had been scheduled it got snowed out, so I was excited that I finally got to do it. The weather wasn't so great that day, but it only rained a little bit so it wasn't enough to make us stop working, and it actually helped make the holes in the sand for the grass because the wet sand held together so the holes didn't fill in as soon as we made them like some of them were doing in the morning when the sand was dry. It was a fun project, and it was great to see our progress at the end with all the little clumps of grass covering the dune. Here are some pictures of that day.

Then on Saturday we had an optional service project, which was an event Joelle planned for volunteers to come build bird boxes for bluebirds to nest in. Our task as AmeriCorps members was to assist the volunteers who came, and we also built some of the boxes during downtime. People who came to build them could take them home if they wanted to, or they could donate them to be placed on town conservation lands in Wellfleet, so the boxes that the AmeriCorps members made are part of the number that will be donated (I made 2!). It was a little cold and windy that day, but it was lots of fun, and the finished bird boxes look great! Here are some photos of that event as well.

Then today we had a project at Monomoy Island in Chatham that so far is one of my favorite projects we've done this year. We went out to South Monomoy in a boat with people from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and installed signs saying that the area was closed because of shorebird nesting. This involved carrying 4 signs at a time, which each weighed 8 pounds, and putting a sign up every so often along the beach. Then we'd go back to the pile and pick up more signs, and each time we went back for more the walk to put them in got longer because we had to walk past the signs we'd already put up before we got to the next area to place a sign. It was hard work, but it was so much fun because it was a beautiful day and we were out on the beach the whole time, and riding to and from the island on the boat was so fun! I was standing on the boat holding onto a handrail while we were speeding across the water and I thought to myself, I love my job! It's days like today that I really appreciate the things that I get to do in this program and how much fun I get to have!

Out on the boat!

We had to wear exposure suits while we were on the boat so that if we fell in we didn't get hypothermia. We looked like astronauts!

Me rocking the exposure suit

It was a gorgeous day to be out on the beach!

Carrying signs

Well that's it for now. I'm sure we'll have plenty more awesome service projects in awesome weather to update you on soon now that spring is here! Yay!