Red Cross shelter, day 2

4:00 am: I got to sleep for about 5 hours and now I'm on shift again. The storm hasn't been as bad as I think people expected since it turned so far inland so we don't have any more people than we did last night. It sounds like we'll close the shelter in the morning since the storm had pretty much run its course here. I'm not sure exactly how the area is doing in terms of power outages, hopefully we have power back on at the house or the generator is still working. I guess we'll find out in a few hours. Now I'm just sitting waiting again to hear any news.

7:30 am: Breakfast is starting now and my shift is almost technically over but I think we're going to pack up and close down the shelter soon. So we might be back home pretty soon, but then I'm not sure what they'll have us do for the rest of the day. Hopefully they'll just let us rest.

8:20 am: After being asleep for only 20 minutes I was woken up to help pack up the shelter. With everyone helping it didn't take long at all and we were out of there by a little after 9.

9:40 am: Now I'm in bed at home ready to take a nap. Luckily we found out that we don't have to work the rest of the day so we just get to relax. We don't have power back yet and we might not for a few days so now irks a whole new adventure. But that's it for now, time for me to nap.

4:00 pm: Not only do we still not have power but our generator stopped working, so now I'm at the library to use internet and just to get out of the house. We should have power back within a few hours though so we're hoping for the best.

5:15 pm: The power is back on! Yay!!!

Red Cross shelter, day 1

So like I mentioned could happen yesterday, we ended up being called to help at a Res Cross shelter. That's where I am right now and I'm typing this post on my phone. The reason the title says day 1 is that we're going to be sleeping here, we packed clothes for two days and brought sleeping bags, so we could end up being here for 1 or 2 nights depending on how bad it gets. I figure I'll do a timeline style post about what's happening throughout the day and update it every so often. So here goes.

6:00 am: Left the house to go to the shelter. There are 3 shelters throughout the cape, 5 of my housemates went to the Dennis Yarmouth one and 7 of us are at the Eastham one, which is at the high school.

6:15ish: Arrived at the shelter. We signed in and got a tour of the shelter., and got ourselves settled. We split up shifts and helped with some last set up.

8:00 am: Shelter opened. I'm on the second shift which starts at 2pm so I have some time to relax. No clients at the shelter yet.

9:00 am: After having some Dunkin Donuts the Red Cross brought in for us, I take a nap.

10:30 am: Done with my nap, now I just have to sit and wait. Apparently that's what a lot of today will be, even when I'm on shift. At least I'll be able to catch up on some reading. The weather still hasn't gotten that bad. It's just some wind at this point with some occasional rain.

1:00 pm: So far we have 6 clients at the shelter, and weather-wise it's still just windy here. I've been checking the progress of the storm online and it's slowly moving up the coast but hasn't hit land yet. It looks like the worst of us will miss us but it will definitely get worse later today.

2:00 pm: My shift has started and
I'm at the registration table. I'll be helping check people in once things pick up but right now we still only have about 10 people so there hasn't been a lot to do yet. The storm is moving pretty slowly so it looks like the worst of it will start around 6:00 instead of noon like they originally thought. I just heard that places in Chatham are flooded and there are power outages in parts of Hyannis but here it's still not even raining.

5:00 pm: Still waiting at the registration table but no more people have some yet, the weather hasn't really changed for a few hours. I got to go pick up dinner and we rode in the Red Cross's ERV, or emergency response vehicle, which is pretty much like an ambulance, it was cool.

8:00 pm: I'm off my first shift and have a few hours till I'm on again. So I'm gonna kill some time and then sleep before getting back to work.

Fort Hill and Hurricane Sandy

So a few interesting things have been happening recently, some good and some not so good. The other day at my IP my service partner let me go to an archaeology walk at a nearby site in Eastham called Fort Hill, which I have driven past many times and wondered what it was. Turns out that it is a place where there may have been a fort back in the time the settlers were first here because when the English were worried about the Dutch coming and taking their land they told every town to set up a fort to watch out for invaders. Eastham chose this hill, which they called Fort Hill, but it's unclear whether they actually build a fort there or just said they did haha. It was a beautiful day to be outside that day and it was nice to get to see the view. Here are a few pictures of it.

Then onto the not so good things, our housemate Brian left yesterday to go back to California. It was really sad to see him go and it hit me a lot harder than I expected. We've all bonded so much already that his absence is going to be very noticeable. I think the suddenness of it made it worse too because we hardly had any time to come to terms with it before he left, and we all assumed we would have many months left to spend with everyone here and get to know each other even better and all of that is just gone now with Brian. So yesterday was a very sad day, with some crying involved, but we were able to distract ourselves pretty well by going to Hyannis and shopping for Halloween costumes for going out in Provincetown last night. Danielle and I decided to be Thing 1 and Thing 2 from Dr. Seuss even though we're not going to be together, so I bought some red clothes and pinned a piece of paper to my shirt that said Thing 2. Here is all of us in our costumes last night.

In Provincetown, we went to a haunted house that was really fun, and kinda scary at a few points when people jumped out and scared us. They sent us through in groups of 5 and the 4 other people I was with were a lot more scared than I was so they made me go first and were squeezing my hands really tight the whole time. It was lots of fun, and I wanted to go through again lol.

After that we went to the bar we've been to a few times before that has karaoke, and we hung out there for a while and sung some songs. The drag queen that hosts it had an awesome costume, and everyone was dressed up. It was great, Provincetown is really into Halloween so there were lots of cool costumes.

Drag queen in her awesome costume. 

Senja and Suzanne (as Ila and Ethel) singing karaoke.

Then, the most recent of the interesting things that's been happening is the approach of Hurricane Sandy. It looks like at this point the worst of it is going to hit New Jersey, but we still have to do some preparations for it. Since we live in a house owned by the National Seashore, if the seashore decides to close during the storm we would have to leave the house and go somewhere else until the park reopens. We're hoping it doesn't come to that, hopefully we get to stay in the house. Even if the power goes out we have a generator so we'd be ok. Also, part of our job as AmeriCorps is to help the Red Cross if they have to open shelters during the storm, so we might have to go do that today or tomorrow. The Red Cross if already setting up shelters now, so we just have to wait and see whether they start sending people to them, in which case we would have to go to the shelter and help check people in, which I think would require us to stay at the shelter too because our house supervisor said we should be prepared to pack clothes for two days. So that's two situations in which we might have to leave the house pretty soon, but we'll see what happens. We have other prep we have to do as well, like this morning we had to cut down some trees in our yard that are dead and could fall onto the shed if the wind gets bad. So today could end up being a pretty interesting day, but for now we're just hanging out at the house waiting to see what happens. Hopefully the storm doesn't turn out to be that bad and we can just wait it out at home.

Sad day

So today we got some sad news. We found out that one of our housemates, Brian, is leaving the program, and his last day is going to be this Friday. He has some family issues going on at home in California, so it couldn't really be avoided but it's still really sad. We've all developed such a great dynamic and we've all bonded so well that not having him here is going to be so weird. And it's early enough in the program that they can still replace him, so on top of adjusting to him not being here, soon we'll have to adjust to a new person living with us. I just really hope the new person is as awesome as Brian and that we are all able to get along well so that things go as smoothly in the house as they have been going. Apparently it's not unusual for people to leave the program, last year they lost 3 members, I was just hoping that we would be the exception and everyone would stick it out for the whole year.

So that's the news for now, I have some other things to write about but those can wait because this has overshadowed other things at this point, and also it's getting kinda late and I need to go to sleep. I seem to have fallen back into my habit of staying up unnecessarily late, which was fine over the summer, but now that I have to wake up between 6:30 and 7:30 every morning, not getting enough sleep has been catching up with me. So I'm trying to make myself go to sleep by 10:30 pm again like I was doing at the beginning, which is right now so I have to end here. Goodnight, and hopefully my next post will be a happier one.

Wolves!

So as I mentioned in my last post, I went to see a wolf show on Saturday. It was awesome! It was a group called "Mission: Wolf" and it's a husband and wife who own a wolf rescue in Colorado who travel around showing wolves to the public to educate people about wolves and about how the idea that people have of wolves as vicious is a misconception. This event was one of our Saturday service options, so a bunch of us from AmeriCorps were there to volunteer. We helped set up a little bit at the beginning and then I checked tickets as people came in the door. Since I was still working when the show started I missed some of it, but the man, Kent I think was his name, started by giving a lot of background information about wolves and wolf behavior, and talked about how his wolf rescue came to be. The wolves he takes care of mostly come from people who decided to try to keep a wolf as a pet, or from movie studios who use them in movies and then don't want them anymore.

After that came the best part, when the wolves actually came out. It was so cool when they walked into the room, everyone was transfixed. And they were definitely not scary, they looked a lot like dogs and they were even not as big as I expected. The really great part of the show was that we actually got to touch the wolves! Apparently Massaschusetts has a stupid law that says that the public cannot interact directly with wild animals so the wolves weren't allowed to go up to audience members to say hi, but luckily for us in AmeriCorps, we got to be special "greeters" for the wolves, which meant that we sat on the floor in front of the audience and the handlers brought the wolves around to us. Kent told us the correct way to greet the wolf, which is bring your hand up from underneath them, not on top of their head, and scratch their chin, and look the wolf in the eye and the wolf will usually touch it's nose to yours. Apparently if you don't keep your eyes open the wolf will get upset because it thinks you don't like it or you're being rude. The first wolf who came around to us was named Abe, and he was actually a wolf-dog mix so he looked pretty much like a husky. When he came up to me I scratched his chin and he started sniffing my face, and then he licked me right on the mouth! It was so cool, and I can now say I've been licked by a wolf. :) A few people go really kissed by the wolves and got their whole faces licked. The second one who came around was a 2-year-old named Zeb, and he seemed to like to sniff people's laps. I had my phone in my lap to take pictures and he reached down and tried to take my phone. I had to reach out and take it out of his mouth haha. Which also goes to show how gentle wolves are with people that he let me do that. The third wolf was name Magpie, and she was the alpha female of the pack. She was a little bit tired, she had been sleeping right before the handler got her to walk around, so she was more reserved when she walked around to us, but it was still awesome to be so close to a real live wolf.

So without further ado, here are some pictures:

Magpie (or Maggie), the alpha female, rolling around on the floor when she first came in the room. 

Maggie on the floor still, Zeb is the one standing behind the woman.

Maggie and Zeb sitting while Abe makes the rounds

Abe greeting people

Maggie greeting people

The boys, Abe and Zeb

Close up of Zeb as he walked by. This is the only close up picture that I got because I wanted to be able to pet them while they were close to me. 

So that's wolf show pictures! It was a great experience and it made me want to go visit the rescue in Colorado. He invites anyone who wants to to come visit the wolves there and I think that would be awesome! At the end of the show he tried to get the wolves to howl, but since they were tired it was only a little half-hearted howl, and it would be amazing to hear many wolves howling all at once which he said happens all the time at the place where the wolves live. Maybe I'll have a chance to go there sometime. I certainly hope so.

Today we had a group project in Chatham which was working on a conservation land that needed some tending to so we were doing things like clearing trails, removing invasives, and moving brush that we collected. It was a long day but it was good, hard work that makes it feel like you really accomplished something. Then after dinner a bunch of us went to play volleyball at the local elementary school, which maybe I mentioned before but I don't think so. One of my housemates started a league for us to play, and this time we actually had enough people to play 6-on-6 unlike last week. We also had someone from the community come play with us, since the league is now being advertised as a community event, so that was fun. His name was Bud and he was actually really good at volleyball unlike most of us haha. I think I might be getting a little bit better, so hopefully that trend will improve. We also played dodgeball after volleyball. It was the first time I'd ever played and it was really fun, but it was a lot more tiring than I expected. I'm going to try to go every week so I can get better at both games.

Well I guess that's it for now. I'll post again whenever I have something exciting to write about.

HOT WATER!

So the title of this post doesn't have much to do with most of what has been going on recently, but one of the most exciting things that happened in the last few days is that the plumber came and fixed the water heater so we can actually take showers that are HOT! Ever since we've been here all of our showers have been lukewarm at best even with the water turned all the way hot, and if two people were showering at the same time it was actually cold. So this is a huge relief to everyone, and taking a hot shower today was one of the best things ever! Anyway, moving on...

Things have been going well, we're starting to get into our set routines now that we've been doing our IPs and COD days for two weeks. My IP is still just a mishmash of things going on in the department that I get to sit in on, but I know that within the next few months I'll get a better idea of the projects I'll be working on and what is expected of me and I'll most likely be doing more self-directed independent things in the office so I'll feel like I can plan out my time more efficiently. But as it is now, I think it's good that I've been spending most of the day doing whatever my service partner is doing so I can get an idea of how things run and what is expected of me.

Some COD day highlights, we accepted a proposal to help a middle school create a community garden that will also be part of their math curriculum for kids who need more hands on applications of math instead of just learning in the classroom. I agreed to be the lead for that project, and we've been to one site visit at the school and we'll be going next week to get a better idea of the scope of the project and to help them out with the beginning of the process. We're also going to be planning lessons for the kids for future dates, including teaching them about composting which they want to get started at the school.

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, we have to do Saturday service at least once a month, so last week I went to Oyster Fest, a big annual event in Wellfleet where people go to eat oysters, shop, and have certain oyster-related contests. My job there was to help make sure the recycling process went smoothly because they were recycling the oyster shells back into the ocean so that the smaller oysters, or spat, that are stuck to the shells have a chance to stay alive and the population can be brought up for more fishing in the future. I was excited about getting to experience Oyster Fest, but honestly the 4 hours that I was there were pretty boring and by the time I got done working I was so fed up with the huge crowds that I just got one oyster and then left. I'm still not a huge oyster fan but I figured since I was there I had to get one haha. Here's a taste of what the crowd looked like:

Another highlight, one of our group service projects this week was with my IP service partner, and it involved installing a netting called jute on a trail near one of the local ponds to prevent more erosion in that area, because the paths have been worn down a lot by foot traffic and sediment has been flowing down the trail when it rains and contributing to a decline in water clarity in the pond. The pond is called Duck Pond, and it is one of the ones I will be working on a condition assessment for as part of my work at my IP, so it was cool to see firsthand some of the measures that can be taken to help improve these ponds. Here's what the finished project looked like:

And here's a bonus picture of two of my housemates doing headstands during some downtime:

And then finally I just feel like showing off my new-found interest in baking which most recently has resulted in trying a recipe for zucchini bread. I think it came out good, it tasted great even though it was slightly undercooked in one spot in the middle, but I think it was pretty good for a first attempt. Here it is (I had already taken a piece or two when I remembered to take a picture lol):

Well that's it for now, I know this entry was a jumble of different things, hopefully my next one will be more cohesive. Tomorrow I'm doing another Saturday service (I've been doing all of them for the most part because they sound interesting and also so I can get a jump on getting extra hours in), and tomorrow's is a live wolf show which I'm really excited about! I'm sure you'll be hearing about that in my next post. :)

COD day/first day of IP

Yesterday we the start of our first official week since training ended, and my week started with my first COD day, which stands for Community Outreach and Development. Basically it's the day that a smaller group of us made up of members from both houses go to the AmeriCorps office and work on planning projects and events. There will be some variety to what we do it seems like, but I'm not exactly sure what that will look like yet since it seems like there are many different directions we could take with that day based on what we want to do as a group. We're split into 3 COD days based on when our IPs meet and my day is responsible for planning an event called Canal Clean-Up where we organized volunteers to clean up the canal in Bourne. That's not until April though so we have a lot of time before then to work on smaller projects. One aspect of COD day is doing puppet shows for kids, which we got trained to do last month, so yesterday we did a fire safety puppet show to a preschool class. It was pretty fun, and the kids were adorable.

Then today was the first day of my IP, which as I said before is my Individual Placement, which is basically an internship that I'll go to twice a week with the Cape Cod National Seashore Planning Department. I got a little bit of a better idea today of what I'll be doing there, which was good. A big part of what I'll be doing seems to be working on their Climate Friendly Parks initiative, which includes keeping records of the parks emissions for their carbon emissions inventory to track whether they are progressing towards their goals of becoming greener. I'm also going to be part of something called Green Team, and I'm not exactly sure yet what that means but I have a Green Team meeting tomorrow morning so I guess I'll find out. Other things I'll be working on throughout the year are helping plan events such as the annual Highlands Fest in the summer, writing for their newsletter, and helping with their new pond assessment project. I think it will be a great year, I'm really excited to start getting into the routine of things there and I think I'm going to learn a lot of great things.

For my first day, my service partner Lauren just showed me my work space, gave me a tour of the building and introduced me to a bunch of the people who work there, who I'm sure I'm not going to remember their names because there were so many of them that I met in a short period of time lol. Lauren also showed me hwo to access important information on the computers and gave me some time to read over some of the information I had on hand, part of which was a letter from the girl who had my placement last year which was nice because she outlined some of the main duties and gave some tips about things I could work on. I documented many parts of this day so I could remember my first day, so here's a picture of my work space. :)

We also went to a nursery to check out the plants that we will be using for a group project with the rest of the AmeriCorps members on Monday, and then toured some of the National Seashore land in the area. Here are some pictures from that.

A beautiful pond we went to when Lauren was showing me some of the property. This picture doesn't do it justice.

A beach where we went to check on some beach grass planting that AmeriCorps did last year.

 Highlands Light, where AmeriCorps will be doing a group project on Monday, planting bushes to keep people away from the edge of the cliff which is eroding.

 Well, I guess that's it for now, it's getting late and I'm kinda tired. I hope you enjoyed the pics!

Officially an AmeriCorps member!

Yesterday was our official swearing-in as AmeriCorps members. All the members from my house, the Bourne house and the fire crew met at the County Complex and stood on the steps in front of the main building, as you can see in the picture above. We introduced ourselves to the County Commissioners (I think that's who they were) and then all said the AmeriCorps pledge as a group, which means that we are now officially members of AmeriCorps.

After that, we had an orientation with our IP service partners, or the people we will be working with for our Individual Placements. The way the program is set up, we have two days a week where we do service projects as a group, one day a week where we're in the AmeriCorps office working on planning projects and outreach events, and then the other two days are for our IPs. We indirectly got to choose our IPs because we were given a binder that listed all the choices and gave information about each, and then we got to rank them based on which ones we wanted the most. I was one of the people who ended up getting my first choice which was awesome, and I'm going to be working with the Cape Cod National Seashore Planning Department. It's mostly going to be office work, but that's what I wanted because our group projects are going to be all outdoor so I wanted to have a balance between office and field work. The main reason I was interested in this placement is because I've become interested in environmental policy recently and this placement involves learning more about that and how environmental issues are dealt with at the federal level, so I think I'm going to learn a lot of useful things that might help me figure out what I want to do as a career in the future. At this point I think I want to do some sort of environmental work so I'm hoping this year will help me narrow down exactly what shape that will take for me.

Highlights from training so far

Welcome to my second blog post! It will probably be a pretty general overview of the things I’ve done so far since I’ve done a bunch of different things so far and I won’t be able to cover all of it. So like I said in my first post we’ve been doing trainings in the few weeks since I’ve been here, everything from learning to use tools, GPS mapping training, learning about ticks, CPR and first aid, shellfishing, and today we did carpentry training. We also have already had a day where we go into an elementary school and have a kind of fair with a bunch of activities to teach the kids about the importance of taking care of the groundwater, so we had a day of training for that and then the next day we actually went to the school. We’ll be doing those throughout the year, which I don’t think will be my favorite thing to do since I’m not that into teaching but it should be kind of fun. The kids are pretty entertaining at least haha.

One of my favorite days of training so far was the day we got to do shellfishing. I had never done it before so it was something completely new and it was really fun. We learned all about the process of aquaculture and how they grow the shellfish initially in the nurseries, and then the part of the process we got to help with was after they reach a certain size, they are put out into the ocean to grow more. What we had to do was go out into a tidal area where the water was shallow and clear out an area where we placed nets that would go over the shellfish. Then we pulled the nets back and spread the shellfish out underneath them and then replaced the nets to protect the shellfish from predators and to keep them from washing away. In the spring we might to get to help harvest them again which would be fun. Another fun part of that day was that we got to wear our waders, which are basically waterproof overalls so we could walk around in the water as much as we wanted and still stay dry.

Here’s a picture of all of us in our waders the first time we wore them when we tested them for holes.

Here’s another group picture in our waders, this one is from the day we did shellfishing.

On that day we also pulled some oysters out of the ocean where we were working and opened them and ate them. I was a little skeptical at first but I ended up eating one. In this picture you can see me as I was contemplating the oyster right before I ate it. It was slimy and kind of salty but not as bad as I thought it would be. I think I could probably get used to eating them if I had more of them.

Other than training we’ve also gotten to explore the Cape a little bit. A few weeks ago we had a retreat with all of the AmeriCorps members (meaning everyone in my house, everyone in the house in Bourne, and 4 guys from another house in Wellfleet who are part of the fire crew that works on firefighting and controlled burns as far as I know about their job). During that retreat one activity I did was go on a dune hike which was really cool. Here are a few pictures of that.

We’ve also done some non-AmeriCorps related things, like going to a vineyard in Truro. They were having a wine festival and a bunch of us went and brought some cheese and sat on the grass and had some wine. There was also a barrel with grapes in it that we got to walk around in a crush up the grapes. It felt a little weird and it was cold, but it was fun too.

I guess that’s it for now, I will try to write as much as I can when exciting things happen. Next week is when our training will be over and we will get into more of a routine with group projects and days at our IP (or Individual Placement) so I’ll write more about that next time.