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.