Catching up, goodbyes, and my first marine mammal stranding

Ever since the shelter things have been pretty busy around here. The weekend after the shelter was my vacation to Florida (I won't write about that here because it's not AmeriCorps related but there are pictures on Facebook for anyone who wants to look at them), and then the week after that was our AmeriCorps winter retreat. We all went to a camp in Sandwich for three days and got to hang out with everyone from the other houses and we also had some sessions about "Life After AmeriCorps" to help us prepare for what we're going to do after this year of service. It was fun, and the space was a lot better than our fall retreat because there was more space for us all to spread out and we weren't all on top of each other the whole time.

Then the week after retreat I had a lot of catching up to do at my IP because I had missed 3 weeks of it, but that meant that the two days I was there this past week were very productive. I had a lot to catch up on but I was able to get a lot done and now have several things that I can start working on more in the coming weeks.

There have also been several other events in the past few weeks, such as our last Wet Fest! I've written about Wet Fest before and I think I made it clear that it was not my favorite service project to do, but now we are done with all 12 of them that we had scheduled. Although we found out at the last one that we're going to do something similar in June at a larger event in Western Massachusetts, but we will only be doing certain activities and some of them will be new so at least it won't be exactly the same thing we've been doing. And we'll have some time to take a break from it for a while before that.

Another cool event was the Owl Show with the Harwich Conservation Trust. It was similar to the wolf show we did earlier in the year, so we helped out and then got to sit in the front, this time to make sure the kids sitting there didn't get too rowdy. We didn't get to touch the animals this time unfortunately, but it was still fun to see them up close. Here are just a few of the pictures from that.

If I remembered what each of the types were called I would write them with each picture but I don't. I know the white one is a snowy owl, and there were barn owls and barred owls, but other than that I can't remember haha.

Also, a few weeks ago I joined a community chorus in Truro, which is one town north of Wellfleet. I've gone twice, and it's been fun. It's nice to get back into singing and I'm excited that there's a performance in the summer. The first day was fun because I was by far the youngest person there, which isn't surprising given the demographic of Cape Cod, so everyone I was sitting near noticed that I was new and was very friendly and welcoming.

Now onto the bad news of this week. Last week we found out that one of the girls from the Bourne house got a job in Louisiana and will be leaving in a few days. Then on Wednesday we found out that one of my roommates, Senja, also decided to leave for a job. She left early this morning, so today has felt really weird. Since we just found out a few days ago I don't think it's really sunk in yet. It's just so weird that she won't be coming back. So needless to say today has been sad.

On top of that today has also been significant because around noon we got a call from IFAW saying they needed our help with a marine mammal stranding. It was a single pilot whale that has stranded in Chatham and died, and they needed our help moving it because it was so heavy (they estimated it was about 2,000 pounds.) So that was cool because it was my first stranding experience, and it was hard work because even though it was only one animal, it was huge and we had to move it several hundred feet to get it into the truck. Here are some pictures from that as well.

That's all the news for now, after the stranding we all came home to relax because it was more tiring than I expected. I hope everyone weathered the recent storm ok.