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.