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.
