Snow, cold weather, and MLK

As most of the northeast, we have been experiencing some pretty cold temperatures and several days of snow recently. Today was the coldest it's been by far (it was 11 degrees with a -6 degree windchill when I woke up) but luckily it was a day that I didn't have to be outside, so I was comfortably warm inside and just had to listen to the wind gust against the building. We did have our coldest outdoor service project to date last Friday after it had snowed the night before. It was about 25 degrees for most of the day and we were in Brewster clearing invasives from a piece of town conservation land, which is a pretty standard task for us on our group service days. The day started out feeling like it was going to be brutal and that everyone would be miserable, but I wore tons of layers so once I got moving around I was a comfortable temperature the whole day. Also, it was a day that people from all 3 houses (Wellfleet, Bourne and the Fire Crew) got to work together, which doesn't happen often, so it was fun to get to spend time with each other. Overall it was a great day, and it was really cool to see the freshly fallen snow all around us while we were working. I took some pictures of it to share, although pictures never do nature justice.

This is what happens when all 3 houses get together...lots of chainsaws!

We also had another encounter with snow this week when it snowed Monday night into Tuesday morning and we got temporarily snowed in. It didn't snow enough for anything to get cancelled, but we had to wait for our driveway to get plowed before we could go anywhere so we had about an hour delay while we waited for that. It made me realize that I'm really back in New England, not in Maryland anymore, because people here actually know what to do with snow and the chances of getting a snow day are a lot lower haha. And as always at our house, if there's downtime there's going to be some shenanigans going on, so I took a picture of what happened when Jared tried to take a nap on the couch:

Collin loves tickling people and this morning was no exception. I just love how at peace Jared looks at the bottom of the pile. 

Our service project this Monday was a special project for MLK Day that a group of my roommates planned (each COD Day has a specific volunteer recruitment project they are assigned to plan and this was Thursday COD Day's event). The main focus of the day was "Serving those who serve us" and doing things to help people who serve in the military. The event "hub" was where everyone checked in and there were stations to make care packages for soldiers and families of soldiers who are deployed. Then there were other sites for different projects. The site I was at was helping a veterans center redo their basement which was flooded during Sandy, so I spent the day putting in insulation in preparation for a group of volunteers to put up drywall. It was a good day, everything went very smoothly which was great and really showed that the group of members who planned it had done a really good job. It was fun to work with other volunteers and do something different from what we normally.

Now for some bonus photos of some other goofing around that happened recently when we were working on fixing shellfishing cages during COD Day on Tuesday:

Suzanne decided to get into a shellfish cage

Steph wearing one of the cages

Well that's it for now. Everyone try to stay warm in this crazy weather!

Since Christmas Break

So since Christmas break, our days have been pretty routine in terms of service (IPs, COD Days, and group service projects). One thing slightly out of the ordinary is that we have more Wet Fests this month than usual, and two of them are pretty much back to back, so we had one on Friday and another one tomorrow. I'm getting a little bit more used to Wet Fest so I don't dread it like I did for some of them, and the group of kids we had on Friday was really well behaved so I'm hoping that trend continues tomorrow.

At one of our group service projects, 2 reporters came to find out about what we were doing and interview some people. I thought they were just going to be writing an article about it, but it turned out that they were video taping for a website called CapeCast. The video ended up being kind of funny and silly, so I'm guessing that's the editors style with these videos he does. Here is the link if anyone is interested in watching it. I'm pretty sure I'm in it at 0:24, but it's sort of hard to tell if it's actually me.

One new thing that is not service-related is that I joined a gym. It's the first time I've ever joined one because I was usually pretty active with dance and sometimes went to the gym at school which was free, but I felt like I hadn't been active enough recently. A gym in Orleans, which is about 20 minutes away, was having a deal for a 3 month membership and if 3 or more people signed up you got 15% off, so me and two of my roommates decided to join. I just signed up on Thursday and I've gone every day since then, so I'd say I'm off to a good start. It's feel good to be getting more exercise again, and I think the fact that I actually paid for it will be a good incentive to go if I ever feel like being lazy haha.

Well I think that's all for now. I'll keep you updated on anything else exciting that happens.

Christmas Break bonus: Shellfishing video!

Hello all! I just got back from Christmas break so there's nothing new to write about at this point, but I just realized that I never posted the video of us shellfishing that one of my roommates made. I just found out it's on YouTube so I can actually share it on my blog now! It's from the most recent time we went shellfishing, in the beginning of the day before we all got ridiculously cold haha. So here it is! Click here to watch it. More blogging to come soon as we get back into the swing of things here.

Another blog post finally!

I'm so sorry it's taken so long for me to post. We didn't have wifi for about a week and a half recently and I didn't want to take as much time on the house computer as a blog post would have taken since all 13 of us had to share that computer. So a lot has happened, but I will give a quick synopsis of the most interesting things.

A few weekends ago one of my housemates and I went to the Cape Cod Beer brewery in Hyannis for a tour. The brewery is really small so we basically just stood and listened to the tour guide and also got to taste a bunch of the types of beer while the tour guide talked about the beer-making process, the history of the company and how each of the beers was made. It was really fun, and the beer was really good. And it's great that it's a local company so I feel good about supporting them. Here's a few pictures I took at the brewery. 

We also recently had a few holiday-related activities at our house. The first was the day we took our holiday picture so people could send out Christmas cards. We went to the beach and took some group pictures in our ugly Christmas sweaters. We took some serious ones and then some of them we got a little silly. Here's a taste of what went on.

This was our most normal pose...

This one shows a little bit of what goes on in our house on a regular basis haha

Then we got creative with the posing...

...and a little silly. 

The last one was just random haha. 

After that we decorated our Christmas tree! It's just a random pine tree we took from a service project where we were cutting them down in a field, but it turned out very nice. :)

Then this weekend the festivities continued with our Christmas Party which involved a potluck dinner, secret santa, white elephant swap, and a Jeopardy game that two of the girls put together to help us get to know each other. It was cool, they did interviews with each of us and then made questions about some of the things they learned and put us into teams to answer them for the game. For the white elephant, we decided that the gifts had to be free from the swap shop at the transfer station (the dump as I'm used to calling it, Massachusetts seems to like to make up it's own words for things lol), so everything was really random and hilarious. For the secret santa, we had a $10 limit but everyone ended up getting great gifts. Since we all spend so much time together, we know a lot about what each person likes so it was probably the best secret santa I've done since everyone got something that was great for them. I have a few pictures of this celebration also, but not very many. Here they are:

Meg got a green plastic knight suit as a secret santa gift. 

The knight suit was quite popular so Mike took it when it was his turn to choose a gift. 

So that's been our Christmas celebrations up to now, definitely lots of fun and gotten us in the Christmas spirit. Now for a bonus picture: this me and Meg and it was taken during one of our group service projects last week. It was raining and we were working outside all day so we were wearing our "foulies," which is our bright orange rain gear.

Even though it was raining and we were wet, it was still a great day and made me realize how lucky I am that I get to be outside all day, even in all kinds of inclement weather, doing work that I feel like really makes a difference. I'm so thankful that I was accepted to this program because I've met so many awesome people and had so many great experiences even just the few months I've been here so far, and I know the rest of the year is going to be just as amazing!

Boston trip

This past weekend Friday we all went to Boston for the AmeriCorps opening day event that all the AmeriCorps programs in Massachusetts went to, which meant that Danielle was there too! It was great to see her, and since we both had Monday off for Veteran's Day we stayed in the city and hung out for the weekend and then headed back on Monday. We spent a lot of our time just hanging out at Danielle's friend Hina's apartment, but we did do some fun stuff so I'll give you some of the highlights.

Like I said, Friday was the opening day for AmeriCorps. That was basically just a rally where some people gave speeches and someone from each program gave a short description of what they do. I had no idea there were so many people in AmeriCorps programs, there were tons of people and that was just all the people who serve in Massachusetts. I was especially surprised at how many City Year members there were, about a quarter of the people there seemed to be with City Year. Here's the best picture I could get of the crowd, there were even more people that I couldn't fit in the frame. (You can see Danielle and some of the people from my program in the foreground in the maroon polos.)

After the speeches, we got lunch provided and then moved on to the afternoon activities. The activity we were signed up for was a tour of the state house, which was really cool. I loved learning about the history of it and seeing the chambers where the state senators and representatives actually meet. I seem to have grown more interested in history recently so it was really cool to learn about, and the architecture in old buildings like that is always really fascinating so I enjoyed it a lot.

Inside the state house

The senate chamber

The house chamber

The hall of flags. Each town has a flag hung on the wall, I tried to find Wellfleet's flag but the closest I came was finding the Falmouth one.

Then a bunch of us played paintball on Saturday, which was really cool. I had never played before and it was a great experience. I don't have any pictures of us during paintball because I left my phone in the car so it wouldn't get paint on it, but I do have some pretty impressive bruises to show for it. I knew it was probably going to hurt to get hit by paintballs but some of them hurt more than I expected. Getting covered in paint was kind of fun though haha.

Other than that, the highlight of the weekend I think was the IMAX show Danielle and I went to see on Sunday at the Museum of Science. It was about the arctic, and had a lot of cute polar bears. :) I always enjoy seeing IMAX shows, and they always have great ones at the museum so I try to go whenever I'm in Boston if I can.

So that's the basic overview of my weekend. I'm not sure I'll have anything very interesting to write about between now and Thanksgiving, but it's possible that we could get called to help with a dolphin stranding tomorrow morning. My roommate who works IFAW, the group that responds to strandings, was working with them all day today monitoring dolphins who they thought might get caught on shore when the tide went out and that possibility stills stands for tomorrow so I might have something exciting to write about tomorrow, but maybe not. Hopefully for the dolphins we won't have to go, but it is bound to happen at some point so I'm sure it's an experience I'll be writing about eventually.

Poison ivy is evil!

So for the first time in my life...I have poison ivy! Since I never got it before and had been exposed I thought that I was immune, and that was reinforced by the fact that I made it this far without getting any when we're around it on a regular basis, but unfortunately that turns out not to be true. So far it's just on my arms so it's not as bad as it could be but it still really isn't fun! I had to get up in the middle of the night last night to put anti-itch cream on it because it itched so bad. So in my opinion right now, poison ivy seems evil. We don't do anything to it, it's not even one of the plant species we're trying to get rid of, and it just feels the need to torment us! Not cool poison ivy!

Anyway, some news. It turns out that the group who was going to go to NY isn't going anymore. They found out today that the Red Cross doesn't need them to go. It's too bad that they don't get to have that experience, but now it won't be weird and quiet around here for two weeks.

Also, today was quite a day at our service project. We were doing shellfishing, which I usually really like, but it's the first day so far that the temperature has been in the 40's so being in the water was really hard. My hands were cold after about 10 minutes and it just got worse from there. We ended up leaving the site early because people were too cold, and by that point my hands were so freezing that I could barely move them. So we went back to the Shellfish Department's storage area and did some maintenance work on their equipment. We were inside for some of that but I was still really cold, and I still couldn't move my hands that well when we left. I didn't completely warm up until I took a gloriously hot shower at home and put on comfy clothes. And now I'm happier. :)

Also, just a random bit of news, not very important but it makes me happy: I finally got a new battery for my laptop, so now I can actually carry it around without running from outlet to outlet and hoping it didn't die. And I only paid about $10 for it on Amazon. Don't know why I didn't think of that before, it's awesome!

Halloween (sort of)

So on the night of Halloween we didn't actually do anything holiday-related, since trick or treaters don't come to our street and it was a week night so none of us really wanted to go out. It also didn't really feel like Halloween since we celebrated on Saturday. But then yesterday we finally carved the pumpkins we'd had for a while. It was really fun because I hadn't carved a pumpkin in years so it brought me back to years when I always used to do it. 3 of my housemates carved pumpkins with me and we chose a seashore theme for our carvings. Here is the process and the result.

Mine is on the right in this picture

And on the left in this one :)

Also Halloween-related, I forgot to mention the last time I wrote that last Friday I helped out at a haunted forest at the Wellfleet Audobon. I got to lead walks through the forest so I got to see all the skits. They weren't actually scary because they were geared towards little kids, they were more educational and it was all about animals that live in the area. It reminded me of being in the forest of mystery that BEEC used to put on. It was a lot of fun.

Now a hurricane update, things are still fine here but we just found out today that the Red Cross wants half of us to go to NYC to help at a shelter for two weeks. I probably won't go because they don't need all of us and other people are more excited about it, but if I did end up going I think it would be a good experience. If I stay here it will be really weird to half the house fine for so long. We've gotten so used to being around each other all the time.

And now just some bonus pics of some things I've baked recently, scones and pumpkin bread. I still seem to have the baking bug :)