West Texas Quarantine Log

Greetings from Redford, TX! I have been living here since September and have neglected to blog for lack of time and a plethora of other things to keep me entertained, so now here I am ~ a week in to our Quarantine of sorts. It's Saturday and there is not a whole lot going on because for once in our outdoor educator lives we are observing proper weekends.
I thought I'd give my dear readers (aka my mom) a glimpse into the life of our Redford Quarantine. Not gonna lie, it's been pretty swell, especially when I compare our situation to friends who are stuck in their apartments in big cities. Hopefully this post doesn't come off as me bragging about how great we have it. We do have it great, and we are very lucky to have been able to stay here for some extra weeks. We're trying to enjoy this community time while we have it because we know from watching the rest of the world in isolation how special our situation is. In ten days we, The Quarantine Ten, will be going our separate directions into this changed world because the Texas base has to close down to save money.

But until that time comes, we've been keeping quite busy with service projects and events and have set up a system for living here. I'll give you a run down:
We had a long meeting once it was established that ten of us would be staying on base for as long as we possibly could. To stay here we would have to contribute 20 hours of service to base each week to earn our room and board and we would also have to abide by the Outward Bound community living guidelines as directed by the CDC. No physical touch, bleach down every surface two times per day, use your own bathroom only (luckily we each have our own bathroom), don't go into other people's rooms, one person is the designated errands runner.
We had to move things out of the Melon (where we keep tools and supplies) so that we limit people going in and out of certain spaces.

Then we decided on jobs and crafted a Quarantine Living Agreement.
Kevin had all the projects in mind so he was elected to be Bob the Builder.
I was obviously the Post Master, responsible for checking the mail.
Arty was dubbed 'The Explorer' and is responsible for trips to town every three days for groceries.
Maxx is 'Senor Limpiador' or 'Profesor Maximilian' because he is the best at Spanish and is responsible for a weekly Spanish lesson and for making the daily bleach solution
Nina is the Laundry Lady- since we can't go to town for laundry anymore she does it at her house
Jaimie is the Town Scribe- she made all our informational posters
Dan doesn't seem to have an assigned job but he's in charge of the burn barrel
Bennett is the Party Planner, keeping up with our schedule of social events
Brian is still doing his normal job of Program Director
Yoshie and I are tag teaming the food room- we are the Ration Rats and operate the "store" on base where we give out dried food if people need more

Every Sunday we have community dinner. We have to be served food by the cooks, but otherwise it's a pretty normal affair. Tomorrow is Indian food, last week Arty made this beautiful array of dishes.

We have a projector in our community space so many evenings we watch a movie. So far we're watched O Brother, Where Art Thou, Gladiator, 1917, How to Train Your Dragon, and Moulin Rouge. We're been board gaming a ton, armed with hand sanitizer in case we accidentally touch our face while gaming, and a rule that we have to wash our hands before and after. We've collectively played 8 games of Pandemic, 1/2 a game of Twighlight Imperium, and talk of Catan has been in the works for days. We had a hilarious cooking competition a couple nights ago. Each team was given 5 ingredients from the food room and had 1 hour to craft an appetizer, main, and dessert using those ingredients plus whatever else from their personal food that they wanted.

Tonight we're having open mic night, and already today we had trivia hosted by Willie over Zoom. A couple days ago our Spanish lesson was a mock courtroom where we had to split into two teams and argue about the ownership of a dog. As you can see, we're pretty dang busy, and I haven't even gotten into our projects during the day.

As I said, we're expected to do 20 hours a week and Kevin is our task maker. A big project has been filling the ground of the gear-clean station out back with small rocks to promote better drainage. We devised a system of digging for rock 50 yards away from the site and loading it into a wheelbarrow using a giant hand-made sieve to get rid of the dirt.
Another project is painting: we are still working on painting the inside of the Melon, and we unearthed two bathrooms on base that were covered in dirt and random stuff and have painted them and turned them into what will soon be the most popular bathrooms on base, once Nina figures out the plumbing. And it'll bring our grand total of bathrooms on base to 12!

It really is an ideal situation. Very limited contact with the outside world, a very fun community to be in, freedom to socialize and be outside... I love it. Every day I go on a bike ride, typically at sunset because the days have been pretty toasty. We have our neighborhood pups that come visit every couple of days. Someone is always baking something delicious. We do 15-minute ab workouts every other day. I think reality is going to hit pretty hard when our time here is up, but for now, everything is peachy. And boy do we have a lot of canned peaches in case we get really desperate.