Earth Stuart

Today Team Bingo Bango Bongo aka Team Turtle aka my teaching team had our first day of teaching! It went fairly well, considering about half of our whole group caught a barfing plague, including Jillian (see her blog for a first-hand account).  She got better enough to come into the school today though, and miraculously did not barf in class. A Christmas Miracle!

Our lesson was simple: to introduce ourselves and the idea of Earth Stewardship. All kids in our program have to take the Earth Steward Pledge, which goes as follows:

I Pledge-

To care about the world around me

To understand and explore the world around me

To share my learning and do service

To make the world around me a better place for plants, animals, and people

I carry this commitment with me always

I am an EARTH STEWARD

Only issue? Fourth graders definitely don’t know what stewardship is. In our last class of the day we had to talk about how Steward and Stuart are two different things, and being and Earth Stuart is not a thing.

The joke about Stuart did lead to this character, which is sure to show up from time to time because he is now our group's inside joke. We think it's hilarious, and I hope you do too.

Team Turtle

Meet my teaching team! They are Dan and Jillian. We are Team Turtle and we do everything together. Every other Wednesday we cook dinner, and every other Thursday we are On Call for anything that may come up for facilities management (shoveling snow, picking up a food order, or some other project). On Tuesday and Friday we are in the schools doing our lessons and after school programs. And at all other times we are planning said lessons. And at all other other times we are having a weird photo shoot somewhere around the lodge!

Here we are cooking dinner last night. We made Bomb Lentil Soup (no pics because it looked suuuuper ugly but tasted great), rice and quinoa with sweet potatoes, and a large kale salad, and it was a hit! Even though we finished making it a whole hour early and didn't follow any recipe whatsoever.  More cooking adventures to follow, I'm sure.

Times we clapped

We clap a lot here at Bear Brook. Which is the understatement of the year, because it’s not just a lot of clapping, it’s clapping for EVERYTHING. We just really like encouragement, or something. 

To keep myself entertained during our training sessions, I kept a list of all of the different times that we clapped. I didn’t write down repeat clapping offenses, so this is by no means an exhaustive list for times that we clapped. That would be pages long. Also how many times did I write ‘clap’ in this blogpost? Anyway, here goes:

When we did our count-off successfully

When we failed at our count-off

When someone brought out more plates

When we finished with some skit

When someone finished their lunch

Anytime anything is announced

When it’s dinnertime

When we get to gather on the couches

When I was late to the meeting

When the guys were jamming on guitars

When Darren played violin

When Drizzy came up with the soup analogy

When Davis said “I told you the clapping would stop”

When Aimee didn’t get clapped for and was sad

When Bryan made some announcement

When Maya’s grandma sent chocolate

When we successfully counted off by 6

When I found my notebook hiding in plain sight

When anyone cooked dinner

Every time someone got a nametag

When we arrived at the DMV to get fingerprinted

When Levi got called for a fingerprint

When Levi passed the garbage truck on the road

Because Bryan didn’t have to get fingerprinted

When Ray succinctly explained our range of experience

When the lady got back up on the stage at the high school

When Bob Champagne mentioned people hooking up because it’s so cold

When we planned to go on a tour and then play dodgeball at our Salvation Army orientation

Because we are getting a drum set

When I volunteered to make a box for the memory box

Bouta pull Valentines Day names

Yummy meals

Clapping for snapping

To thank Jessie for organizing Valentines

When Drake wasn’t going to say it but he said it anyways

The genres in the movie collection are now labeled
When Levi volunteered as notetaker

and now that I am in internet land, here is picture in case you were curious of where I've been spending my time clapping in the past few weeks:

Wood stove blues

As far as I can tell, the ability of a group to keep their own cabin warm is just a test of how good each group is at scavenging. Someone left the toilet paper roll in the stall? Snag it quick!! Did we just use scratch paper for a group activity? Hurry and collect it and stash it in your pockets for emergency late-night fire starting! Going for a walk? Get all the birch bark you can and don’t leave it lying around! And whatever you do, don’t tell any more people about the dryer lint trick. Or just be really good about taking it before people think to check the dryer trap.

Our cabin is still puzzling though the ins and outs of our very tiny wood stove. I’m on the top bunk, so if we crank up the stove I feel like a boiling potato up there and can’t sleep. But if it’s too cold, the fire will maybe go out twice in the night instead of just once and that’s pretty rough for whoever notices they are cold first. You lie there thinking about how maybe it will be fine to wake up in a frigid cabin in the morning, because you’re just leaving to go to breakfast anyways and you don’t have the change your clothes because who does that anyway so is it really that necessary to have a warm cabin? But then you also consider how very nice it was that your roommate got up last night to stoke the fire, and how probably you should just do it, and probably you’d sleep better if you got up to pee anyways, and it will be a million times easier to light if the stove is still slightly warm…..

You hop down from bed and start finding logs that have strips of wood coming off already so you peel all the strips and make a little shavings pile and then you scrounge for paper or magazines or something and then think about how you wish you had chopped some wood while it was still light out or not the middle of the night because it would be quite nice to have some logs that are not the size of your entire stove. But alas, there is just not enough time in the day, especially if you go for an xc ski before dinner.

So anyways you light the fire and because there are still coals it goes great but then the smoke alarm goes off because it’s so dang smoky in there and then everyone wakes up anyways and then you get it so hot that you can’t sleep again. But hey, at least the cabin will be warm in the morning. Maybe. Unless it’s in the single digits outside. Then you’re shit out of luck.**

**This is all to say that things are going well here at Bear Brook, and I’m learning me some woodsy living skills/ refreshing what I learned in Alaska.

Life at Bear Brook

Day 3 here at Bear Brook, my home for the next 10 months. Eek! We don't have great internet, so no pictures yet, but it is quite beautiful, let me tell ya. We are a few miles into Bear Brook State Park in a large lodge built by The CCC. The lodge is full of old couches where we meet, and long wooden tables where we dine and plan. There is an industrial kitchen which is oddly comforting in its familiar Simple Green and bleach solutions, dish racks and the sanitizing machine. We have 3 toilets in two bathrooms for all 30 of us, and a laundry room.

All 30 of us aforementioned Corps Members live in 5 smaller cabins all about a 5 minute walk from the lodge. The cabins are winterized but don't have electricity. New skill I have picked up: how to turn on a propane light! The cabins also don't have central heat-- we have wood stoves! I'm relearning the skills of wood stove lighting that have faded since my time in Alaska. Wood stoves also involve chopping wood, so I'm practicing that too with uhhhh a lot of room for improvement.

The food so far is fantastic. All vegetarian diet with lots of beans and produce and yummy sauces. Since it's training, we get all of our dinners cooked for us. Once the season starts though, we'll be in cook teams that correspond with our teaching teams. Breakfast is basically a continental cereal spread, and lunch is a salad/sandwich/leftovers smorgasbord. AND get this: if I want to eat leftovers for breakfast I totally can. Dinner for bekfart!!

More detailed and coherent post later. I hope.

Driving On

Yesterday I was in my car for almost 12 hours, driving from Austin to New Orleans. It should have been an eight hour drive but I don't think people in Louisiana know how to drive because there were at least three accidents on the road once I go into the state. I had to pull out all the stops to get through the drive. This post is about how I keep myself entertained and awake for anywhere upwards of three hours of solo driving.

First off I download a few podcasts of This American Life or The Moth. These are for when the times get tough. Mostly I like just listening to music while I drive because then my mind can drift and I don't have to worry about missing part of a story. I typically start with a CD or two and skip half the songs, then switch to the country radio station when I can find it. And then when I get to a spot where there are no stations, I bring out the ol' ipod from high school that has some quality stuff on it. Usually when I'm trying to stay awake I put it on shuffle and then skip through pretty much everything. This is the most entertaining because I never know what I'm gonna get. It jumps from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Peterson's bird calls to Dixie Chicks to Sufjan Stevens to Bill Staines to random segments from the 7th Harry Potter book. When the situation gets dire aka I've already listened to a podcast and skipped through the ipod and the radio and the CD and tried to call a bunch of people, I turn to Harry Potter and actually commit to listening to an entire segment. Last time I ended up listening to the Battle of Hogwarts segment where (spoiler) Fred dies and I guess I hadn't read or listened to that part in a while so it made me cry (but in an alert way).

Anyways, the highlight of my trip last night was when I walked into  a gas station to buy a coffee drink and got into a conversation with the lady there about my long drive and how I needed coffee. She ended up giving me a 5 hour energy drink for free! Thinking back on it, perhaps that was a low point for me. I looked so rough and haggard that I got a free energy shot. But hey I didn't even have to use it because my Harry Potter/ music/ radio/ phone method worked just fine!

Sorry for a boring post but this has been on my mind recently-- 3 long solo drive days in two weeks! And I still have to drive all the way to DC in a few days-- luckily with Amelia.

Plane Life

I’m cruising on a flight from Phoenix to Houston and I figured it was high time (ha ha) to write a blog post about flying! I’ll jot down some tips and stuff I’ve thought about over the years I’ve been roaming this country by plane.

Some thoughts from the plane:

1.

Bloody Mary Mix is the way to go for that free drink.  Salty, some substance to fill you up a bit so you don’t have to buy airport food, and on United apparently they’re super fancy and dress it up to almost look like a real Bloody Mary! You know it’s a good airline when they give you a whole can, amirite?

2.

The thing I hate most about seatmates is when they close their window if they have the window seat. Like come ON what is the point of flying if you’re not gonna look out of the window.  Take the aisle if you want the space, duh.

3.

I always try to work the carry-on system.  Take a fully-loaded bag and other random things in my arms and then also a huge backpacking pack stuffed to the gills. Then I go though security and gate check it and save myself $25 and also don’t have to carry it around the airport with me while I go pee. I suppose a better solution would be to pack less but… eh.

4.

Something that just got reemphasized for me just a few moments ago is that the very best way to get exercise is to have a very tight connection in a large airport. I felt like a champion when I made it onto my flight after my dorky Chaco-clad sprint through the Houston airport. No one applauded though; what a letdown.  You can really show yourself as a true hero when you let people who have tighter connections leave the plane before you. The comraderie among plane passengers on a delayed flight is unparalleled, I’d say. That bond is extra fun when you see the people from your first flight sitting on the little airport car things as you huff past looking like a fool. But the run was worth it. Sorry current seatmates for how much I sweated, though.

Hokay well we’re landing and my seatmates just tried to buy 4 Jack and Cokes so there’s that. Can they share?