Community Meeting

We are in the middle of transition time, full of trainings and less full of children. Education season ended three weeks ago, and we had our very last Community Meeting. Here is a list of things we discussed at community meetings throughout the winter, because when you write it all out it’s quite hilarious. This may not make any sense to you, dear reader, but I hope you at least appreciate the wide variety of topics.

Here we go:

Should we buy a drum set?

If we buy a drum set, who will chip in to pay for it?

Ok we are buying a drum set.

Can we order the drum set to our P.O. box?

When are we allowed to use the drum set?

Let’s do secret Valentines!

How?

Ok first let’s vote on if we should do secret valentines.

Ok that passed, now let’s vote on if you have to tell the person you had them.

Should we have a reveal party?

But what if we don’t want to reveal ourselves?

Should we do it on Valentines Day or the week after?

It will be cheaper after Valentines Day.

Whoever has Rachel don’t give her Snickers.

Ok let’s revisit this because we still have a whole month until Valentine’s Day.

We have a drum set!

Can Hilary hear the drums from her cabin?

Let’s get Bryan to play to drum set right now.

Which words aren’t allowed to be used in our community?

Let’s kill the porcupines and eat them!

We need a rice cooker. No one knows how to cook rice.

Where are things in the tool cache?

We need to be more professional—find a better place to hang our laundry.

Who wants to go to Montreal?

Y’all need to pay up for Montreal.

Should we do Secret Easter Bunny? Egg hunt?

How?

We could make a map and label each section and then you can only look in your section.

We could label eggs with numbers and you only find your number and that way we don’t lose any eggs.

We could combine both ideas.

How?

Seriously, pay up for Montreal.

Let’s talk about food waste. We are a Conservation Corps.

Well, we do have to throw things out sometimes. It’s Ok. (Throw that shit out it’s moldy ain’t no one gonna eat it-Annie)

Where should we put half-used vegetables?

Who wants to learn how to make some whistles?

People need to be better at committing to things they say they are going to do.

We are doing Secret Aprils Fools. Put your name in the hat.

We have a rice cooker!

Y’all want to work on a farm? And get paid in cheese?

We reorganized the Tupperware. Keep it that way.

What songs are inappropriate to listen to in this community?

Clean your shit up before ream.

Should we have dinner at 6:30?

How is the 6:30 dinner time change going?

Let’s make a Bucket List of things for our time here. In a bucket.

All in favor of the bucket give a thumbs up.

We are going to build a greenhouse! Everyone needs to help!

Are y’all still excited about the greenhouse?

Clean your shit up off the porch.

We drink too much coffee.

Should we get worse coffee or should you drink less coffee?

Let’s get worse coffee.

Maybe the coffee will taste better if we get rid of the Bunn and use an electric percolator.

Maybe we should clean the percolators.

Like seriously, clean the percolators when you finish the pot.

Maybe we’ll add that to ream.

We reorganized the Tupperware again. It’s really organized this time.

Should we invite the City Years over?

Who wants to drive across the country with Darren?

The ticks are coming. Take every precaution.

Stop giving advice about ticks because the tick guy is coming in a couple of weeks.

Does anyone want to order some boots? No? K.

Where are we now allowed to drink alcohol now that it is nicer out?

Wait, you can’t have a fire at Spruce Pond.

We need a crew to take care of the fire ring dispersal at Spruce Pond.

Ok just remember no drinking in the cabins, it’s a safe space.

I finished reading The Martian.

Let’s be aware of… just everything. And be mindful. As long as you’re aware and mindful everything should be good.

Future predicted meeting topics:

Nobody plays the drum set…

We reorganized the Tupperware again.

Who wants to go to Mexico?

Just a quick reminder to stay positive.

The Most Glorious Big Night

Big Night… the most magical two words of all time… except for maybe Harry Potter. All of the Spotted Salamanders and Wood Frogs and other amphibians crawl out of their burrows on the first wet and warm (ish) night of spring and make their way towards vernal pools (I just taught a lesson about this and probably said this line 10 times today at least). Anyway, I’d been dreaming of this night since I arrived in snowy New England this January. The Spotted Salamander is in my Top Three Favorite Salamanders Ever count, and they’re just so big and chunky and cute and the best… eek.

See?

This year we had a very strange winter, with a lot of false alarms. We had our first wet and warmish night at the very end of February, in fact. The pools were still mostly frozen, but still a few brave salamanders marched over to find mates. I waited sort of patiently for the next warm rainy night, but it never came. Instead we got below freezing temps for a few days at the end of March! Luckily, April showers on April Fools Day brought the most epic Big Night I have ever witnessed. I went to Maine for the weekend, and luckily spent the night with fellow herp-enthused friends who were totally game to go out herping at midnight when we got back from a concert. We found So. Much.

Everywhere we looked in the pond there were five or so spotted sals flitting up to the surface to nab some air or just say hey. They were quite easy to catch, so I probably held/cooed over a dozen. And I will go our to the pond here a Bear Brook as much as possible over the next few weeks and just hold amphibians and all will be well.

Here I am with Lucy, all dressed for a night of herping.

Searching for salamanders is sort of a frenetic/ compulsive activity for me at this point. Obviously it’s really enjoyable too, but when I search at night I end up looking like this hunched over pond gremlin fishing around with my hands and poking myself in the eye with branches and grumbling and scouring the surface of the water and flipping over logs and scrabbling in the leaf litter. I probably have crazy eyes. But it’s worth it, lemme tell ya.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned at Camp

This post is a play on an essay that is frequently read at camp: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarden. I've found that so much of communal living and parts of my job here are second nature to me, because of all my years at camp. I've unknowingly been prepared to be a sanitation/ composting/ recycling/ behavior managing freak. Hopefully in a helpful way....

Here is what camp super duper prepared me for:

How to walk alone at night without a light

How to use an electric percolator

How nice it is to clean out the percolator at night instead of in the morning right before you’re trying to make coffee

How to load a dish rack to go into a sanitizer so that a lot of stuff can fit in but everything gets clean

That a sanitizer is not the same as a dishwasher

Knowing that Simple Green degreases, Bleach kills germs

How to think/ cook for people with allergies

It's important to change the mop water often

Automatically knowing where every weird food item is stored in the kitchen, fridge, and dry storage areas

How to get a large group of people quiet quickly

How to deftly answer non-sequitor questions without losing my train of thought

The importance of planning ahead for lessons and gathering materials ahead of time Make a back-up plan and a rain plan

Do not go in the kitchen without close-toed shoes (though I have learned that better here)

Sometimes you can’t save every food item

If something has been in the fridge for too long, just chuck it in the compost and don't be sad about it

How to think on my feet and whip out a game for any situation

How to quickly respond to first aid incidents

How meat should be stored in the fridge

What can and cannot be recycled

How to manage a group of crazy children at a meal

How to have stimulate interesting table conversations but keep it from getting too rowdy
How to cook for mass amounts of people

and a billion other things.

Nostalgia Trip

Last February I was camping in the mountains somewhere in Death Valley, working on some odd project involving carrying weird heavy metal objects in backpacking in the blistering desert heat. My time as Wilderness Intern was one of those jobs that was, sweaty, exhausting, fairly rewarding, and unglamorous. It didn’t seem like that sweet of a gig at the time—just a way to break even and work outside in a beautiful place, and learn something along the way. However, I look back on those four months living at the lowest point in the country as the highest point of my year (awwwwww I know I couldn’t resist).

Also made some pretty great frands.

While my fellow roommates were working in air-conditioned offices or interacting with the public, I was hiking in the wilderness and eating ice cream and bumping over crazy 4WD roads and getting weird tan lines. There aren’t many jobs where you can get paid to do that (paid is a strong word, though). My job took me to every corner of Death Valley. I didn’t by any means get to know the park well, because that would take a lifetime. I did get to see a huge variety of landscapes, from crusty geometric salt flats to sagebrush scrubland dotted with burros and chuckwallas. I got to sleep under some of the darkest night skies in the country during the work week, and I frequently took my lunch breaks in the shade of canyons. 

Here's a photo from park service orientation. Pretty sweet field trip to the Badwater salt flats!

My govnt truck hangin' out in some scrubby desert land.

Side note: I miss my lunches there almost as much as the work. Picture a fat sandwich loaded with hummus, lettuce, pepperoni, cheese, mustard, and avocado after a long day hiking up an alluvial fan dodging cacti and creosote bushes. That sandwich was better than the views some days, I gotta say. But on this day, the view was better:

But I guess I’ll stop bragging about how freaking awesome my job was by saying something about how National Parks are totally America’s Best Idea and I’m excited to be working on public lands all summer doing conservation projects. I’ll look back on Death Valley as one of those Golden Times in my life. Carefree desert living, only concerned about having a great sandwich and not dying of dehydration.

Me and Charlie and the Americorps crew on a hitch in the Wilderness. Capital W.

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: