Summer!

I know, I know! It's been awhile. Things that have happened in the last month....

Memorial Day has come and gone, and the Cape is slowly getting busier. Beaches are crowded and weekends are getting progressively crazier. I planned to spend all of Memorial Day weekend hanging out here and enjoying the beach, but one of my housemates and I decided to take a spontaneous trip up to Vermont for a day. We visited the Ben and Jerry's factory and hiked a bit in the Green Mountains - a beautiful day in a beautiful state!




One really fun project I worked on recently was a mural at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. 5 other members and myself planned, drew, and painted a room at the museum which is used for summer kids' programs. We each picked a Cape Cod ecosystem and did a wall... mine was a saltmarsh, complete with osprey and an osprey pole!



Speaking of saltmarshes, at my IP with APCC, its finally field season for saltmarsh monitoring. We put on a fish monitoring workshop for volunteers a few weeks ago. Myself and the volunteers learned how to seine for fish with nets, identify, and measure them. I've set up a few days where we'll be doing this in the next month with some other members from my house, which should be fun. I also had the chance to go out on a bird monitoring trip... I don't know much about bird ID, but I learned a few new ones!


One of my favorite projects of the year is our work with the Quashnet River restoration. We help out a volunteer group who has been working for over 30 years to restore a river which is prime habitat for brook trout. We spent another day out there recently, helping to install logs in the river to control waterflow and create habitat for microinvertabrates and redirect sediment.


Another tiring but rewarding day was spent doing a shellfish "relay." While there was no racing involved, we did help the County move 2600 bags of crushed clam shell, called culch bags, to a local shellfish hatchery. These bags will be soaked and seeded with tiny oysters, and then later moved out into the bay to grow and eventually be available for harvest. It was a long day involving a lot of lifting (definitely a good arm workout!) but it's always good to have projects where the end result is really visible.

One of my housemates has spent the year planning an event called the Junior Solar Sprint, and a few weeks back myself and a few other members helped her run it. At the Sprint, middle-schoolers race solar-powered cars which they've built in preparation, and are also judged on various criteria such as creativity and design. We were worried about the weather (what's a solar race without sun?) but the clouds parted just before the races and it turned into a great day.


And don't worry! I recently had a somewhat odd opportunity to put my film production skills to use. We spent a day shooting the play that we performed in the winter for local schools, in which a dog, a toilet, and a car are put on trial for polluting the bay. We shot the trial in the county courthouse, and I'll be editing it into a piece to be used by the Cape Cod Commission for education and outreach.



This week was our third and final retreat of the year. This time, rather than heading to the beach, we camped out at a Boy Scout camp on a pond in Yarmouth. Thankfully the rain held off until this morning, allowing us two sunny days for swimming, kickball, campfires, watermelon football, and general fun and relaxing. It's a bid sad knowing this is our last real time to be all together as an entire Corps before graduation, but I think it was a break we all needed.



AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST, I had an interesting experience last weekend. Ready for this? I auditioned... for American Idol! Unfortunately, I'm not going to be the next American Idol (not surprising, considering I can barely carry a tune!) But one of my housemates (who actually sings beautifully) wanted to audition, and I figured that if I was going to spend the whole day waiting in line in the rain with her, I might as well sing for fun! So I did, and while I was definitely not "what they were looking for," it was a blast and we met some fun people.

Slow and steady

Spring has arrived on Cape (finally!) and I have less and less free time.... but here we go. Interesting projects of late!

Yesterday a few Bourne members went to the outer cape to help out the Wellfleet house at the Highlands Center in Truro. It's an old airforce base acquired by the National Seashore about 10 years ago. Eventually, the goal is for this to become housing for AmeriCorps, and it's also being used as a science and art center for the community. We did a general cleanup, collecting trash and planting native species to spruce it up a bit.


Last weekend was the second of our three big volunteer events for the year - Canal Cleanup! The whole Corps gathered just across the bridge to lead 300 volunteers in picking up trash along the Canal. There were educational booths, music, food, and kids activities and the whole thing went amazingly smoothly. We collected about 700 pounds of trash, more than half of which were recycled.

A few weeks ago we went out to the Falmouth Service Center, a local food bank with a really nice community garden that supports the Center's clients. Back in the fall, we helped close up their garden beds for winter, and this month we helped wake them back up - weeding, mulching, tilling, and generally cleaning up. It was great to be back now that it's spring! And we found a family of baby bunnies (saved from a close shave with a rototiller)


We also had our last projects with the National Seashore Fire Crew - I spent a day in Eastham clearing a historic stone wall of all sorts of delightful prickly things.

This past monday we went to South Cape Beach in Mashpee, where we painted gates protecting trails and parking areas for the State Conservation agency. The Friday before that, we were with our most frequent shellfishing partner in Mashpee, doing oyster propagation. It's a lot more fun with the weather this nice....

Last weekend one of my housemates, my friend Rachel from Bard, and I went to the zoo in Providence! It was the first hot day of the year (almost 90 qualifies as hot... I've been out of the south too long) and it was a beautiful day to be there, even if the animals were all a little sleepy.

Not much else new. I've finally gotten going on videotaping and am working on multiple projects for the program and myself. I acquired a bocce ball set and have been playing with my housemates almost constantly! We've been able to have a few good beach days, though I know it's only a taste of the next few months.

SPRING BREAK! and birthday.

SO. The last week in March was our ambitious roadtrip down south. Here goes...

We left on Friday after a full day of clearing a herring run across the bridge. The herring are just now starting to arrive, so I'm looking forward to visiting some of the runs we've worked on when they are in full force.

Our first stop was Philadelphia. We stayed with Aleia and spent a day in the city - all the necessary tourist stops (Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Betsy Ross house, etc...). One of my friends and I made a stopover at the Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities, after which we rejoined the rest of the crew at the art museum to have our very own Rocky moment. After an exhausting day of walking, we met Aleia and Matt for dinner and then headed home.

The next day we got an early start and had our longest day of driving. We headed all the way down to Atlanta on Sunday, with a short stopover in Chapel Hill, NC to visit one of my housemates' friends.

The next day we spent in Atlanta. Our big goal for the trip was the Georgia Aquarium - we spent most of the day there, and it was worth the trip! It was an amazing aquarium, complete with whale sharks and a walk-through tank.

After the aquarium, we walked around for a bit to enjoy the beautiful southern weather. We went to the Martin Luther King historical site and saw his tomb and birth home (though we missed the last tour going inside the home by 10 minutes!)


We had planned on finding some delicious soul food for dinner, but waited too late and had trouble finding something open... so settled on a Southern classic: Waffle House.


The next day we packed up and headed back to North Carolina, this time to the Outer Banks. We spent a little more than a day there. Climbed up the huge sand dunes and watched hang gliders at Jockey's Ridge, went to see the Wright Brothers flight site at Kitty Hawk, and a lighthouse at the National Seashore. At the end of the day we went to see my housemate Jenny's friend near Virginia Beach.


Our last stop was DC - we had a couple days there. Crammed in a lot since I've never been. Probably the highlight was our private tour of the Capitol - one of the girls in my house has a friend from college who works for Nevada Senator and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, so some of his interns gave the five of us a tour. We had tickets to the House and Senate galleries, but unfortunately they weren't in session. We made a trip to the National Cemetary, pretty much all of the major monumets (some at night, it was gorgeous!) I would have loved to have a whole week at the Smithsonians, but I managed to do the American History museum and the Air and Space Museum.



Our last day in DC was the first day of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, and also the Smithsonian National Kite Festival! We got to fly some kites on the Mall, and see the blossoms starting to bloom.

It was a lot of driving, but worth it! We've had some fun service since we've been back - more herring runs, some work at the seashore, and this week is Blitz Week. We're spending all week out at a place called Thompson's Field in Harwich - clearing invasives, doing fire fuel reduction, and doing education programs with volunteers and students. The field is town owned conservation land and used as a dog park, and this is the eight year AmeriCorps has done Blitz Week to help manage it.

This weekend I helped throw an Easter Party at Children's Cove, a child advocacy center we volunteer at for some special events. We all hid eggs and helped the kids with Easter crafts, and one of my friends even had the job of wearing the bunny suit!

Even though my birthday isn't until Friday, I've had multiple celebrations already (the joy of working somewhere different every day and having 13 roommates!) My Tuesday placement made me a cake and had a celebration yesterday, and today I was treated to yet another cake at house dinner (I'm getting spoiled!) Probably the best part was a scavenger hunt two of my housemates set up for me today... I had to go all around town to our favorite places (my gym, the coffee shop, where we play trivia, the movie theater, and our favorite sunset beach) to collect clues and solve puzzles!