So this past weekend my team finally got a taste of living all together under one roof. Till now, whenever we go on spike we either stayed in separate tents, cabins, or rooms. But last weekend the Boys and Girls clubs had us move out of our rooms because there were actual kids coming to use the camp, honest-to-goodness campers. So we moved into one of the houses that camp owns (this one's called the doll house, there must be at least 5 just sitting empty around camp, in various states of disrepair). We spent most of last week cleaning the house out, fixing it up, and staining its floors, so it was a getting our just rewards kind of thing. Very posh.
It was interesting, but could have been cooler, because we were really only at the house for sleeping purposes. We still hung out down at the main building complex, which has the lounge (with electric lighting!) and the kitchen. A few of us still dream of a “Silver 4 House” where we all chill in the living room. Maybe one spike, but not any spike soon.
Arrgh. I’m frustrated with this camp. Not awfully so, just it’s week three of our stay here and we still have yet to find where they are hiding the board games. If they have any. Honestly, what’s the point of having no electricity if there are no board games? Cards are an option of course, but I lost my entire $5 buy-in by the second hand of poker last time, so I’m iffy on that one. I’m really not that bad, it’s just the guy I was in a bluff-off with had a higher face card (ace to my king…sigh). I’m pro.
Today was pretty fun. We splintered into three groups, and I headed off with 3 other guys to clean out the maintenance sheds. Not super fun in itself, but Camp Mendocino gets most of its equipment via donation or army surplus (apparently their official non-profit status figures in at the federal level, so they are eligible for HUGE air force dump-trucks or a military grade forklift—which was named Anthony). Plus, they’ve been a camp for over half a century, so they have a lot of cool junk accumulated, which we get to fool with before throwing out (or sometimes keeping)
They have a massive box of .22 caliber bullet casings from where there was a rifle range at the camp (now it’s politically incorrect to teach inner-city kids how to respect guns). There are two chariot (think coliseum) beds, sans wheels, waiting to be utilized. They have a large assortment of industrial grade tools—namely, wrenches that are half as tall as I am and truly a bitch to lift. The best find of the day was a piece of nameless rubber with a mini caribiner attached to it, which I have now appropriated and added to my collection.
It’s true, you can’t trust us AmeriCorps kids with anything. If given the chance, we will steal your needless junk and expired food right out from under you.
Devious little bastards, aren’t we?
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Ketchup, please
Well I hope everything is well.
I realized that I mentioned squat about what we’d been doing these past days here at Mendocino besides what we do in our spare time. What, AmeriCorps gets things done? Pshaw.
But indeed, we have been doin’ stuff. Our first task upon arrival was to increase visibility along a three-mile stretch of the windy, altitudally schizo bit of road from the camp gate to the main parking lot.
Imagine I have a mobster accent, and thus: “Now, see? All these plants, stickin’ up outta the ground here, they gotsta go, see? I want ‘em gone, and I want ‘em gone good!”
It was supposed to take us a week to do the brush clearance, and we were at the bottom in two days. Now, I think it proooobably should have taken us three days (the bottom mile was skimped when people realized how close they were. I have no guilt, I was still at mile 2 doing “quality control” on the skimping when they hit bottom), but we still got all the overhanging trees, small brush, and obnoxious viney things out in a 5’ corridor.
That was boring, mind-numbing work, lightened only by the fact that our handsaws had belt holsters. Not only could we drop our loppers and wip them out to saw stuff down if we got really bored, but a couple of us spent the walk back to our lunches going “1. 2. 3. DRAW” Good times.
BUT. We did get to burn the 15-or-so large piles of brush we accumulated. Much more stressful and tiring than you would think, seeing as it rains every night here. The fire has to be slowly coaxed up to heat by burning leafy brush stuff in exponentially increasing amounts at the instant the last batch flares up. Add more fuel too early and smothered, too late and the new stuff didn’t catch. However, once the fire was blazing with a great coal base, you could dump anything on it and it was torch instantly. And since we are very responsible fire tenders, we were willing to sit around and watch the fire die before moving on, to make sure none of the forest caught fire.
The rest of our week involved a lot of painting over graffiti in the cabins and buildings (a lot of misspellings, but humorous stuff) and staining the floor of one of the buildings. This week we’ve moved on into odd jobs. We have, thus far, dug a trench for gas lines, half-demolished a small building, deep cleaned our kitchens and the walk-in fridges, and organized the camps food warehouse.
The warehouse was a scary job, primarily because it smelled amazingly strongly of mouse urine and decomposing rodents. At one point, we opened up and plastic tub to see what was inside, and everybody ended up sprinting from the warehouse because the smell from the tub stung your face. It turned out to contain the liquefied corpses of three very unlucky mice. I don’t think we even bothered to clean it; we just dumped it about 100 yards from the work area and had the back loader come pick it up.
Demolishing the building, on the other hand, was a real blast. There was much use of axes to smash holes in things and then yell “HEEEEERE’S JOHNNY!” and many a successful roundhouse kick landed in the sideboards. The only bad part was digging through the wreckage later for our tools and hauling away the debris to a burn pile.
A good week, thus far, and we’re only kind of running out of food! I would like to claim some credit for that status, since I have assumed the position of food nazi. It’s a cold place to be when we’re shopping, but eating is good so it balances out.
I wrote the stuff above a couple days ago, and the generator is on, so booya. In recent news, the camp kitchen has a deep fryer, and my cooking partners and I decided to utilize it this week. So yesterday we did homemade chicken fingers and fries that were finger-lickin good, with one catch. WE HAVE NO KETCHUP. What kind of America-orps do we live in where a boy must use barbeque sauce with his fries? Well, I didn’t, cause those fries were so good and droopy with oil that I just scarfed handfuls plain. Oh, and we made broccoli and a salad. Please, we’re not savages.
I spent 8 hours today stripping the bark from a 20’ section of a redwood by hand. Or pretty much by hand, I had a walloping-looking iron scrape bar. Not easy, I’m certain my palms are permanently bruised.
But how many people can say that they manually stripped a redwood?
The sound you hear is Sam entering the exclusive club of lumberjacky.
I realized that I mentioned squat about what we’d been doing these past days here at Mendocino besides what we do in our spare time. What, AmeriCorps gets things done? Pshaw.
But indeed, we have been doin’ stuff. Our first task upon arrival was to increase visibility along a three-mile stretch of the windy, altitudally schizo bit of road from the camp gate to the main parking lot.
Imagine I have a mobster accent, and thus: “Now, see? All these plants, stickin’ up outta the ground here, they gotsta go, see? I want ‘em gone, and I want ‘em gone good!”
It was supposed to take us a week to do the brush clearance, and we were at the bottom in two days. Now, I think it proooobably should have taken us three days (the bottom mile was skimped when people realized how close they were. I have no guilt, I was still at mile 2 doing “quality control” on the skimping when they hit bottom), but we still got all the overhanging trees, small brush, and obnoxious viney things out in a 5’ corridor.
That was boring, mind-numbing work, lightened only by the fact that our handsaws had belt holsters. Not only could we drop our loppers and wip them out to saw stuff down if we got really bored, but a couple of us spent the walk back to our lunches going “1. 2. 3. DRAW” Good times.
BUT. We did get to burn the 15-or-so large piles of brush we accumulated. Much more stressful and tiring than you would think, seeing as it rains every night here. The fire has to be slowly coaxed up to heat by burning leafy brush stuff in exponentially increasing amounts at the instant the last batch flares up. Add more fuel too early and smothered, too late and the new stuff didn’t catch. However, once the fire was blazing with a great coal base, you could dump anything on it and it was torch instantly. And since we are very responsible fire tenders, we were willing to sit around and watch the fire die before moving on, to make sure none of the forest caught fire.
The rest of our week involved a lot of painting over graffiti in the cabins and buildings (a lot of misspellings, but humorous stuff) and staining the floor of one of the buildings. This week we’ve moved on into odd jobs. We have, thus far, dug a trench for gas lines, half-demolished a small building, deep cleaned our kitchens and the walk-in fridges, and organized the camps food warehouse.
The warehouse was a scary job, primarily because it smelled amazingly strongly of mouse urine and decomposing rodents. At one point, we opened up and plastic tub to see what was inside, and everybody ended up sprinting from the warehouse because the smell from the tub stung your face. It turned out to contain the liquefied corpses of three very unlucky mice. I don’t think we even bothered to clean it; we just dumped it about 100 yards from the work area and had the back loader come pick it up.
Demolishing the building, on the other hand, was a real blast. There was much use of axes to smash holes in things and then yell “HEEEEERE’S JOHNNY!” and many a successful roundhouse kick landed in the sideboards. The only bad part was digging through the wreckage later for our tools and hauling away the debris to a burn pile.
A good week, thus far, and we’re only kind of running out of food! I would like to claim some credit for that status, since I have assumed the position of food nazi. It’s a cold place to be when we’re shopping, but eating is good so it balances out.
I wrote the stuff above a couple days ago, and the generator is on, so booya. In recent news, the camp kitchen has a deep fryer, and my cooking partners and I decided to utilize it this week. So yesterday we did homemade chicken fingers and fries that were finger-lickin good, with one catch. WE HAVE NO KETCHUP. What kind of America-orps do we live in where a boy must use barbeque sauce with his fries? Well, I didn’t, cause those fries were so good and droopy with oil that I just scarfed handfuls plain. Oh, and we made broccoli and a salad. Please, we’re not savages.
I spent 8 hours today stripping the bark from a 20’ section of a redwood by hand. Or pretty much by hand, I had a walloping-looking iron scrape bar. Not easy, I’m certain my palms are permanently bruised.
But how many people can say that they manually stripped a redwood?
The sound you hear is Sam entering the exclusive club of lumberjacky.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Skunk Trains and Braggart Towns
Since today is a federal holiday, we get a three day weekend (unofficially I think, seeing as I only get 20 days off besides weekends total, and what with xmas break and all we’ve already used up about 15 of them I think). It just kind of happened because our sponsor usually works from Tuesday to Saturday, and we’re currently shifting to match his schedule.
We finally saw the skunk train this weekend; it rolled by at a speedy 15 miles per hour on Sunday. We were good Americans and waved to the tourists as they went by, and refrained from hopping on the back, regardless of how tempting it was. They went by again today, and I swear I heard the announcer say “AmeriCorps” on the intercom. I know (from reading the past debriefs written by other teams) that the last AmeriCorps team to come here for a SPIKE got themselves installed as part of the scenic Skunk Train tour, but that was five years ago. Either way, awesome if they mention us, because as Media Rep, it’s my job to get that kind of thing set up. In other words, I got a freebie.
Regardless of how much of our food we eat when we hang around all day, I love not doing anything here at Mendocino. Lazing en sleeping bag until 11ish, reading sci-fi (finally found a short story anthology), enjoying SUN today. Actually, we went into Fort Bragg to hang out/foodshop on Saturday, and while wandering around, I found a crazy shop. It had a really old-fashioned wooden sign that read “studies in electro energetic waves.” It was a one-man museum; the guy that ran it is apparently the guy who did the laser/mirrors experiment and nailed down the speed of light decades back. I really wanted to get one of his free lessons. The guy called himself “82 years young” and had his desk in the back of the shop/place, with a name card on top. Everything was about what he had created and discovered, and I couldn’t tell if the guy was really into bioelectric, new-agey stuff or just really egocentric. It was closed when we got there, but everything I could see through the windows made the old guy who ran the place out to be a magician or something. I will be calling for a free lesson.
I am officially a data geek. We’ve been having some trouble shopping (we had to put items back on the shelves again this week), so I’ve started actually organizing it, what with lists and all. And now I’ve put the receipt into excel and created pie-graphs to distinguish our spending on breakfast/lunch/dinner and that kind of thing.
I have no shame.
More next time the main generator comes on.
We finally saw the skunk train this weekend; it rolled by at a speedy 15 miles per hour on Sunday. We were good Americans and waved to the tourists as they went by, and refrained from hopping on the back, regardless of how tempting it was. They went by again today, and I swear I heard the announcer say “AmeriCorps” on the intercom. I know (from reading the past debriefs written by other teams) that the last AmeriCorps team to come here for a SPIKE got themselves installed as part of the scenic Skunk Train tour, but that was five years ago. Either way, awesome if they mention us, because as Media Rep, it’s my job to get that kind of thing set up. In other words, I got a freebie.
Regardless of how much of our food we eat when we hang around all day, I love not doing anything here at Mendocino. Lazing en sleeping bag until 11ish, reading sci-fi (finally found a short story anthology), enjoying SUN today. Actually, we went into Fort Bragg to hang out/foodshop on Saturday, and while wandering around, I found a crazy shop. It had a really old-fashioned wooden sign that read “studies in electro energetic waves.” It was a one-man museum; the guy that ran it is apparently the guy who did the laser/mirrors experiment and nailed down the speed of light decades back. I really wanted to get one of his free lessons. The guy called himself “82 years young” and had his desk in the back of the shop/place, with a name card on top. Everything was about what he had created and discovered, and I couldn’t tell if the guy was really into bioelectric, new-agey stuff or just really egocentric. It was closed when we got there, but everything I could see through the windows made the old guy who ran the place out to be a magician or something. I will be calling for a free lesson.
I am officially a data geek. We’ve been having some trouble shopping (we had to put items back on the shelves again this week), so I’ve started actually organizing it, what with lists and all. And now I’ve put the receipt into excel and created pie-graphs to distinguish our spending on breakfast/lunch/dinner and that kind of thing.
I have no shame.
More next time the main generator comes on.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Yes, we are still at Mendocino. But it's only raining a LITTLE!
I think we can be considered “settled in” here at camp Mendocino; it’s been four days, we completed one of our tasks, and we’ve started griping about our dwindling food supply. We have an issue with food as a team. We have been getting by admirably without any sort of planning, figuring out what we want to cook for dinner as we shop each week at Trader Joe’s (I’m not sure how we got by shopping at Trader Joe’s, but it worked), and all for under $350 a week. However, regardless of how much or how little food we buy, we always go through four stages (the Silver Four Food Cycle):
1) Being excited about how much food we bought when we first get the food
2) Exclaiming at how fast we are going through food
3) Running out of one or more of the following: eggs, milk, or bread
4) Going shopping a day earlier than we had planned
Personally, I think our food consumption is directly related to the amount of food we have. Everyone just gets guilty about snacking when it looks like you’re probably eating the bread that someone is going to need for lunch on Friday.
Added to that little cycle is the fact that we run generators from 7-8:30 AM and 6-10:30 pm to power the heater for water and our rooms, the lights in the kitchen, and the TV in the lounge. Otherwise the buildings are rather cold and dark. We are still concerned for our milk and meats.
Oho. I recently had a slight dilemma. Because of the 3 rooms for 11 of us, one of my roommates is my team leader. He’s a shorter guy, but packed with more muscle and passion for life than one might think possible. He is the epitome of giving 100% to everything, and generally he lets nothing worry him. This week he has repeatedly been using my towel, to shower, to dry his face off, whatever, and this threw me for a loop.
Initially, I was pretty pissed, but I buy into the “ignore it-see if it goes away” confrontation strategy. The only thing that ever bothers me about him is that sometimes his carefree, unworried attitude leads to certain social faux paus (fox paws? Faw pow? I have no idea how to spell it). So then I wondered: why did him using my towel bother me? It’s not cause I think it’s unsanitary; I wouldn’t mind if a family member or good friend used my towel without asking. So I figure I was annoyed because he broke an ambiguous social rule put in place by the first whiny guy to say “dude. That’s MY towel.” Thus, since I ultimately approve of his ability to not worry about anything, assuming that it will be ok with others because he wouldn’t mind, I am now ok with the whole issue. With the exception of the fact that my towel reeks a bit. He’s a true backwoodsian, and has been said to be the child of a bear.
And that was the story of a towel. Obviously a disaster needs to happen so my blog can be EXCITING and PICKED UP BY A MAJOR PUBLISHER.
We did burn stuff today. We’ve been brushwacking the side of the inroad to the camp so the buses can see where they are going, and we are now burning the piles. Cool stuff. On a side note, they figured it would take us to Friday to finish the brushwacking. We finished today. No biggie, we just kick ass.
Well the main generator (on today so our team leader could get some paperwork in) is going back off soon, so the computers are gonna die. More next time on the Corps Life.
1) Being excited about how much food we bought when we first get the food
2) Exclaiming at how fast we are going through food
3) Running out of one or more of the following: eggs, milk, or bread
4) Going shopping a day earlier than we had planned
Personally, I think our food consumption is directly related to the amount of food we have. Everyone just gets guilty about snacking when it looks like you’re probably eating the bread that someone is going to need for lunch on Friday.
Added to that little cycle is the fact that we run generators from 7-8:30 AM and 6-10:30 pm to power the heater for water and our rooms, the lights in the kitchen, and the TV in the lounge. Otherwise the buildings are rather cold and dark. We are still concerned for our milk and meats.
Oho. I recently had a slight dilemma. Because of the 3 rooms for 11 of us, one of my roommates is my team leader. He’s a shorter guy, but packed with more muscle and passion for life than one might think possible. He is the epitome of giving 100% to everything, and generally he lets nothing worry him. This week he has repeatedly been using my towel, to shower, to dry his face off, whatever, and this threw me for a loop.
Initially, I was pretty pissed, but I buy into the “ignore it-see if it goes away” confrontation strategy. The only thing that ever bothers me about him is that sometimes his carefree, unworried attitude leads to certain social faux paus (fox paws? Faw pow? I have no idea how to spell it). So then I wondered: why did him using my towel bother me? It’s not cause I think it’s unsanitary; I wouldn’t mind if a family member or good friend used my towel without asking. So I figure I was annoyed because he broke an ambiguous social rule put in place by the first whiny guy to say “dude. That’s MY towel.” Thus, since I ultimately approve of his ability to not worry about anything, assuming that it will be ok with others because he wouldn’t mind, I am now ok with the whole issue. With the exception of the fact that my towel reeks a bit. He’s a true backwoodsian, and has been said to be the child of a bear.
And that was the story of a towel. Obviously a disaster needs to happen so my blog can be EXCITING and PICKED UP BY A MAJOR PUBLISHER.
We did burn stuff today. We’ve been brushwacking the side of the inroad to the camp so the buses can see where they are going, and we are now burning the piles. Cool stuff. On a side note, they figured it would take us to Friday to finish the brushwacking. We finished today. No biggie, we just kick ass.
Well the main generator (on today so our team leader could get some paperwork in) is going back off soon, so the computers are gonna die. More next time on the Corps Life.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Back at Mendocino for a SPIKE
Awright. So I'm at camp mendocino, comfortable situated in one of our three bunk rooms (one for the four girls, two for the seven guys).
Electricity here is a give-and-take. We got spoiled last night since they are having a kind of Boys and Girls Club conference/retirement party. With the bigwigs here they left the main generator running all night. In the future, we get power from around 5:30 to 10:45, and they also said we could run the generator for about an hour in the morning for breakfast and the like. It is unfortunate that we did not know this while we were shopping, because we bought an all time record of 7 gallons of milk, anticipating our next shopping trip being 9 days away. Buuuuut since we are now living out of coolers, the milk may not last that long. Ah, well, another brick in the road.
It is February in California, so of course it is raining pretty much constantly. I am very happy that we are indoors and not in the cabins, as we initially thought. Much more comfortable.
We start work monday. We were told to wear our FRT clothes (nomex pants, fireboots, the like) so I assume we must be doing brush hauling, and maybe a little burning of the brush piles. Nothing glorious.
The camp itself is a pretty awesome place to be spending four weeks. It has the ability to house and feed about 400 kids at once during the summer, so clusters of cabins (I think they are divided into "tribes" during the summer season) sprawl out from the main complex that has laundry, offices (with computers and wifi if I get the password), and a gigantic kitchen.
This is redwood country, and this area is fairly old growth. Not quite sequoia national forest old growth, but much bigger than el averago treeo back home. The upper canopy is easily sixty to seventy feet up, and the forest floor is bare of almost all low-lying shrubs, just layered in needles. Fairly magical area.
The Skunk Train that runs through camp (apparently the only train left in the country that the postal service actively uses to transport mail), supposedly comes daily, though I never saw it when AmeriCorps was here last time for team training. It goes into nearby Willits and Fort Bragg, so theoretically the plan is to hop it if it makes enough passes to get us back before next week. Otherwise the weekend is going to be pretty sleepy here.
By the way, I'm getting great photos and videos now that I have a cord to connect my camera to my computer, the wondrous technology. I'll figure out where I'm going to put those so yous all can see them eventually. And we do have internet here (obviously), it's just a little hard to get (need electricity and time) but since I have my loyal lappy I can write on there and flash it over to the office to for webification.
It is realllllly lazy here without anything to do, and it being rainy and the weekend. We played some cranium and some cards and came to the conclusion that we eat the most of our food supply when we don't work. Yuss indeedy.
But theoretically, once we get our act together and it stops raining, this is a boys and girls club camp. They have bows and arrows with rubber tips, and we have goggles and helmets, so fun is to be had by all. Now the rain just needs to stop.
Electricity here is a give-and-take. We got spoiled last night since they are having a kind of Boys and Girls Club conference/retirement party. With the bigwigs here they left the main generator running all night. In the future, we get power from around 5:30 to 10:45, and they also said we could run the generator for about an hour in the morning for breakfast and the like. It is unfortunate that we did not know this while we were shopping, because we bought an all time record of 7 gallons of milk, anticipating our next shopping trip being 9 days away. Buuuuut since we are now living out of coolers, the milk may not last that long. Ah, well, another brick in the road.
It is February in California, so of course it is raining pretty much constantly. I am very happy that we are indoors and not in the cabins, as we initially thought. Much more comfortable.
We start work monday. We were told to wear our FRT clothes (nomex pants, fireboots, the like) so I assume we must be doing brush hauling, and maybe a little burning of the brush piles. Nothing glorious.
The camp itself is a pretty awesome place to be spending four weeks. It has the ability to house and feed about 400 kids at once during the summer, so clusters of cabins (I think they are divided into "tribes" during the summer season) sprawl out from the main complex that has laundry, offices (with computers and wifi if I get the password), and a gigantic kitchen.
This is redwood country, and this area is fairly old growth. Not quite sequoia national forest old growth, but much bigger than el averago treeo back home. The upper canopy is easily sixty to seventy feet up, and the forest floor is bare of almost all low-lying shrubs, just layered in needles. Fairly magical area.
The Skunk Train that runs through camp (apparently the only train left in the country that the postal service actively uses to transport mail), supposedly comes daily, though I never saw it when AmeriCorps was here last time for team training. It goes into nearby Willits and Fort Bragg, so theoretically the plan is to hop it if it makes enough passes to get us back before next week. Otherwise the weekend is going to be pretty sleepy here.
By the way, I'm getting great photos and videos now that I have a cord to connect my camera to my computer, the wondrous technology. I'll figure out where I'm going to put those so yous all can see them eventually. And we do have internet here (obviously), it's just a little hard to get (need electricity and time) but since I have my loyal lappy I can write on there and flash it over to the office to for webification.
It is realllllly lazy here without anything to do, and it being rainy and the weekend. We played some cranium and some cards and came to the conclusion that we eat the most of our food supply when we don't work. Yuss indeedy.
But theoretically, once we get our act together and it stops raining, this is a boys and girls club camp. They have bows and arrows with rubber tips, and we have goggles and helmets, so fun is to be had by all. Now the rain just needs to stop.
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