Oh, Why Not?

So I was not planning to do NaBloPoMo this year. I was toying with the possibility of trying to write a novel or even doing the academic version of writing every day for a month, which apparently now exists. But both of those things seem to require more preparation and thought than I've given them, while blogging can be done a bit more on the fly.

This is my lame entry for the first day, just so there's something here.

Michael is currently driving across this beautiful country so he, too, can rejoin the ranks of the westerners. I will have more time AND access to photographs when he gets here, so I'll try to post lots of pictures of our ever-growing girl.

In the meantime, here's some of what I've been doing recently:

We had a great four days of Food Day celebrations last week, ending with this day of DIY Food Workshops, which were a big hit. You can read about the bigger plans and see the great coverage our local newspaper gave us here and here. The first article started on the front page and the second was the front page, above the fold of the B section. It was a whirlwind to put this together in the first seven and a half weeks on the job, but we did it and did it successfully!

If I Was Single In Another Era...

There are many jobs in our modern era that are much easier to imagine having if you were childless and preferably single, so you didn't have to worry about the amount of time you were spending at your job.

I think in previous eras, there might have been even more of those sorts of jobs and if I were choosing one of them, I would choose working on this mobile post office. This is one of the cars we got to tour at the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton. It's a car that was leased to (or by? I don't remember the exact relationship) the railroad, but it's a fully self-contained post office. It is amazing, but I get the feeling that the postal workers pretty much lived their whole lives on the train. Not good for maintaining relationships.

What do you say, Auntie Best? In the days before airplanes would have let you teach yoga around the world, would you have joined me on this post office car?

An Unconvincing Day

I had a surprisingly unproductive day at work today. I had anticipated selecting two candidates for the VISTA positions I'm recruiting for right now. A rescheduled interview with one of my top candidates derailed that. I got a few small tasks off my desk, but the day was just so unmotivating. Gray skies. Wind. Rain. My office never really got out of the original gloom. My overhead lights buzz, so I don't use them, and the floor lamp I bought to replace them doesn't give off all that much light. Most of the year, that's just fine. But today, I felt like I was in a hibernation cave all day and got about as much done as a hibernating bear. 


Now, that's probably not quite true, because I answered a lot of emails and took many calls, so it seems likely that I accomplished something over the course of the day. It just doesn't feel like it.


Tomorrow will have to be extra-special-productive to make up for it. It would be more likely if I had made a to-do list before I left today. But again, it was a very unconvincing day. I think it was really just one long twilight. With heavy rain. And wind.

It's Not All About Michael

Tonight, we went out to dinner because my husband is wonderful and I was really, really tired. Darcy fell asleep in the car on the drive home and so we were free to enjoy our evening starting at 7:35! Unheard of. And this story makes today's post NOT all about Michael, as he requested when I asked him to provide me some links for the rest of the post.

Which is all about Michael and some of the amazing things he does in his job. 

Michael looks great in a park service uniform. Those of you who haven't seen him wearing the badge are missing out, but you can get a small taste of it in this post and this one (which also gives you a sense of the wonders of a desert flower display). Michael is an interpretive park ranger, so he's the kind of ranger who teaches you something and touches your heart in a program around the campfire, not the kind of ranger who pulls you over for speeding in the park. Just want to make that clear.

(And apologies to our friends who are or love law enforcement rangers: I'm not trying to say that one kind of ranger is better than the other or anything like that. Just clarifying.)

However, he has a particular specialty these days, as the park media specialist. So he tweets and Facebooks for the park, makes the park newspaper great, creates site bulletins, picnic table signs about feeding animals, and almost any other thing that could count as media. I'm pretty proud of the work he does and I thought I'd share some of it during NaBloPoMo.

First, if you want to know what's going on in Redwood National and State Parks on a day-to-day basis, you can follow him on Twitter or "like" the official Facebook page. The parks also have a YouTube channel where the "Redwood Ranger Minute" series (produced by Michael) is housed (they're video podcasts and can also be found on iTunes). He also maintains much of the park website and is working on an update now. As you can imagine, taking care of the social media for five combined parks every day can be tiring. But Michael still does more!

Recently, the interpretive staff at Redwood have been taking turns writing the "Hey Ranger" column in our local paper, the Del Norte Triplicate (formerly known as the Daily Triplicate, but now it's down to three days a week, so not very daily). Michael wrote this one and helps edit and organize the others. 

He's a busy and productive man-in-uniform, despite what many Republican members of Congress want you to think about government employees. I haven't even mentioned the roadside signs, posters, event flyers, and who knows what else gets designed and produced on the giant pair of computer monitors in Michael's office. He's a all-around good guy and I just thought I'd share some of the stuff he does and doesn't talk about much. I hope you enjoy the vicarious tour of Redwood National and State Parks while admiring my man.

VISTA: Exciting Work, Lousy Pay!*

Many of you know that I served as a VISTA for one year of national service. VISTA, for those who don't know their AmeriCorps acronyms by heart, stands for Volunteers In Service To America. VISTA was created in the 1960s as the domestic version of the Peace Corps and VISTA members still get a hybrid of benefits that straddle those given to Peace Corps members (non-competitive status for federal jobs, anyone?) and AmeriCorps (what? 5,500 bucks towards my student loans???).

Right now, I supervise two great VISTAs at my job and I will hopefully soon supervise a third. They work to improve our region's food system in a variety of ways, working with many different people and communities. They are part community organizer, part researcher, part grant-writer, and part a few other things, depending on the day.

This week, we are recruiting for two of these positions. They are both challenging in their own ways, but offer opportunities to make real, positive change in the world. One is located in Crescent City and will work with two community groups trying to improve food in our schools and neighborhoods. The other will be working in the upper Yurok Reservation, doing similar work, but in a different cultural and geographic setting. They will both be part of a dynamic and friendly team -- my food team!

If you work with young people -- people, for example, who have recently completed undergraduate anthropology degrees -- and are having a hard time finding a job in this economy, encourage them to consider this opportunity. VISTA is a year of service that gives back through training, real-life experience, and a small, but meaningful financial benefit.

For those who love numbers, our VISTA positions provide the VISTA living stipend of $927 a month plus a local housing stipend of $800/month. At the end of the year, members get an education award of approximately $5,500 (it's tied to the Pell Grant maximum) that can either pay off existing student loans or pay for further education.

Please spread the word! My VISTA service was an incredible experience and I highly recommend it for anyone who isn't sure what they want to do with their degree or their life. 

*Really, in this economy, the pay's not all that lousy for a single person around here.

Do You Prezi?

I think that almost sounds dirty, but it's not, I promise! Prezi is a new presentation tool that threatens PowerPoint as the be-all, end-all of meeting presentations. A really wonderful Prezi that makes the rounds of Facebook is "This Anthropology", a response to Florida's Governor Rick Scott's announcement that subjects like anthropology don't need to be taught in Florida's universities. Because, of course, anthropologists like the Glores don't do anything useful. It's well worth watching (which you do by clicking on the arrow at the bottom of the presentation when you're ready to move on).

So I've been playing with Prezi for work. I practiced by making a Prezi about our Food Day event. It's not perfect: Prezi makes it very easy to embed YouTube videos, but videos from other sources, so I had to swap out one movie. You can watch the Prezi and get a taste of the film festival we put on here. And if you'd like to watch the wonderful movie about a school bus renovation project we couldn't include in the Prezi, you can watch it here. It's only eight minutes long and it is awesome.

So, do you Prezi? If you do, you can post a link in my comments so I (and the millions who read my blog) can check it out.

(And as you may have noticed, I'm thinking that some work-y stuff mixed into the family stuff may make NaBloPoMo less stressful. Deal with it.)

Angela Works Sometimes

I mostly stick to non-work stuff for this blog, but I thought I'd use a few days this month to let you all know about the work side of our lives. One of the things I get to do at my job is community gardening. This year, we started two large new community gardens that are thriving. One of them has been in the works since before we moved to Crescent City two years ago. The Elk Valley Community Garden serves our local Hmong community, many of whom were farmers before coming to the United States as refugees during and after the Viet Nam War. This garden is amazing, as the following series of photos will demonstrate:

Elk Valley Garden site, mid-March, 2011

We had a break in the rain early spring this year and we were able to get one of our volunteers to go to the site and till the sod. Unfortunately, he discovered that there was a lot of debris (large rocks, rusted metal, glass) that needed to be removed before he could till deeply, so he left the site looking like this:



About a month after that, the Hmong gardeners came out and combed the site, pulling out everything that could destroy a tiller.

 By the time all that was done and the site was tilled, it was late May. We went out and measured and marked the beds (each family has a 10' by 30' plot) and within two weeks, a blush of green was covering most of the plots:

The eagerness of our Hmong gardeners is overwhelming sometimes. When we marked the second half of the beds, gardeners were working within AN HOUR. By the end of the summer, the garden was so lush with plants at every stage of development (new seedlings that had replaced earlier plantings, plants ready for harvest, and plants going to seed because most of our gardeners are seed savers) that it was very difficult to remember that it had existed for less than four months:

This garden makes me happy. It's feeding well over a hundred people, many of them harvesting every day for their family meals. Twenty-four families are gardening here and it's common to see three generations working together on the same bed. There's a waiting list for space and we're hoping that the land-owner might allow us to fence more space next year and add 10 to 15 additional plots. Even that will not fill the demand for long, but it's a start. 

This is one of the most rewarding parts of my job, but there are others, too. We just did an interview with a local reporter this morning about our community gleaning project. In our first year, we gathered over 4,500 hundred pounds of locally-produced veggies and other food from farmers and backyard gardeners to distribute through our food bank. A week and a half ago, we officially elected 14 people to our Community Food Council, which was just a dream 12 months ago when we were planning the very first outreach meeting. Slowly, but surely, we're changing the face of food in our community. The need is great and there's still a lot to do, but we make a little bit of progress day by day.

In a shout-out to my wonderful husband, he helped bring about a system change in the school food system last month. There were several menu items on October's menu that were ambiguous as to their vegetarian status and Darcy is very keen on being able to have hot lunch every once in a while. Michael exchanged several emails with the head of food services for the district and this is the result:

Note the first Monday box on the lunch menu. No more ambiguity! And they even changed the names of some of the entrees. The "whole grain cheese pizza" was called "whole grain piazza pizza" last month. Yay, Michael!

Darcy Does Good Works!

Yesterday was a good day for the Glore household. I was watching over the first of a series of gardening classes I helped arrange with the local community college. We had 41 people show up on a sunny Saturday morning! And the farmer who taught it went half an hour over the two hours allotted for the class -- and only three people left before he was done! It was pretty incredible. I'm probably going to teach the next one in May because having been turned down by said farmer to teach it, I don't really have enough time to find someone else by tomorrow's deadline for the course listing.

As some of you know, I was in LA last week for training. In the Volunteer Development class, our table group had to create a poster representing our collective volunteer experience, including how many generations of our family had done volunteer work of some kind, and at what age we first volunteered. If Darcy is ever in that same position, she'll have some good tales to tell. While I was at the college yesterday morning, Darcy and Michael helped restore the Mill Creek drainage by planting redwood seedlings. Darcy was very proud:

And very protective and happy:

She and Michael made a great team on those steep slopes:

Right now, thanks to her trip on the pirate ship (ok, just a wooden sailing vessel, really), she's in bed singing the "heave away, haul away" lines from Bound for South Australia. Pirates didn't grab her fancy in the same way as the Wright Brothers, who have been making a small comeback recently. It's sad, but one of the best entertainments we have is listening to the things that come out of her mouth as she's supposed to be falling asleep. Tonight, she's in rare form with the sea shanties.

News Update

Well. Where to start? I apologize in advance for the lack of pictures. Michael has finally broken down and decided that I will never blog again if he doesn't make the pictures easy, so he's installing PhotoShop on the netbook soon. I did use the online photo tool a few times, but it's true that you'd get more pictures if PhotoShop appeared on the desktop.

My job...um, year of service... is great! Today 11 baby goats argued over the right to suck on my fingers and then I got to pet a seven week old adorable ball of fuzz who will grow up to be a great big half-Great Pyrenees livestock-guarding dog. Ok, so I also worked on a brochure about the community gardens, worked on a report for the USDA to wrap-up a big planning grant, sat through an hour and a half conference call, prepared for a Monday to be spent deep in USDA reporting minutiae, and ate freshly-baked bread with freshly-made chevre from those baby goats' mommas' milk. Oh, wait. That last one probably doesn't make you feel sorry for me over my work load, huh?

Seriously, though, I'm enjoying my work a lot so far. I work with good people and I'm working on issues I care about a lot. There's a lot to be done, and I have a to-do list that would be overwhelming if I sat down and really concentrated on everything that needs to be done. Luckily, I'm pretty good at blocking all of that stuff out and concentrating on what I can do for THIS hour in between THAT meeting and THIS conference call.

The first week was somewhat miserable. I started on Tuesday and Darcy was sick. So I stayed home with her until my first event at noon and Michael took the afternoon off with her. When I left, she seemed better than the day before. When I returned at 5 for an hour before an evening meeting, she was a miserable little unresponsive human being and we decided she needed to go to the ER rather than wait for the appointment Michael had made with the doctor the next morning. So I started the meeting waiting to hear from them at the ER. It turned out to be a really bad ear infection and she was home from daycare all week.

Michael took one for the team and stayed home most of the week since I had a full training schedule. He went in a couple early mornings and late afternoons/evenings. It was a tough way to start.

This week has been much better. Darcy has been an absolute star at daycare. She's happy to go in the morning and reluctant to leave in the afternoon. Wednesday, she announced that she wanted a sister when I arrived to pick her up. Thursday, she announced that N and M (the other two kids in her daycare) were her sister and brother. I'm glad she solved that issue for herself, because fictive kin is the only way I foresee her gaining a sibling.

It's actually pretty impressive, once again, how quickly Darcy has adapted to a new situation. She doesn't seem at all unhappy about my working or her going to "school" every day. There are still times when she's unhappy about not being in Cima anymore and it's heartbreaking when she starts listing all the things she misses about Cima while little tears start welling up in her eyes and her lip starts quivering. She listed all the animals she used to get to watch at Cima for Miss L, her daycare provider, the other day, and I thought we were going to get full-on tears there for a while. She held it together.

The impressive thing, to me, is that she is able to articulate very clear preferences about the two places now. We talked about how we wouldn't live in this house forever and that we'd either move to another new place altogether, or if we stayed in Crescent City, that we'd probably try to buy a house that we could paint, etc. She told us she wanted any new house to be "like Cima House". And I thought, really? You want to live in a 25 year old double-wide with doors that blow open, leaky windows, fake wood paneling, no edging on any of the counters, and no neighbors to be seen? But when prompted, Darcy explained that she wants a house without stairs, like Cima House. I think she misses being able to run the full length of the house and have all her toys on one level, but it amazes me that three months after leaving Cima House, she can explain that preference.

But now I'm just rambling 'cause I'm really tired. We had Friday night pizza night with our neighbors tonight and my fellow Crescent City VISTA joined us. We got home not much before 9 and thanks to brownies for dessert, Darcy didn't go to sleep until amost ten. I'm tired. But I've blogged.