Science lessons.

I don't have much time to write an epic post from my travels as of right now, but I wanted to check in. I have an interview (finally someone called me back!) to work at a rehabilitation center in about an hour and a half. I figured I would leave you with a sketch while I was oot and aboot.

What the hell is that?

Ever wonder why it is that some people are able to sneeze after looking at a bright light, or a glancing at the sun to help them get that sneeze out? I say some people because I am one of them. I also say some people because I had found out that that sensation does not happen to everyone. It's genetic.*

My memory might be a little hazy on this, but I remember looking up what made some people sneeze after looking at a bright light, and it has to do with an optical nerve rubbing up again a nerve that controls your nose. Your sneeze button, I'd like to call it. That particular sketch is of the trigeminal nerve nuclei, which is one of the main (or might be the main nerve). I was so inspired during work back when I was at Eastern I decided to draw it for the hell of it.

*Note that I am not a scientist, and I am recalling from memory...if you actually know why or how the whole process works then I would love to learn it all over again! If not, then well...that's what I remember reading. I'll probably look it up later when I have the time. Adios!

Revision. In a good way.

Heeeeey...it's been a while!

So sorry about that.

Well, this is probably the shortest Ameri-blog the world has ever seen. But, no fear. I shall continue steadfastly updating, even briefly, about the entire experience volunteering.
But first let me re-orient you, dear reader, on where I have been tossed and turned within the past year. I believe we started in Vinton, Iowa, for training/home base. Then it was to YMCA Camp Ohiyesa, in Holly, Michigan. This leaves us with:

West Branch, Iowa
Coralville Lake, Iowa
North Port, Florida*
Joplin, Missouri*
Madison, Wisconsin
Marquette, Michigan

*I did not originally intend to go there this year. But I am quite all right with that.

So that's a lot to update you on, and I will be thorough enough with everything myself and my Oak 3 team did, for now I am just reveling in the glory that is: constant connection to the internet. Which explains a huge reason as to why I never really bothered-to/had-the-time-for/really-wanted-to-but-couldn't update in my blog. Take your pick.

I also have lacked in any sort of update in artistic endeavors, and for that I can wholeheartedly claim that to laziness. I really should have worked on more when I wasn't working, but I did manage to sneak in a few pieces of the artistic me while serving the corps. I leave you  (not for a whole year! I'll come back fairly soon!) with a photo from a part of the mural our team painted at Camp Ohiyesa in the dining hall.

I also have an obsession with trees. I guess it comes in handy when you're asked to paint a mural full of them. 

This was actually a pretty proud moment for me, because it will forever be seen by kids every summer (unless they decide to tear down the building but I doubt that will happen anytime soon). This particular tree was a mock up of an oak tree on the grounds that is roughly about 500 (I shit you not) years old. It is also my favorite because besides sketching all of the trees, this one was to left to my own devices.

It's been approximately almost one week since I've been back. I miss everyone in the NCCC, but man, I am glad to be home. Also, today is Thanksgiving! Good times!

I'm not dead I swear.

I'm just super busy.

Round one is over, and I've literally left my home state for a second time. I absolutely loved Camp Ohiyesa and all of the staff there. It's good to know the they're only an hour away from home and I can visit there when the program is over.
The last week before leaving, teams have to fill out forms and do debriefs and briefs for this project and the upcoming projects. So I have literally had zero time to go online. The closest is checking my phone when I'm working, which isn't all that much.
In any case here's what's going on! We have a week in transition before going to our next project. Back in good ole' Vinton once again, but only for a little because then I'll be in...

Iowa city! (just outside of it really)

So an hour away from campus, for eight weeks. The first half we're gonna be working at a Quaker school and helping them with maintenance , farming and organic gardening...I'm excited about that part.

The second half we're working with the U.S. Army engineers and doing trail maintenance and removing evasive species.
Which I'm pretty interested. But...considering the news about all those tornadoes in the south, there are talks of us being pulled from our project sites to go down there for disaster relief. Apparently teams from Maryland and Colorado have already been sent there. I wouldn't mind being sent...I kinda want to go and help there more then the project we're going to go to.


Anyway, that's what's going on with me right now. During transition we have a bunch of meetings we have to go to but it will be a little easier going online so I will try my best getting on as soon as I can. Pictures from camp on facebook soon!

Good news til the end of the week: no government shutdown! Now it's just a matter of time to see whether or not NCCC is in the budget by Friday or not. If not, then it'll be a sad story and I don't know what our next move is, but if we're in, then we'll keep trucking along.

Oak 3 has kept busy though! Today half of the team including myself worked program activities at the camp with high school boys from a Christian prep school. Seventy of them. Can I just say that it is a waaaaaay easier working with fifth graders then it is with high school boys? You would think since they were older they wouldn't be as rowdy...

The Final Countdown

I'm sure you've heard about talks going on with the nation about budget cuts and how it's going to effect a great deal of people and government programs directly. NCCC is greatly affected if it happens.

I have til tonight to know whether or not I'll still even be in this program anymore. I love what I'm doing and what Americorps stands for, and it's hard knowing I set aside a about a year for this and now have to anxiously go through today wondering if I'm still a member by tomorrow. Hopefully things work out, I'd like to serve for the full ten months.
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Camp Ohiyesa!

Whew. Long time no see. I had originally had a long post ready as soon as we were leaving for our first project, but my phone decided to be mean and delete the whole thing! Needless to say I was a little discouraged from posting for a while.

Besides, it's easier putting pictures on here with neat tiny font underneath it.

We've officially have been at our first project for the past  week and a half and it has been a blast! Oak 3 (our team name) is currently stationed back in the good ole' mitten in Holly, Michigan. I've already gotten jokes about how our team came to Holly because I'm the only Holly around in the Vinton campus. We are the YMCA Camp Ohiyesa (pronounced oh-e-yesa) working on a variety of projects.

So far we've been trained to work with kids for the camp programs and activities, stuff such as the rock climbing tower, archery, and the zipline to name a few. There's also a giant swing that completely terrified me, because you have to go through the activities to learn how to work them, and I had to learn to deal with going up heights very slowly.

And then letting go of the ripcord!

Besides kids, we've also been working with the maintenance staff for the camp grounds. So far I've learned how to split a log, use a chainsaw and drive an ATV. I can't even imagine my mom's reaction to the chainsaw. I really liked splitting wood...right until I bruised my hand and couldn't do it anymore.

Corps Training Mini-Project

Tomorrow our team will be doing a three day mini-project after physical training to simulate how the next nine months are gonna be with our real 4-8 week projects.

I'm excited for sure, because we'll be working on our current campus to repair and renew the building that has been so graciously letting us stay here.
Of course in terms of timing, having a super awful cough doesn't really help. I hope it goes away but chances are I have a feeling I'll be outside working with a cold. Lame.

On top of our mini-project, each person has an individual role in the group that either spreads the word about Americorps or helps find sponsors for new projects. My role is media representative...so I'll be blogging on top of this while getting to talk to reporters or doing any other outlet of media you could possibly think of.


As for tomorrow, I believe we're doing some landscaping and painting inside the building. I know some other groups got mini-project trips that were farther so they had to stay there...I am a little sad we're staying on campus for this one, but hopefully that means our real first project will be far away.


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Independent Service Projects

It's been a while and here's the latest.

Aside from main projects that last four-six weeks, we're required to volunteer on our own time. The goal is to reach 80 hours of ISP's and I've gotten a head start!

I just got done helping out at a hands-on science museum, nothing fancy just yet....just some data entry and helping packaging their magazines for public schools all over Iowa. But they are getting ready for the summer series of classes, so that'll be fun to help out with between main projects.

Speaking of projects, our team is going on a mini three day project next week as a part of training. We won't know what we're doing til a few days from now. I can't wait!

I leave you with a few pictures from the science station today. Til' then!
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I could sleep for days.

This past week has been jam packed full of training! I get tired just thinking about it how crammed the schedule is for the next three weeks.
As of this past week I am now CPR/First Aid certified, have taken a road test to drive a 15 passenger sized van (affectionately named Jaws). Oh and I get up at 4:45 in the morning for physical training. LOVE IT!



It is funny though, having to wake up around six o'clock or earlier. Now that my body is adjusted to it, I consider waking up around nine in the morning to be late.

The best way to tell you what team I'm on is to just think of Harry Potter and the sorting hat. There are about 220 of us in the school campus, and we are divided into three units: Cedar, Oak, and Maple. I am in the Oak unit, Team 3.  So far my team leader is pretty cool, and the rest of us are beginning to know each other better. I feel like the first few days kind of dragged for a bit, but only because we gotten used to our temporary teams.


This lack of internet access is making it hard to update all the time. But I promise I'll try to be better at updating when I know I can. Also, expect pictures soon!

Free day!

Oh Sundays, the day of rest. A day where waking up at 10:30 in the morning now seems rather late in waking up. After being set to wake up at 5:45AM you can imagine my excitement over turning off my alarm clock.

Let's review shall we?
This whole week has been adjusting/orientation to the environment, so there will be a lot of pictures on facebook as soon as I can get to it. Being here feels like 10% percent army (with all the rules), 20% summer camp (with the uniforms) and 50% college dorms freshman year. It'll change though once we have our permanent groups and training starts next week.

My temporary group...I love these guys.

Since we don't have permenant groups til tomorrow, we've been assigned to temporary ones throughout the week. I absolutely love all of them, and our personalities are meshing together so well. We are outrageous and sarcastic...I hope my permenant team will be just as close as this group has gotten.

Also starting in the next few weeks is our training: physical training, CPR training, cooking training (though that's more for people who don't know how to cook all that well, I feel like I'll get kind of bored in that), and tool training. I'll be pretty happy to have a set schedule again, that was one thing at home I missed.

The town of Vinton is pretty small, but the people are extremely nice. It's a close knit community, and there's a few places that I've liked so far. There's an amazing Chinese restaurant that is super cheap and I'll most likely be spending my money there most of the time for lunch. I don't think anything is over $10.25.
Yeah, I'm gonna be such a regular.

These signs are all over Vinton. I feel like such a celebrity...to a small degree.

We've also explored the bigger city near by, which is Cedar Rapids. That was pretty fun. I didn't get a picture of it, but there was a billboard that said "single mother or meth?" Not the only two things you can do in Iowa, I would hope.


I'm out for now, but I'll keep you posted! Check out the pictures on either Facebook or Flickr!

First few days...

Here's a few pictures to tide you over...i'd do them all at once if the wireless could work on my computer. I'll try later tonight. It's been so incredibly busy since I got here!

So far it kind of feels like summer camp. But that will change eventually since we haven't started PT yet (physical training). The other two people are my roommates from California and Florida.
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Move on to another day, to a whole new town with a whole new way.

Oh Michigan sky, you are pretty when you want to be.

My last night in Michigan doesn't really feel like my last night. I know as soon as I get on the plane and I strap myself in, I'll settle for a second and then have that sense of forgetting to do something. Then that feeling will be drowned out by constant ear popping and hoping that I'm not the type to get air sick.

I couldn't have asked for a better weekend though! I spent a majority of it with the people I love in various settings. From bars asking you to be loud and obnoxious, to punk rock dances (even though I think I looked a little more goth then punk but who cares), to just sitting around watching movies, this weekend ended on a sweet note. And the others I could only contact via the interwebs know that I will hack/slash my way to the nearest wireless spot just to say hello and catch up when I can.

Adios Michigan! I shall miss your not-so-subtle mitten potatoes.

One last thing, I've saved up on obnoxious amounts of postcards and I'd love to snail mail you if you'd let me. Just leave me a text/message on Facebook with your address and I'll send it your way!

Less than two weeks!

I still can't get over how slow this past month has been! Now as the flight date approaches the days seem to be zooming by. Too bad that sense of time can't reverse itself to make my last week and a half feel longer.

I went with my dad yesterday to pick up a few things to ship over to Iowa (bedding, laundry hamper, etc.) so I wouldn't have to lug it with me on the plane. But I have a timer when it comes to shopping for stuff.
I seem to have inherited both my dad's practical shopping skills (the whole...get in, get out method) along with my mom's three hour indecisiveness and spontaneity in buying things. Within the next hour I couldn't for the life of me figure out what color towels I wanted. Oh and that hoodie over there? Looks awesome...I should get that. Mmm candy is on sale too!

Needless to say I decided to call it quits for the day.

In other news, snow does indeed exist. And yes, it does happen a lot in the mid west. This should be a no brainer to those living here. Part of me wants NCCC members who don't live in the mid west to come to Iowa unimpressed. Perhaps even call us sissies for living in the cold and acting shocked by the gathering of snow in mass quantities.
Personally, I love it. So the first thing I want to do is go outside!


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Fun fact of the day: My dog will take crackers from you and bury them like a bone. She also waits until you stop watching her so you won't know where she buries them.
I'm not quite sure why exactly she does it, but I'd like to think there is a hidden cache of saltines underneath a tree she likes to snack on from time to time.

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More like fight itinerary...

Instead of taking one plane, I'm taking two.  The first one I'm taking from Detroit is going to Chicago...literally fifteen minutes. The other flight is two hours after I get there, and only an hour until I reach my destination: Vinton, Iowa. Is it odd that I'm taking two or is that just how airlines work? I would have thought that I only needed to take one plane.


I suppose this is practice for my lack of flying. Wheee!

Let's see if this works blogging from my phone...testing...testing...

A realization the other day came to mind when I looked at my heading. Where are the sketches? I've been slacking hardcore about showing any kind of proof that I can even draw. My pants will eventually be on fire if I don't do something about it, and pants are expensive. So without further delay, we'll come to the first of the sketch turned artwork.

If the names Antoine de Saint-Exupery or The Little Prince sound familiar to you, then this will be a brief nostalgic moment. If not, then I suggest you to check it out even though it's a children's book. We're all kids at heart, right? Either way, it's aesthetically pleasing and a nice tribute. A little background story, I made this with the intention to give as a gift to a friend who loved the book...a year or so later I finally got around to it. (There's that slacker in me again)

Photo from the book that I referenced:

And my little re-creation:  

Almost completely done with all the paperwork that I need to send in...and to make sure I'll be able to leave. I got the welcome packet from NCCC a couple days ago, which tells me I have to fill out a travel form, healthcare information, and all that jazz.  I haven't read through all the way, but here's some stuff I found interesting that stuck out:

• On the travel sheet I just mailed, I chose to get to Iowa by plane. I've never been on a plane before. This is kind of a big deal for me, since I used to be terrified by the thought of being on a plane when I was younger. Right now I'm completely fine about it, so perhaps I just grew the hell up.

• I could test to be a wildlife firefighter if I so choose.

• Apparently I'll being doing PT while I'm there (physical training? did I just accidentally sign up for the Army? I would be very, very annoyed at myself if I did.)

•  Corps members are assigned to one of three units: Cedar, Maple and Oak. Units are comprised of 70-80 Corps members, broken down into seven teams. Personally I think it's cute that they are all named after trees, however if I could choose I would choose Cedar just because I love the smell of cedar chests.

• I will probably have to get a tetanus shot there, since I can't even remember when I last had one. In fact, I can't remember the last time I had a shot. That's probably not good.

• Projects can very from one day to two months. The average is six weeks.

• Spikes are projects that are more then one hour away from campus (like when I go to another state). I might not have access to a computer/cell phone reception, depending where I would go...but I can still get snail mail. I'll post up my address when I figure out what team I'm on. Letters would be cool!

That's it so far. I'm sure I'll run into something interesting again soon. Over and out.

Saturday. Naps galore.

To give a sole reason as to why I joined Americorps wouldn't necessarily be accurate or true. Why I wanted to stemmed from my own interests and curiosity...and the fact that I just really, really didn't want to go for another round of school (and grad school at that). My last undergraduate semester, while it felt great to be finally done, left me with extreme anxiety from my last classes.

Since I wasn't working full-time, I spent a portion of my summer volunteering at the children's Fly Art Center, which gave way for wanting do more volunteering. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

I first heard about the Americorps program (specifically the one I'm going to be in, NCCC) through a co-worker at the Ypsi Food Co-op. Traveling has always been on my mind, so that was what attracted me. I kept it as an idea in the back of my head for a year.
Fast forward to graduation. The two things I have been thinking about most is whether or not I want to go to grad school right away, or begin to look for work. Standard post-graduate issues.

Then I remembered about Americorps.

The more I continued to think about it, the more I was kept saying to myself "why the hell not?" By this point mid-summer I was still going through my options of what I wanted to do. Every day I woke up pretending a different future path. Monday, grad student. Tuesday, teaching English overseas. Wednesday, finding work anywhere, even out of state. Thursday, Americorps. By Friday I would exhaust myself from over thinking it and just worried for no good reason.

From volunteering at Fly Art, I gained an overwhelming sense of achievement from helping the kids and it gave myself something else to think about that wasn't my own problems for a while. Finally, I just decided to go for it and apply. Doing selfless things and feeling good about it was right up Americorps alley. Because I had applied to grad school and was waiting for them to also call me back, that whole month of August seemed incredibly long. I'm talking molasses slow here. The more I sent in information for Americorps, the more I wanted to get in.

Grad school called me back first, and I declined. Not as easily as I just made it sound in that sentence. Since I hadn't heard from Americorps yet I thought about it for an entire month whether or not I should just go to school instead. It certainly would have stopped me from freaking out about the future, especially if I wasn't picked for the Winter 2010 program. Then I would have had to wait until Fall 2011 to get in and I wouldn't know what to do with myself for a whole year waiting. Probably go crazy.

Obviously you know the end of this story though, and if you don't I'm going to have to ask you to read the two previous posts and my little info box, stat. But I'm going to stop myself before this turns into an unnecessary ten page essay. Adios!

So let's start with what this blog is going to be about in a few months. Normally when I mention Americorps to someone, they don' really know what it is, so I compare it to Peace Corps and then they get a familiar idea of what that entails.

Americorps is federal government program that started in 1993. In it, people serve and work for the country in a variety of ways ranging from public education to environmental clean-up. So like Peace Corps in the sense that it is community service goodfunstuff, except that people stay in the United States to work on projects.
There are 3 divisions of Americorps, and the one I applied for was the National Civilian Community Corps or NCCC (N triple C so it's less of a mouthful). To learn more about what the other two programs are, click here!!

In a pinch, the NCCC works like so:
-Only people 18-24 can apply (unless you sign up as a team leader)
-You're sent to one of five regional campuses (California, Iowa, Colorado, Maryland and Mississippi)
-You are on a team of 10-15 people
-You work on about 4-6 projects for ten months
-Each project is different, and you're not set to one place on the campus. You can go anywhere within the region for projects, this includes states that are around your state.

I didn't get to everything about NCCC, but that is the general gist of what I'll be doing come February. I'll post why I applied in my next entry.

Over and out.