Back to Business as Usual

So here we are again. As you know, I got back from dispatch on Thursday. As a result, I had Friday off, which was nice. I did my laundry, hung out in Ned, pretty much did nothing.

A few things changed while I was gone. Levi made the decision to leave the program. I won’t go into it because it was his decision. He will be missed. Laura, the team leader for Earth 4, also decided to leave. Again, I won’t go into it. But I thought I should note that some things changed while I was on dispatch. Transition week was apparently a little dramatic. On Saturday, Earth 5 packed up and moved down to the house in Boulder where Earth 4 had been living last round. It was decided that we would swap housing for this round.

On Sunday, I did the grocery shopping, as per usual. We have less money because we’re now a team of nine, so I have to make it stretch a little farther and we had to restock. So this week is going to be less ideal than normal in terms of our food situation. But it’s not terrible. After getting that out of the way, I spent the rest of the day walking around Boulder. I went to Target and did some shopping to restock my red bag. I ran a few other errands of a similar nature, and ended my day at a café called The Laughing Goat. It was really nice and they make some great iced teas.

It was back to work on Monday. PT was a struggle, I was sucking air for the whole run. Oh, elevation. The camp crud that I contracted on the way home from California didn’t help much either (camp crud: a run-of-the-mill cold that you get from living at a fire camp, working long hours and not getting much sleep). I’m back to square one, it would seem. The push-ups, crunches and pull-ups weren’t bad, though, so I don’t have a lot of catching up to do.

All the chipping at campgrounds has been finished. Our new project consists of thinning out certain areas in order to promote aspen growth. Can’t say it’s the most flawless assignment, but it’s a job. So Jordan and I were paired up with LeBlanc for our section. He pretty much just let us go at it. I let Jordan have the saw all day, because it had been about two weeks since he had even touched a saw. He was loving it. So I just swamped. We’re supposed to put all the slash into big piles that will get burned in the winter. I miss swamping this stuff! It’s so much easier than the brush in California. And I get to make piles of it? Awesome! Cake!

Yesterday, Harrison and I were paired up and we just swapped out after each tank of gas. Cutting was a bit frustrating for me, it had been a while and, like I said, they kind of just let us go at it. It was weird to fly solo. I definitely have a lot to work on still. And all of my trees were pains, they all needed to be wedged or pushed over. One sat back on my bar during the back cut. Grr!

For dinner last night, I made meatballs from scratch with spaghetti and then steamed a bunch of asparagus that Paul brought back from Michigan while he was on break. He got about four pounds of asparagus for $7. That’s crazy! It’s a shame their season is over or I would ask his mom to ship us more. Even with the postage, it would still probably be cheaper than buying it here. After work, a few of us went to the café down the street, Amante. It’s a very Italian coffee place, where they even serve Italian beers and wine. They also serve gelato, which was quite good. I know my team was really disappointed to have to leave Ned, but I think we’ll enjoy Boulder thoroughly. On Saturday night, after we moved in, a bunch of us went to a bar that had karaoke and had a good time. I felt like we were in Texas, when we would go to the bowling alley’s bar for their karaoke nights. I still haven’t gone up on stage. Maybe before AmeriCorps is over … then again, maybe not.

We were back to working with Open Space today. We did more trail building, but the work wasn’t so bad this time around. The team split into two groups and we managed to establish a better system of cutting into the trail to get the proper grade and everything. We only went until 3:00 because of the heat. I’m not complaining