(no subject)
A long, interesting week.
ESAR showed me a lot of my outdoor prep holes and incensed me to do better next time. I came out of it first wet, broken, and exhausted, then furious, and now finally intrigued. So for Course I I'm going in with a tactical vest, waterproof goatskin work gloves, a heated camelbak, a laser pointer, measuring tape, more waterproof pants, and a leveler. So we'll see. I think the toughest thing for me will be that most of the people I really hit it off with were guys (everyone pretend to be surprised now) and since Camp Brinkley is BoyScoutLandia, we're supposed to pair up with our own age group and gender. Sigh. It was nice connecting with T over the whole thing, and it'll be great to see him when he comes back up. A lot of my people are coming up for a visit in the next couple of weeks. This is good.
I've had Dunn's Between Angels relentlessly stuck in my head for the past while... I'm not sure when it started bouncing around (Monday? Sometime right after I got back...). I didn't look the whole thing up until today, but this is the part that's been stuck:
Between angels, on this earth
absurdly between angels, I
try to navigate
in the bluesy middle ground
of desire and withdrawal,
in the industrial air,
among the bittersweet
efforts of people to connect,
make sense, endure. ...
I seem to have landed at least one tutoring job, which makes me happy. My first client is an ACT student, which isn't particularly exciting, though the second company I've interviewed for had me demonstrate some basic geometry problems, which were a lot of fun. I checked a few books out of the library to review a whole bunch of things, from geometry to chemistry. I've also picked up an audio teach-yourself-Spanish kit - can't hurt, right? There've been increasing reasons recently to learn it, between the possibility of going down to Argentina for tango next year and the Guatemala project. But we'll see. I never took the time out while actually in school to go too far in depth into all these areas, so I'm glad to be getting the opportunity. Plus it gives me more food for thought for the self-education environment. I'm theoretically supposed to hear back from these second company in the next day or so (though who knows with Thanksgiving), and am interviewing with a third tutoring company on Tues.
I met with the lady heading up the Guatemala project last Monday, and continue to be really excited about it. The website that I saw originally (cliniclink.org) turns out to be just her initial blog, and not an indication of things to come. It sounds like her idea basically incorporates my old idea for backpacker microvolunteering abroad/courier surfing, though she had not prior to talking to me given much thought about tapping into the backpacker community, nor had she heard about couchsurfing. Everyone working on that project seems pretty competent - except for the fact that they picked Rails as a platform and it doesn't seem like too many people involved actually /know/ Rails. So I'm not entirely sure what that means. It's been a hard system to learn for me, but that's because I've mainly been using internet tutorials, and since there are a lot of changes between versions, it's hard to find all the information you want. With luck, there's an O'Reilly book or something of similar quality out there for the current version, in which case we're in fine shape. My only book reference so far has been Agile Web Development with Rails, which I really don't like. Too many specific paths, too few conceptual building blocks.
Habitat went pretty well. I haven't been sleeping (still have the Plague, so have been dry coughing myself awake almost every night) so got to the site zonked, and instead of setting in fence posts with Bryan and Tori I ended up doing a bunch of sanding and putty work with a guy I met at orientation. He's pretty cool - wants to be a statistician for the Mariners. Watching sports is no so much my thing, but sports math seems pretty fascinating.
I didn't get the churchy feel from the HfH folks at all, which was something I'd been curious about. There do seem to be a lot of politics involved with what tools they let volunteers use and how they let volunteers work, though. It seems like the correct and efficient way to go about it is to stick with one project for a while, get some sense of what tools you'd need, and then bring down your own. Not that I godforbid own anything (hey look ma, rabid minimalist!) but I'm willing to bet my grandpa's workshop is still fully equipped, and organizing that is a project that I've been wanting to tackle for ages. Anyway, the lack of proper tools was a little ridiculous. They wanted us to scrape texture off wood stair boards, but all they had were chisels. I suggested to the guy that hey, maybe it would make more sense to use hand sanders, and eventually they brought down a wallpaper scraper... but it's little things like that. In one area, they were missing a pump, and while I understand that having some crazy elaborate mechanical device might somehow in theory maybe cause an accident (I'm not even sure how, but sure), why not use a simple hand pump? I'm sure you could rig up a bike pump pretty quickly. And later in the day, we were doing some wood putty work which seemed like it would go a lot more quickly with a putty scraper. Just little things like that. I just don't believe that they're that underequipped or underfunded, based both on an offhand comment that someone dropped, but also on the scrap material that they're not reusing... and I also don't believe that it would slow them down AT ALL to have a designated materials coordinator person for the site, a la ARC. So that intrigues me. I haven't signed up for more builds yet - Thanksgiving weekend will be really busy, and then my uncle is coming into town from Russia on Monday for a week. But it'll happen. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and probably stand to learn a ton from them.
ESAR showed me a lot of my outdoor prep holes and incensed me to do better next time. I came out of it first wet, broken, and exhausted, then furious, and now finally intrigued. So for Course I I'm going in with a tactical vest, waterproof goatskin work gloves, a heated camelbak, a laser pointer, measuring tape, more waterproof pants, and a leveler. So we'll see. I think the toughest thing for me will be that most of the people I really hit it off with were guys (everyone pretend to be surprised now) and since Camp Brinkley is BoyScoutLandia, we're supposed to pair up with our own age group and gender. Sigh. It was nice connecting with T over the whole thing, and it'll be great to see him when he comes back up. A lot of my people are coming up for a visit in the next couple of weeks. This is good.
I've had Dunn's Between Angels relentlessly stuck in my head for the past while... I'm not sure when it started bouncing around (Monday? Sometime right after I got back...). I didn't look the whole thing up until today, but this is the part that's been stuck:
Between angels, on this earth
absurdly between angels, I
try to navigate
in the bluesy middle ground
of desire and withdrawal,
in the industrial air,
among the bittersweet
efforts of people to connect,
make sense, endure. ...
I seem to have landed at least one tutoring job, which makes me happy. My first client is an ACT student, which isn't particularly exciting, though the second company I've interviewed for had me demonstrate some basic geometry problems, which were a lot of fun. I checked a few books out of the library to review a whole bunch of things, from geometry to chemistry. I've also picked up an audio teach-yourself-Spanish kit - can't hurt, right? There've been increasing reasons recently to learn it, between the possibility of going down to Argentina for tango next year and the Guatemala project. But we'll see. I never took the time out while actually in school to go too far in depth into all these areas, so I'm glad to be getting the opportunity. Plus it gives me more food for thought for the self-education environment. I'm theoretically supposed to hear back from these second company in the next day or so (though who knows with Thanksgiving), and am interviewing with a third tutoring company on Tues.
I met with the lady heading up the Guatemala project last Monday, and continue to be really excited about it. The website that I saw originally (cliniclink.org) turns out to be just her initial blog, and not an indication of things to come. It sounds like her idea basically incorporates my old idea for backpacker microvolunteering abroad/courier surfing, though she had not prior to talking to me given much thought about tapping into the backpacker community, nor had she heard about couchsurfing. Everyone working on that project seems pretty competent - except for the fact that they picked Rails as a platform and it doesn't seem like too many people involved actually /know/ Rails. So I'm not entirely sure what that means. It's been a hard system to learn for me, but that's because I've mainly been using internet tutorials, and since there are a lot of changes between versions, it's hard to find all the information you want. With luck, there's an O'Reilly book or something of similar quality out there for the current version, in which case we're in fine shape. My only book reference so far has been Agile Web Development with Rails, which I really don't like. Too many specific paths, too few conceptual building blocks.
Habitat went pretty well. I haven't been sleeping (still have the Plague, so have been dry coughing myself awake almost every night) so got to the site zonked, and instead of setting in fence posts with Bryan and Tori I ended up doing a bunch of sanding and putty work with a guy I met at orientation. He's pretty cool - wants to be a statistician for the Mariners. Watching sports is no so much my thing, but sports math seems pretty fascinating.
I didn't get the churchy feel from the HfH folks at all, which was something I'd been curious about. There do seem to be a lot of politics involved with what tools they let volunteers use and how they let volunteers work, though. It seems like the correct and efficient way to go about it is to stick with one project for a while, get some sense of what tools you'd need, and then bring down your own. Not that I godforbid own anything (hey look ma, rabid minimalist!) but I'm willing to bet my grandpa's workshop is still fully equipped, and organizing that is a project that I've been wanting to tackle for ages. Anyway, the lack of proper tools was a little ridiculous. They wanted us to scrape texture off wood stair boards, but all they had were chisels. I suggested to the guy that hey, maybe it would make more sense to use hand sanders, and eventually they brought down a wallpaper scraper... but it's little things like that. In one area, they were missing a pump, and while I understand that having some crazy elaborate mechanical device might somehow in theory maybe cause an accident (I'm not even sure how, but sure), why not use a simple hand pump? I'm sure you could rig up a bike pump pretty quickly. And later in the day, we were doing some wood putty work which seemed like it would go a lot more quickly with a putty scraper. Just little things like that. I just don't believe that they're that underequipped or underfunded, based both on an offhand comment that someone dropped, but also on the scrap material that they're not reusing... and I also don't believe that it would slow them down AT ALL to have a designated materials coordinator person for the site, a la ARC. So that intrigues me. I haven't signed up for more builds yet - Thanksgiving weekend will be really busy, and then my uncle is coming into town from Russia on Monday for a week. But it'll happen. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and probably stand to learn a ton from them.