Sept 2008: Back to the Real World

Well, my sabbatical is over now. I left GFS in March with an eye toward several adventures and now the summer is over and I’ll be back in school.

To be honest, even though I had some really great experiences, I’ll be glad to be back to the regular schedule. People kept telling me how lucky I was to be able to sleep late and do whatever I wanted. It didn’t always work out that way. One day I didn’t get anything done on my list of things to do until about 2:00 in the afternoon and I felt really horrible about it.

The good side was the ability to travel; to New Orleans in April, to Scotland in May-June, and to New Mexico in August.

The trip to New Mexico was my biggest adventure. As a Boy Scout leader I have always wanted to go to the scout’s most impressive summer camp, called Philmont Scout Ranch. Philmont is a HUGE area in the  mountains of New Mexico that’s set aside for teams (called crews) of scouts to do 10-day backpacking trips.

Now you may have been to summer camp where you did fun stuff all day and then went home. You may even have been to sleep-away camp where you lived in a cabin or bunk house. If you are a Cub Scout, Boy Scout or Girl Scout you might have even been to a camp where you lived in a tent. But unless your family likes hiking deep into the back country of America you might not have had to carry your tent, your changes of clothes, a gallon and a half of water, food for 3 days, tent, rain gear, sleeping bag, flashlight, toilet paper, sunscreen and bug spray in a large backpack.

That’s what you do at Philmont.  Plus you hike up and down mountains about 6 – 10 miles a day.

Ten miles is the distance between GFS and my house in Drexel Hill!  Ten miles is like walking from Chestnut Hill to the Plymouth Meeting Mall and then back to Chestnut Hill.

10 miles round trip from CH to the Mall

Most of our backpacks, fully loaded, weighed 30 to 40 pounds. That’s like walking to the mall with somebody’s little sister on your back.

Ok, now put the mall at the top of a mountain.  THAT’s what Philmont is like.

This is called the Tooth of Time

So why in the world did I want to do this? Because I’d heard it was AWESOME, hard to do, and reserved for people who had really trained for it. (I’m nutty like that).

So all year, since the fall of 2007 I was practicing with my team. The crew was 6 teenage boys, 3 teenage girls, and three other adults. We hiked in the Wissahickon first (about 4 miles), just to get used to carrying heavy packs. Then we took two hikes in the Pennsylvania mountains along a trail called the Appalachian Trail (about 30 miles in a long weekend). This helped us in several ways.

1) We learned about hiking, finding and purifying water, and working together without getting on each others’ nerves (mostly)

2) We learned about what heavy equipment we could get rid of or trade for lighter stuff. My first sleeping bag was 6 pounds. I got a better one that was 1 1/2 pounds.

heavy backpack

3) We practiced doing without normal stuff you have at home (like flush toilets, hot water, a fridge, and television).

yep, a two-seater potty

4) We built up our muscles for climbing rocky hills.

We flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico for two days of getting used to being over a mile above sea level. The air has less oxygen  in it and your first two days you are likely to get sleepy, have trouble breathing when you work hard, and get nasty headaches. This mostly goes away in 2 days.

We did fun stuff like hiking, taking a tram car up to the top of a cool mountain, and kayaking on the Rio Grande River. (Except I fell out and almost drowned, but everybody else had fun.)

river rafting

Then we went to Philmont, sorted out our gear, met our Ranger who trained us in what to do in case of bears, or lightning, or getting lost.

Then we hit the trail. After two days the Ranger left us and we were on our own. It was harder for me than for the kids but they were very encouraging.

Almost every day we hiked to a different camp in the mountains and each camp had a special activity. We climbed huge poles, we explored a mine, we rode horses, we did a forest fire-protection project, we milked a cow, we shot old fashion rifles, we threw tomahawks.

climbing a spar pole

getting ready to ride

clearing underbrush

I really thought I couldn’t keep going, then one day there we were on top of a tall mountain!  We did it!

At the top of Mt. Phillips

Sunrise on top of the Tooth of Time

After 10 days we hiked back into the base camp and received our special arrowhead-shaped patch.

Our crew with Arrowhead patches

Almost all of the kids want to go back someday.  I don’t know about me. But I’m glad I did it.

So, now it’s back to regular work, setting up computers and so on. Happy New Year, everybody!

Daylight and Bedtime

How would your daily routine be different if the sun didn’t go down until 10:30 at night?

Actually, it would probably be the same as it is now, but you’d be going to bed while the sun was still pretty far up in the sky. Your bedroom would need darker curtains. Along with being light until late, the sun also rises in Edinburgh at around 4 AM. Naturally this changes gradually during the year and by the summer solstice (later this month) there area about 17 1/2 hours of sunshine.

In nature most things balance out over a period of time. So, what do you think happens in Winter?

4:30 AM

10:30 PM

Rugby and Rounders

When you’re in Scotland and you say “football” they expect you’re talking about “soccer”. If you see a kid tossing around a ball that looks like a chubby American football but without pointy ends it’s really a rugby ball.

Rugby is one of the national sports of any country that used to be owned or influenced by England. One way to tell that the Revolutionary War was a real rejection of all things British is that we totally invented our own set of national games.

Instead of baseball, Scottish (and other British) kids play “rounders” which is kind of similar but with a really short bat.

(Don’t confuse it with “cricket” which is played with a flat bat and is really different.)

I visited a Boy Scout troop one Friday night when they were having game night. One of the most popular choices was rounders, another was rugby.

They also played a “sumo wrestling” game, a candle-putting-out game, a crazy rope swing event and practiced gymnastics. It was wild and crazy.

Sunday I went to a “Sevens” Rugby tournament in the rain (because it rains a lot in Scotland almost nothing is ever canceled due to rain). A Sevens tournament is a modified rugby game with seven players on each team played in two seven minute halves. They start in the morning and play each other in rotation until the finals. Scotland got eliminated in the second-to-last round against South Africa. England lost to New Zealand in the finals. This year New Zealand was the championship team.

So what is rugby?

Rugby is a game for the truly tough. No time-outs. No helmets. No pads. No quarterback. No separate teams for offense and defense. Teammates have to pass the ball behind them (never forwards) to avoid being tackled. The tackled player has to shove the ball to another teammate to keep the game going. Being down, or having the ball hit the ground does not stop the play. It’s rough and tumble all the way, with people crashing to the ground and climbing all over each other to get the ball. There are leagues for kids, leagues for women, leagues for professionals. Regular rugby has 15 players on a side and takes much longer.

Players can kick the ball forward, I even saw some players kick forward and catch their own kick to keep moving up. Players can intentionally kick the ball out of bounds.

Crossing the goal line with the ball and touching it to the end zone gives your team 5 points. If you’re slick you can boot the ball into the end zone and chase and fall on it.

Then, for 2 more points, a team member has to kick the ball through the uprights from a spot straight out in the field from the point of the downed ball. So if a player leaps across the end zone near a sideline the kicker has to kick from about 20 meters out but along that sideline. Players try to down the ball in the center of the end zone to give the kicker his best chance. He has to drop-kick the ball, there is no place kicker, no holder.

The coolest move is when your team in-bounds the ball after some kind of penalty or out of bounds kick (not sure about this) and the players lift one guy in the air so he can catch the ball over the heads of the opponents. He then tosses it down to one of his guys.

Rugby is known for a huddle-like formation called a “scrum” where the players of both teams link arms and can only use their legs to squirt the ball out to one of their own guys.

Here’s how the Scouts played rugby.

Here’s how Scotland Sevens played rugby.

Well, now that I’m inside and dry, it’s haggis for dinner.

Go Scotland!

Ann

Questions:
1. Where was Rugby invented?
2. What were the teams in the Emirates Airlines Sevens Tournament held May 31 and June 1?
3. Where is Emirates Airlines headquarters?
4. Which came first, Rounders or Baseball?
5. What’s the weather forecast for Edinburgh, Scotland?

Current: Unlearning First Aid

You know about First Aid. You know that the nurse has bandages, ice, bee sting kits, and a bed where you can lay down when you feel sick. You know about ambulances: those wonderful rolling hospitals where the medics can bandage a broken arm, do CPR, save a life with electric shocks to restart a heart, or talk to a doctor on the phone and give medications right on the spot.

But what if your cell phone isn’t working and you’re deep in a state forest? What if there is no road wide enough for an ambulance to drive on? What if the nearest hospital (even if your cell phone was working) is more than an hour away? This is what I learned about Wilderness First Aid.

I had two surprises during my 2-day course. One: I’m a very sleepy student. I have to get up and walk around in order to pay attention after lunch. Two: I had to “un-learn” some of the stuff I learned about normal First Aid. On TV when they rescue somebody it’s all about speed. In the wilderness it’s all about getting complete information.

You don’t run for help, you don’t even call for help until you have done ALL of these steps: Check A for Airway, B for Breathing, C for Circulation, D for Disability, and E for Environment. Get them breathing, stop any blood, pull broken bones back straight, wrap them up in 2 or 3 sleeping bags Count victims, count helpers, check to see if there’s anything dangerous around (like bears).

Take the victim’s pulse, count breaths, check head-neck-spine, check ribs-chest-belly, check arms & legs. see if they can talk and remember who what when where, ask them what medicines they take, ask about allergies, ask when they last had food. After that you write a long list of everything and pick a messenger. We practiced this outdoors and found it took about 45 minutes to find out everything.

Not like TV. (On TV the victim would be rescued by a magic helicopter, swooped to a hospital, get an operation and be at a birthday party by the last commercial.

Practicing outside was a riot; the instructor chose certain people to act like victims and the rest of us had to figure out what to do. We were so sloppy at first. Then we got better. We learned to make rescue stuff out of camping gear. But then our instructor had the victim-actors try not to cooperate.

In our final test I got to play the screamer. I was “stuck” under a fallen tree and yelling that I was gonna die!!!!! and they had to take my pulse while I was hollering and they were supposed to tie my head down so I wouldn’t crack my spine (but they forgot–I freaked them out) and they were afraid to drag me out from under the tree because it “hurt SOOO BAD!!”.

It would have been a fun exercise but right when they started working on me (and the guy who was pretending to be unconscious and the other guy who was pretending to be crazy from a clonk on the head) it started to rain. Yep, real-life rain. Real-life 30 minutes of rain. For a second we hoped the instructor would let us go inside and finish the drill. Nope. He just stood there and said “So?”

So. So… So they got busy digging in their packs and getting rain jackets and stuff to cover us with. I got soaked laying there under a fallen tree hollering about my leg. We learned (and un-learned and re-learned) so much, though. It was an excellent weekend.

Now I have a cool patch!

Recent Flashback: Imagine Water This High

Posted on 4/11 but I thought about this a few days earlier

On Wednesday we happened to meet a neighbor of the house we’re working on. I think he is a retired school teacher. He talked about the water being something like 8 feet high during the flood. Other people we talked to said anywhere from 5 to 7 feet high.

So try to imagine 5 feet high, or even better, imagine as high as you can reach on tip toes (it may be more or less than 5 feet).

Now, go outside and stand next to your car. If the water is as high as you can reach would it drown your car? (Cars don’t work at all if the engine and battery get flooded.)

Now walk around the first floor where you live with your hand in the air. Make a note in your head of what would get ruined. In my house that would be the refrigerator, stove, and dishwasher; the TV, cable box, DVD player, Wii; all of the couches, chairs and tables; this week’s mail, a lot of books and magazines, the carpets and wallpaper.

In New Orleans nobody has a basement (they don’t even bury dead people under ground) because the soil is swampy but if you have anything in the basement (washer, dryer, furnace, water heater) they would be ruined too. Do you have a garage? Forget all that stuff. A lot of houses have only a first floor and some were flooded to the roof!

Look at the flood line on this nice house!

Now imagine your house half under water for TWO WEEKS!

Do you know what happens to food in your fridge after a few days being warm? Yuck! Nobody wanted to come back and deal with the nasty sludge that formed after it was dry again, but many of them did and we were able to meet some of those people.

They are amazing and their stories would make your hair stand up (without hair gel)!

Questions:

1. How would you get out if the flood was up to your upstairs window and the water was dirty?
2. What member of your family lives on the highest hill and would be safe from a huge flood?
3. What would you wear to clean up yucky stuff?
4. If you rebuilt your house how would you flood-proof it for next time?

Current: Hard Work Makes Lunch Seem Better

from today: 4/7

Today was our team’s first day working on a house in New Orleans.

There are 11 of us on the team, but 3 stay back at the home base to shop, cook, and run errands if we need them. The 8 workers have different levels of skill and experience in house building. Terri, our project leader, is a construction supervisor so she knows all of the steps in putting a house back together. She can tell people about pipes, electricity, woodwork, floors, walls, windows, painting, and all that stuff. Lucky for us we are only working on walls. We don’t have to put in sinks or electrical outlets!

I am what we call “trainable”. I never learned much about house building, but I can do jobs that don’t require high level decisions. Today I scraped lumps of hard, white stuff that looks a little like clay but is used to cover the screw holes and seams where the drywall is attached.

Drywall is this amazing stuff that comes in large (heavy) sheets and it’s what most modern inside walls are made of. The outer layer of drywall is a kind of gray cardboard. The inner layer is a hard, white substance that holds its shape and helps a wall be solid and keep cold air out. With a sharp blade you can cut holes in the drywall to fit around electrical outlets. You screw this carefully measured wall board to the wooden inside frame of the house. Some people specialize in this and they are good at it. When they finish there are all kinds of tiny gaps where two sheets of drywall meet, and little dents where the screws are screwed in.

Another team can come in and smear drywall cement, or joint compound over the gaps but it’s not perfect. After it dries the next job is to scrape off the lumps then take sandpaper and sand everything as smooth as possible.

If you don’t get this layer smooth there will be a bump or hole when you paint and everybody will notice it. Look around your house at the walls. Can you see where sheets of drywall were put together? Can you see any bumps under the paint. Don’t shove furniture or toys too hard at a drywall wall or it will leave a permanent scrape or hole.

All of this work was done before we got here by other volunteer teams. We walked in today with our assignments to pick up where they left off. (They even left us nice notes.)

Sanding is really hard if you have to reach up all day and do the ceiling. You have to be careful to move your ladder every few feet instead of leaning way over to reach. Also you need to wear a construction dust mask so you don’t breathe in the dust and start coughing. When I was finished I was covered in white dust except where my mask was. After lunch I painted the trim around the doors.

When you work hard all day (especially doing “physical labor”) lunch tastes extra-special delicious. Also the shower when we got back to the home base was outstanding.

1. Can you find 7221 Read Street on Google Earth? That’s our house for now.
2. Have you ever worked so hard that food seemed to taste better? Tell about it.
3. What would be a good house building job for a person with asthma? What would be a bad one?
4. See if you can find out from your family whether your house has drywall.
   

Recent Flashback: Gradual Travel

posted 4/6  about a trip from 4/2 to 4/4.

In most of my travels I fly. I get on a plane in Philly and several hours later emerge somewhere quite different. This time we drove to New Orleans, 1,300 miles in under 2 days. It allowed me to see the gradual changes in season as we moved diagonally south and west. In PA the trees were just showing the first fuzziness of budding. In VA there were hints, then confirmation of some kind of lavender flowering tree. ( I think it’s a flowering redbush tree.)

The color got stronger as we headed through TN. AL and MS had some major reforestation going on, just behind the highway border trees were hillsides of juvenile pines. As we progressed the lavender trees gave way to white dogwoods, and green leafy understory beneath the pines.

The understory got taller and thicker as we drove, then thinned out suddenly at the Gulf Coast. By the time we entered LA there were far fewer trees

Another change is the terrain. PA has tall rolling hills and minor mountains. VA has oddly slanted flat slate rocks as if the walls of the world are tilted. TN is back to rolling hills and foggy valleys, AL and MS seemed a little flatter and as we got toward the Gulf Coast the land flattened out dramatically. As we crossed the LA border everything opened out into wide low vistas. We saw that famous red clay soil at a construction site.

Despite rain most of the way (we left Thurs evening and ran along a front almost all the way) the temperature gradually got warmer. At our pit stop just over the LA line we entered our first establishment running air conditioning. The car dashboard reported the outside temps ranging from 48 degrees in our home state to 70 at our destination.

For the first time in a long time I have some concept of the distance from my home, and why the world seems slightly different in feel, smell, time zone, flora and fauna.

The all-night mockingbird outside my window may be a harbinger of a spring that hasn’t yet burst forth in Philly.

Current: Living in a Church

Living in a Church
written and posted 4/6/08
My church Katrina Relief and Rebuilding team is spending a week in New Orleans to work on the huge project of rebuilding homes damaged by America’s worst natural disaster. The flood that was caused by broken levees (which are huge walls to keep water from splashing into a neighborhood) after the hurricane in 2005 destroyed whole sections of town.

It’s totally amazing that any place in America that got destroyed has not been rebuilt after almost 3 years. Since everybody says we’re the richest and most powerful nation on earth it seems weird and sad that all of the rebuilding work is being done by ordinary visitors from out of town.

There are 11 of us here from First United Methodist Church of Germantown. It’s not far from GFS. Our church nickname is our initials: FUMCOG. Funny name, nice people. This is the third time a FUMCOG team has come to work in New Orleans. This time we are all adults but one of the teams had teenagers in it.

New Orleans has many nicknames but most people use the abbreviation NOLA for New Orleans, LouisianA.

So FUMCOG has returned to NOLA.

We have a buddy Methodist church that turned all of its church school rooms into sleeping rooms. When full, Kenner First United Methodist Church can hold about 100 workers sleeping sometimes 20 to a room. We are coming during the in-between season so we eleven are the only folks here. Everybody got to pick a room. The two married couples each took a room, two women best friends share one, two other women (our team leaders) took one, I got one by myself so far, and one man got a single room. I say “so far” because another woman will arrive a day later than the rest of us and she might want to share my room.

The church is right near the airport in a town called Kenner. It’s about 7 miles from where all the rebuilding work is happening. Airplanes are flying loudly overhead every couple of minutes.

The kitchen is really nice, lots of refrigerators! We have a giant ice machine, stove, double sink, microwave and all the goodies we can buy or bring. The common room has long tables and a bunch of couches at one end. That’s where we’ll hang out.

No air conditioning…that’s too bad ‘cause it’s going to be hot this week.

The church build two shower houses outside the back door. Nobody is too keen on going outside to a little building to take a shower but that’s the choice. Since our group is only allowed to have one key for all of us it will be easy to get locked out. I hope I don’t get locked out while in the shower!

Questions for kids:

1. Can you locate FUMCOG? It’s in the same zip code as GFS.
2. Can you find photos of damaged houses from Hurricane Katrina in NOLA?
3. How many rooms are we sleeping in so far?
4. Can you locate Kenner, LA near the airport?
5. After whom is the airport named? Why is that person famous? Why do you think NOLA named its airport after this person?
6. One man came in on the train from Philly. What is the next stop after NOLA on the AMTRAK train? (Trick question…two ways to answer)
7. Thought Question: Why do I say it’s weird and sad about the rebuilding effort? What do you think?

Flashblack: My Outdoor Weekend

My Outdoor Weekend March 28-30 posted April 6

I joined a group called Women in the Outdoors and the last weekend in March I drove most of the way across PA to one of their weekend events.

First of all PA is a very long state and it takes about 4 ½ hours of driving to get to Somerset. Driving by myself is not nearly as much fun as having somebody to talk to and I got sleepy and needed a quick car nap, so I took it. Luckily it was still daylight when I got there or I would have never been able to follow the driving directions.

Pennsylvania is mostly rural (country) not urban (city). Once you get out of the greater Philly area the lives of the people are somewhat different from what we consider “regular”. For instance nobody in Somerset goes to Wawa to get a hoagie. There is no Wawa.

This was a weekend for women only, to take classes in things that are often seen as “guy stuff”. There were classes in shotgun shooting, archery, geocaching , trapping fur-bearing animals such as beavers and bears, attracting wildlife (either so you can photograph them or hunt them), outdoor survival, hitching and driving a trailer on your car, and using power tools. There were also classes that were gender-neutral or even “lady stuff” like painting, crafts, identifying song birds, tying knots, and outdoor cooking.

Most of these women seemed to come from a hunting background. A lot wore special forest camouflage that really looked like it would make them invisible on a deer hunt in the woods.

I felt weird there, I was a city girl, and I was one of only two Black women there. I was really crossing a boundary to be there and at first I was a little scared.
Everything was great! I met some terrific ladies. Did great at archery and shotgunning, built a bluebird bird house, added to what I already knew about outdoor survival and got a taste of geocaching.

The food was great, the instructors (who were the only men allowed to attend) were really excellent, and I came in third place in the Turkey Calling Contest. Not bad for a city girl. I had to leave early to get back to Philly by 5 on Sunday so I missed the live bear (but I saw the bear trap that the game wardens brought the bear in.

I might go again next year.

Current VS Flashback Blogging

At this point I don’t know when I’ll get internet access. The local access is working for the moment. When I write/post something that I wrote immediately after the event I’ll mark it as Current. If I’m remembering a past event I’ll mark it as flashback.