exploring winston salem

So I’m doing another Americorps gig! Whoo!

I don’t think it’d necessarily appropriate to give a tonnnn of details, but the short story is that I’ll be working with little (as in, pre-school) childrens who like all children deserve to arrive at school ready to learn and able to express themselves but won’t necessarily be fully equipped to do so because of challenging home situations.

I recently traveled to Winston Salem, NC to train with my new AmeriCrew. I have very few photos of the training itself, but they make me laugh.

The first is of a duck attacking my fellow corps member Leslie.

 

Ha! Our (awesome) supervisor designated one of our training days as an outdoor day, so we did some team building type stuff in a park. We were in a picnic pavilion, where local ducks are clearly used to getting people’s tidbits. They were AGGRESSIVE.

Another awesome thing about this new Americorps program (and there are many) is that unlike my old program, we trained in a beautiful building (not an ugly, old, smelly, crammed-with-random-crap one) and were served delicious breakfasts and lunch each day (unlike the old one, which never fed us unless you count the food bank leftovers we frantically gorged at the end of our stressful days). Our last day, we got (admittedly less than healthy but quite delicious) biscuit sandwiches from a local barbecue place. Enjoyed with delicious fruit.

 

Because our organization was hosting a fundraiser, we spent the morning camped out on the front lawn. It was lots of fun!

And that’s all I have to say about my new gig for now. However, I did want to share about Winston Salem, which is a surprisingly fun city!

I stayed at a hotel and also got a per diem. It was great for like two days (there was also a free gym, which I visited every day after lots of sitting-down-y training) and then it was like “Ugh get me some vegetables.”

One night we went to an establishment with some saucy mermaids and fishing netting on the wall.

 

‘Cept it was Tuesday and our really really really hands-off waiter didn’t tell us it was TACO TUESDAY so we spent too much money for normal food where we could’ve spent very little money for awesome tacos! Tragic.

My favorite day in Winston Salem was our second to last day, where they let us out of training early and we got to visit Reynolda House. No pictures were allowed inside of the awesome-robber-baron-house-turned-museum, but I went a little nuts in the gorrrrrrrrrgeous gardens.

 

This is columbine. It smells like heaven and butterflies love it!

The food department.

Tomatoes and figs!

The rose garden! Usually I’m not that into roses but these were gorgey porgey.

Natives!

Steve calls these “Jurassic Park Plants” :)

 

So. Many. Grapes. It smelled like heaven, standing under the vines and inhaling.

Watermelon patch! Fun fact: my cousins inadvertently created a watermelon patch in their backyard by sitting on the back porch eating watermelon and spitting out the seeds.

Went to the Biltmore estate in Asheville and they had these same funky golden leaves on display. Must’ve been a trend of the times.

Can you imagine having this in your yard?!

   

Fun fact: the Reynolda family made their own lake (…) by damming up a natural spring. Surprise surprise, nature was all “That’s cute that you think you can just manipulate me like that” and it has now almost entirely returned to its natural state and provided a beautiful environment for birdies.

 

Also, Mario mushrooms. Never saw red mushrooms before the move to North Carolina.

Th’other side of the dam.

 

For dinner, we went into the little “village” near the house and dined al fresco.

 

Wish I’d been there with more of a crowd- it would’ve been fun to go sharesies on some of those sandwiches and small plates.

Limemade! Made to order! I got mine suuuuuuuper tart, mm.

For dinner, I opted for a cup of the lobster bisque…

… and some Holy Salty bruschetta type stuff with red peppers, onions, feta, etc… good but a little overwhelming on the sodium front.

ends and beginnings

A celebration in style:

We begin with an ending- Steve is officially done with Americorps!

FYI, I spent my first year post-college providing afterschool enrichment at a program in south Arlington, a DC suburb chock-full of at-risk kiddos who need a good, safe, educational-type place to go afterschool. They also enjoyed having wholesome young do-gooder Americorps members upon which to heap ridicule at that program :) That’s where I met Steve, and we oh-so-subtly had our workplace romance (everyone knew). I felt burnt out at the end of one year, and left for the food bank, but Steve had another year in him. That was nice for me cause I could keep my connection to the program, and also got to meet Steve’s very cool new coworkers.

SO we had a big fat picnic. In the shadow of the Washington Monument! (The Lapiz, as our kids and parents called it).

Friends!

 

(Friends and their significant others. Including people with SPOUSES. HALF OF THE PEOPLE AT THIS PICNIC WERE MARRIED AGGGH WHY I AM SO OLD).

Being national parks, of course, the hallowed grounds of the monuments do not permit drinking.

Cough.

No one would ever suspect this innocent-looking cup contains alcohol.

What I really housed were these:

  

(Just in that corner is the nacho cheese. Mmm).

So Kyle. Kyle! Agh! Our friend Kyle came, who did the first Americorps year with me (we actually led the same team of kids, which naturally inspired tons of rumors about his love for me, and then later in the year his entirely fictional girlfriend they called Savannah. Hah man kids are so funny). Kyle is going to INDONESIA! His (actual) girlfriend got a Fulbright (!) and then he wanted to be with her (aw) and found himself a job, in the same town in Indonesia (hey hey!) and off he was going.

Crazy. Crazy. My friends are having such adventures! I think/hope I am due.

Anyway, Kyle brought an excellent salad that involved blueberries and walnuts and mint from his garden.

 

It was great.

Meanwhile, I made some stuff at home, because I was sick.. for days… Never took a whole sick day, and had so much comp time I didn’t even have to take official leave, but did a lot of leaving early. And I skipped the company picnic, which was pretty sweet.

So I had time to do some cookin’. We had some uh-mazing farmer’s market grape tomaotes, along with some oldish grapes. So I slow roasted them in the oven with olive oil and salt and pepper. Mm.

   

I tossed those with various leftover rice things and herbs and… whatever. Kind of a rice salad. Or pilaf.

The main highlight was the cake! I love staying home from work and making cake. It’s wonderful.

Decorating was fun (that’s the- ridiculous, in my and many others’ opinion- Americorps motto!)

 

We spent the evening talking (a lot) eating (a lot) playing some sweet Frisbee, reminiscing… it was a good one! I forget how nice it is to really mark the end of something in a meaningful way. And night picnics are the best :)

  

John, Steve coworker MacNair’s husband, along with being really nice is a ridonkulously good photographer, and Chris, Steve’s coworker Erika’s incredibly annoying and rude husband has a really good camera. So we were playing with it, and various tricks you can do on the iPhone to make streamers of light in the background. I was in charge of the flash… that’s about all my camera is good for!

 

So that’s the end of something.

The here and now… is wiping me out.

This is the typical state of my desk.

 

I made it look like this. I was pleased.

For ten minutes or so. Anyway, long enough to drink that cup of tea.

And these kiddos come when their mom, who runs a food pantry, comes to the food bank, and make beautiful decorations for my office (along with that picture on the left, made by a high-schooler who’s one of our most devoted volunteers).

But… it’s wiping me out. We’ll see.

Now for a beginning.

For a wee little while, I’ll have the best health care in the history of health care.

No deductible! No co pay!

(You should register too!)