Yesterday was the final band concert of the year at Kilbourne where all the bands, from 6th grade to the Wind Ensemble, perform in WK's gym. This is when the senior awards are given. There are two scholarships from the boosters and two awards given by the band directors. The highest award given, the highest honor for a band student, is the John Philip Sousa Award, given for superior dedication and musicianship. As I finished pounding stakes into the ground (sort of) I noticed I had a text message from my mom. I got the Sousa Award yesterday. I'm still kind of in shock.

Pounding stakes into the ground? That project, which I really finished this morning, was part of the larger goal of preparing beds for the transplanting of tomatos. Each tomato plant will be transplanted right in front of one of those stakes and then a metal cage will be put around them, secured by the stakes. This way, the tomatos will grow vertically. I'm expecting/hoping a lot of transplanting to be happening soon. I'm pretty sure that's my favorite task here. I'm pretty sure my least favorite is picking orders.

I've had a really good week. I'm realizing how much I've come to love the people here and how hard it will be to leave them. Even (or especially) Jess, who doesn't even live at Acorn. There have been a few short-term guests here lately, although all of them have left again. I really liked all of them.

There was a party at Woodfolk House on Saturday which was pretty cool. It's a pretty interesting place.

It is kind of odd to me, realizing how much has happened at home while I've been away. I wish I could have been at Extravaganza, and I certainly do miss band. But at the same time, I suspect leaving here will be harder for me than leaving home was.

Yet Another Week

The week started out rainy and bleak and for the first couple of days, I couldn't really get outside. Happily, the sun has begun to shine again in recent days, and now I'm hardly popping into the office.

It seems that I've been spent the majority of my work time in the allium beds this week. Wednesday, a party of us went about weeding them, and afterwards, I was given the task of re-mulching. I spent almost all of Thursday afternoon mulching, paying no heed the the prevelence of thorns in the hay mulch until later when I realized just how much it had scraped up my legs. There's a visible line where my capris ended (at least I was wearing longer ones that day) and another where my socks began. In between is very scratched up. After that, I began getting up early to work when it was still cool enough for me not to hate my life while wearing long pants as I completed the job.

Last night I went to Twin Oaks to play ultimite frisbee and for their visitor party. (Twin Oaks has these month-long visitor periods that are concluded by the visitors throwing a party) I'm really not any good at frisbee, but I actually came out of it feeling like I'd done alright. To be sure, I was utterly exhausted from running so hard for so long, but there was something nice about that too. The visitor party was basically a bonfire with marshmellows and other food. People came along and played guitars and sang. I finally heard Cliff, with whom I often talk music here, play guitar. Twin Oaks also has a barbershop group and they sang. That was pretty sweet.

Once again, I feel like the week passed unnervingly quickly. I kept not believing I was already so far into the week, but now as I look back, it seems like an incredibly long time. A shift has started to happen now that wasn't nearly as gradual at ProMusica. On the one hand, I'm still counting the weeks that I've been here and have the feeling that this is a short time. I guess that's part of how I can look at the four weeks ahead and think, "how can I be almost half finished already?!" But at ProMusica, after the March concerts, I felt a distinct shift in thought from, "this is how long I've been here," to "this is how long I have left."

The beginning of my week mostly went as the last two have been. I definitely have become more familiar with the way things work here and with the people and everything. I'm able to feel somewhat independent most of the time and know where to look for work to do. I feel accepted here too, and I've been asked a few times if I was thinking of ever coming back. To be honest, I'm not entirely excited for coming back home. Going back to work at Zoombezi Bay just doesn't sound like much fun.

On May Day, we had a bonfire. Burning bamboo makes great exploding sounds like gunshots. Jess came over that night. I don't know if I mentioned her before. She lives at Twin Oaks and was working over here my first week here. She's really awesome, and has this tail she wears all the time just because she can. She stayed the night and brought me to Twin Oaks yesterday.

I don't know how much I've written about Twin Oaks before either. It's another community that existed before Acorn, and is about 100 people big (as opposed to Acorn's 15 members). My main impression of Twin Oaks was... big. Besides having that many more people, things are just considerably more spread out. The property here is already significantly less (even though it felt quite big when I got here), but then I basically never go onto most of it. Pretty much any place I go/work regularly could be pointed out from the porch of Heartwood. At Twin Oaks, we did a lot of walking through woods. There's a lot more walking involved in going just about anywhere.

When I was at Twin Oaks, besides getting shown about by Jess, I helped out in the flower garden some and helped Jess move her smoker. A few weeks ago she sort of made a smoker using things from the resource (aka junk) yard and successfully has smoked cheese with it, but people living in the building where it was assembled in their fire pit were getting tired of it, so she needed to move it elsewhere. It was kind of fun hauling it around just because the contraption looks kind of ridiculous if you don't know what it is.

Other than that, I don't feel like there's a whole lot to report. It's been getting cloudy and finally started raining last night--still is. I hope things are good at home. :)

Another Week

(The picture is from Obohemia: http://www.oboe-comics.com/ and it's like the best website ever)

It's amazing, on the one hand I don't feel like I've been here all that long, but at the same time, my last post feels like forever ago. So here goes my week in an attempt of something like chronological order:

I believe it was Monday morning that I began hacking away at bamboo. So Acorn has this bamboo, and I guess someone has decided that it has grown far enough. G Paul asked me to cut some down and beat it back to a certain line, and then I got to strip branches off. This has actually been an on going project through the entire week--there's a lot of bamboo. This was actually kind of entertaining for me just because bamboo is such a cool plant. I mean, it's bamboo!! I suppose as an oboist I'm supposed to like bamboo, as the arundo donax plant oboe reeds come from is closely related.

I also learned to pick orders this week. Now, as well as putting seeds in packets, I can work in the seed room, gathering together what people have ordered and rubber-banding them together. It's not real exciting, but actually takes a certain amount of concentration since the numbers start to look the same after a while. I understand the way the seeds are catalogged though, which is a good thing I suppose.

The other good thing about picking is that the seed room is temperature controlled as nowhere else here is. Yesterday and today the weather has been in the 90s, and it's not supposed to go down until Wednesday. The heat is brutal. The last couple of days working outside only an hour and a half was enough to completely wipe me out for the rest of the day. Today I only needed to work that long to make quota (42 hours a week, and I was almost there already) and I spent it in the office this morning rather than working in the garden. Hopefully not doing any physical work today will make me ready to face tomorrow.

Working outside has included not only the bamboo exploits but more garden work. I've been doing mostly weeding and transplanting lately. I still really enjoy working in the garden, but I think I need to rework my schedule, at least for the next few days to do it mostly in the early morning and after dinner before sundown. The thing that is both nice and difficult about living here is that I make my own schedule and can do pretty much whatever work I want. No one is telling me what I must do, so I simply have to look around to find what needs doing and ask around to see if I can help people. It's nice because I can do things like rearrange the order of my day, but it can be difficult if there aren't obvious things that need doing.

I'm quite happy here, except for the brutal heat, and I hope things are also good at home. I hear the Wind Ensemble got a 1 at state contest, which is awesome! Good job guys, I knew you could do it!!! :)

Good Times

I've now spent about a week at Acorn and I'm having a really great time. I was surprised when I got here how welcomed I felt and how much working in dirt made me happy. I've done a lot of work in the garden, mostly weeding, and have done quite a bit of seed packing in the office. Seed packing basically entails weighing seeds and putting the right amount into packets to be sold. I'm hoping that in days and weeks to come I might be able to do some other things in the office. I also did some paper stapling, but that's about the same level of task. I don't object to packing seeds of course since it does need to get done.

Yesterday was my "get off the property day." First I went to Charlottesville with Thomas and Juniper for the Earth Week eco-fair where Southern Exposure Seed Exchange--Acorn's seed business--had a table. It wasn't actually all that exciting and I had to attempt to be helpful to people when I couldn't actually answer any of their questions. Happily, we were so close to the stage that it was really hard to hear what people were saying so people didn't try too hard and I had an excuse for being confused. I was never at the table by myself either so it was really just a matter of getting people to talk to Thomas or Juniper instead.

I was only back at Acorn long enough to eat dinner and then I went to Twin Oaks, which is another community about 7 miles away. Twin Oaks is much larger than Acorn, 110ish as opposed to 15ish, and they make their money from hammocks and tofu as opposed to seeds, but they do have a lot in common and there's a lot of interaction between the two communities. The original purpose of going was a game of ultimate frisbee, and I discovered to no great surprise that I am still very bad at the game. I had fun anyway though. We then went to the "birthday" party of a Twin Oaker (now 9500 days old) and there was smoked cheese (made with Twin Oaks's new smoker) and popcorn. I enjoyed being there because I knew a couple people who had been working at Acorn when I first arrived and people are just generally really nice at these communities.

In general, things are going great and I am happy. I hope things are still good at home!

The Plan

Well here's the plan, people. If anyone's checking this blog at all anymore, you're aware that I haven't bothered to post anything for quite a while. There's something about posting personal experiences and feelings for the whole internet to read (things I do try to write about in my journals) that makes the blogging thing a little more complicated. Plus, at ProMusica anyway, I was almost more afraid of gossiping too much about the people in the organization or just the state of things because I don't know that they really want that kind of information out there. So from now on, I'm going to try to write once or twice a week completely separate from any journal so that anyone who wants knows I'm alive and what I'm up to, but if I want to keep some thoughts and fears and opinions between me and my journal reader, then then that is where they'll stay.

For this Walkabout, for which I will be leaving in an hour or so, I will be living at Acorn Community, an intentional, egalitarian community, in Mineral Virginia. It seems that I'll be doing household type chores, helping in the garden where most of the food grows, and helping with their seed business. But really, I don't have a great idea of what I'll be doing at all (heck what does any of that mean, right?) and even though that kind of makes me nervous, in real life that's not why I'm doing this Walkabout. The idea was just to find something entirely different to how I'm used to living and working, something out of my comfort zone. I'm uncomfortable with how comfortable I am in my own convictions and opinions of the world and my remedy is a good shaking up. So here's a whole new world of sorts and now I simply have to wait and see who I become.

Everything is Better With Band Class

It is Saint Patrick’s day. Yes. It is awkward to be around adults talking about the plans to go drink (or their premature celebrations due to a dance performance tonight). I got a shamrock shake at McDonald’s. That is how to celebrate Saint Patrick’s day: green food coloring. Lots of it.

Anyway, life at ProMusica was actually pretty normal. No more stinky sewers, anyway. I needed to work on sending out invitations for the Student Gala, and Julia asked me to find websites for the orchestra boosters of the MIS schools. The first school on the list was Thomas Worthington. I don’t think their orchestra has a website. I don’t think Kilbourne’s does either. They must have boosters, right? I know WK’s choir has boosters, and the band clearly has boosters, so there must be someone out the supporting the orchestra, right? The sad thing is, I don’t know. The orchestra doesn’t do all that much. They have their concerts every year and that’s about it. Band has marching band, at the very least, as well as all our fun trips and what have you. Choir also goes on trips, and has done all sorts of interesting things. But I don’t know if the orchestra ever does anything but their requisite concerts for the year, and they may not need boosters for that. I wonder. I was very frustrated though, because I thought if there were any website I’d be able to find it would be Worthington’s. I’ve also gotten used to thinking that you can find anything you want on the internet if you look hard enough. I seem to have been wrong on both counts.

Sending out invitations for the student gala will be amusing for me because basically, I’m doing a mailing. I’ve pretty much made the contact spreadsheet, although Julia needs to look at it and maybe change and add some people. Then she’ll show me how to use that to print a jillion envelopes without doing what I did for Ashley where I printed each individually. I’ve already printed about 200 invitations. That involved losing a fight with the printer. I caused a paper jam and couldn’t figure out where it was. Julia had to help me. Stupid printer. After that, I get to stuff envelopes and put them through the postage machine. It’ll be like all those mailings I helped Joe and Ashley with… only mine. Bwahahahaha!