Did you know?

In order to mark their territory, spider monkeys pee on their hands and then stick their little stinky handprints everywhere to tell other spider monkeys where their turf is.

I can share this little interesting factoid with you because yesterday's comminuty service project took me and my team to the Folsom Zoo and Sanctuary where we spent the day helping out the staff with building shelters, moving big rocks, making perches, wiping up pee, picking up mountain lion poo while the poo-maker hung out in his cage (!), and monkey-proofing a new habitat. We really lucked out with this service project... we had a great time while helping out a fantastic organization. Our help was really appreciated because some construction projects had been pushed forward by about a month. Instead of having a nice leisurely stretch of time to relocate the monkeys and macaws and other folks, the staff was scrambling to get temporary shelters together for their animals. Apparently, the prison crew who had come in a few days before was not nearly as helpful as we were. We were quite proud to hear this compliament.

The Folsom Zoo is different than most other zoos that I'm familar with. Instead of taking care of endangered or rare animals or having the goal of breeding in captivity, the Folsom Zoo acts like a rescue organization. They take in animals that have been injured or abused and nurse these animals backto health. Most of the time, the animals will spend the rest of their lives at the zoo; they don't have the necessary skills to survive in the wild. Some of the animals are a little mundane (squirrels?) but the zoo also takes care of bigger animals like two tigers named Missy and Pouncer, brown bears, a bald eagle, and some assorted farm animals.

True Life: I'm in Americorps

To disabuse you of the notion that we only go on scavenger hunts here at NCCC, this blog entry is dedicated to the other stuff that we corps members do. (I realized that I've really only reported back on the fun stuff so far.) We wake up early in the mornings for PT (physical training, which I constantly want to call FT), have numerous trainings on topics from CPR and first aid to community relations and conflict resolution, and have short service projects that teach us how to work together as a Siamese dozen and help out the community at the same time.
PT is the first thing that comes to mind because it's the way we start out every day. It's cold and dark at 5:30 in the morning, but regardless, we're all gathered up on Holmes Field to do calisthenics, running, stretching, and the occasional singing of silly songs. Myself, I like the running part best, but my knees are not appreciative of the courses that are laid out on roads and other concrete surfaces. I'm not sure how anyone could miss a herd of us running down the street, but just in case 75 sleepy kids are hard to spot, we all wear reflective orange vests for safety (and embarassment). After PT, there's a mad rush towards the kitchens and the showers. Things get a bit hectic and crowded in the kitchens... there's about 60 hungry and/or stinky corpsmembers trying to get some breakfast in a skinny little kitchen space. On a day like today, when our leaders have stocked up our kitchen over the weekend, there's food like kiwis and pineapple to go with the cereal and milk, but towards the end of the week, there's only Lucky Charms and Coco Puffs left on the shelf. You'd be suprised how many kids shape up their breakfast habits after a former Navy Seal (that's Willie, our PT coordinator) leads your morning run.
Our trainings take up the biggest portion of our time here. Our leaders try to make the trainings valuable and mostly interesting, but some topics are plain boring... for instance, the rules and regulations training. All I really need to know about life, I learned in this training... no kittens, no waterbeds, no porn in Americorps. On the other hand, some of the trainings have been really valuable. We had a good training called Hands of Peace, which teaches conflict resolution skills. When 12 people are pretty much attached at the hip for the next 10 months, there's bound to be conflict. We talked about ways to resolve some of these issues and set up team charters which list rules and qualities that are important to us as a group. I thought that some of the fun activities that we did were almost as important as the "serious" stuff, though. When you get people laughing and being silly during a game like 'Psychiatrist', you get to know your team and become more cohesive. So this Psychiatrist game...here's how it works. Everyone forms a big circle and one person is chosen to be the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist leaves the room and while they are gone, everyone else decides what sort of issue the group collectively has. For example, when my teammate Kara was the psychiatrist, we decided that the group was going to be her overbearing parents. So when psychiatrist Kara gets back in the room, she starts asking us questions. They could be as simple 'How was your dinner last night?' or 'Did you have a good weekend?' But here's the important part. We have the answer the psychiatrist's questions that somehow give hints as to who we are (her cranky parents.) So if the psychiatrist says, 'How was your weekend?', we'd say things like, 'Well if you weren't making me stay up all night worrying where you were, it could have been fine!' It's fun... I recommend it for your next party.
More about our community service projects next time....

Silver 6 maintains a professional attitude at all times.

Lookin' classy, Silver 6! We're in the midst of our downtown Sacramento scavenger hunt, hanging out on the steps of the Crocker Art Museum all properly uniformed so passersby can ask us if we're in the Boy Scouts.

My address

In case you might feel the need to send me a note or some sweet knee-high socks or some other love by snail mail, here's my address ...

Amy McIntosh/ Silver 6
Americorps*NCCC Western Region
3427 Laurel St.
McClellan, CA 95652

Silver 6, y'all

We've finally been sorted into our groups that we'll being living, breathing, working, and eating with for the next 10 months! I'm a member of Silver 6. There are 12 of us on the team and we're from all over the place. There's one girl who's a Maryland alum, which is pretty neat. We're all a little quiet as yet... still getting used to the idea that we need to get to know a new group of people right after we just finished getting to know our old group (our pod). But I think we have potential. Our team leader's name is Morgan and she seems like a great girl and a capable leader.
We had a funny scavenger hunt event yesterday afternoon to hype up the process of finding out our teams. Ours involved a phone call to a Korean guy who pretended that he didn't speak English, reading off a phonetically spelled Kor-English sentance to said guy, telling a joke to a roomate in hopes that we could make her laugh and get our next clue, and finally finding our team van! We're problem-solving right off the bat.

Just in case you were wondering what that prize-winning joke was... I've got it here for you, dedicated reader.

Why shouldn't you take a shower with a Pokemon?


Because he might Pikachu!


Pretty quality.... almost better than my Beethovan joke.


Today's adventures include van driver training and taking to the roads of downtown Sacramento and the highways that connect us here in the stripmall outpost of McClellan to the bustling metropolis. Saturday is what I'm really looking forward to though... there's an all-campus service day scheduled when we're going to be working in and starting community gardens around the area.

Do you have steel toe combat boots in your closet?

Because I do! My new black leather, steel toe boots are my favorite part of my Americorps uniform. Other than my feet, Americorps is also covering me with tee shirts and polos and some not-so-fashionable rip-stop khakis. There's a pretty strict code of conduct in place while we corps members are "wearing the A", as it's put, which includes no bad language, no politicking, and no visiting bars. Guess I won't be using the uniform to help me pick up chicks :)

After chatting about this week's experiences with my dad, an experienced military man, I learned that the paperwork and in-processing and shots and physicals might be called zero week. We're getting used to the rules and learning our way around town and breaking in our uniforms, but we still have plenty of free time to sit around and chat with all the friendly kids that are here. Nearly everyone I've met is super-friendly and approachable-- we have some funny converstations about what town everyone's from and what all we've done over the summer. I've also learned that there is indeed about 6 degrees of seperation between two given people. For example, I played pool last night with a bunch of kids and chatted with one guy who lived in Minnesota and went to school in Illinois. Not so many things in common between a cowboy-booted Midwesterner and myself, one might think. But as we came to find out, his family is all from Towson, MD and he goes back to visit them a few times a year! He's also a fan of exploring Loch Raven. Small world, indeed.

The way you wiggle your antenna...

...You know you give me such bliss,
Come on come on come on, banana slug,
Won't you blow me a kiss?

So goes the fantastic "Banana Slug Song," extremely popular with me and the fifth graders at the San Mateo Outdoors School. Before leaving for NCCC in just a few days, I took a little road trip down the beautiful California coast to visit my old roommate, Liane. She has one of the coolest job in the world, I'm thinkin'. She gets to live in the beautiful sticks of coastal redwood forests, hang out with kids, sing songs and dance around in costume, see banana slugs on a daily basis, and teach her 5th graders about the environment. Awesome!

Just a few more days left of fun and games in California before I get down to NCCC work. Catching up with friends and family has been wonderful and relaxing and now I'm ready to start working and serving. I have to say that I'll miss sleeping in, however. 5:30 AM wake-up call is going to be a bit rough.