I Got a Bike!!!!!!!!!!

I found a bike on Craigslist that wasn't ridiculously expensive, and I met the woman, and I got the bike! It's a little too small for me. I'm hoping that raising the seat will help. I might also bring my bike seat from Goshen, because this one hurts. The bike's a road bike, and it shifts really well, which my other bike doesn't. I took it upon myself to ride the bike home after getting it. It took an hour and a half, and there were hills. Why do I always do that? It's like how my first project after knitting scarves was to knit a sweater. After that I didn't know if I wanted to knit ever again.

I've noticed from the other BVS-er blogs that I follow that we all kind of stopped blogging at the same time. I'm getting more involved in life here, so I'm not as fiercely attached to communication from home, and the complexity of life makes it overwhelming to blog about. By the time I write a new entry, there's way too much to say in order to give people a complete picture. It seems like there are a few subjects that I keep updated, but plenty more I could be talking about. So those are my frustrations with blogging.

And now for a work update, because I realized that the last post about work is really outdated. I. Love. My. Job. And my boss is amazing. She would have made the perfect cooperating teacher for student teaching. I'm appreciating more and more the orientation she's given me. In the first week, she made it clear that she wants me to see as many aspects of the Food Bank as possible. So I've participated in a food distribution with Agency Relations, I've assisted with a class for the Nutrition Education program, I helped run a station at a food fair, I sat in on a class in Spanish about how to connect with supports in your community (for food pantries), I've toured our warehouse, and even driven the huge Capital Area Food Bank van. I really don't need to know all this to work in my department. And knowing that I'm only here for a year, my boss could easily just want me to get to work for her and our department. But it's become more and more clear how valuable all of this is. I can be such a better employee by being well-versed in what we do. Plus my boss puts so much trust in me and has made me a part of the department. It's pretty necessary I guess, because I'll be doing a lot of her job when she goes on maternity leave soon. Oh, here's an example of how awesome she is. We got to a site visit early last week, so she took me to Ben's Chili Bowl to get vegetarian chili cheese fries, just because it's a "DC must," even though it's so artery clogging. She's also tells me about what night life places she recommends and tries to orient me to the city.

It's hard to say what I do at work exactly, but I'll try. No day is the same. Every week, I'm out of the office for part of a few days. I really like breaking the week up like that. Tomorrow, I'm meeting my boss at a distant Metro stop. She'll pick me up to go to the farm, and we'll go over our notes for our "end of season" meeting with farm staff, then do some garden work. I think we have to pull up this really big ground cover thing and weed and plant cover crop. We won't get it all done, but we're going out to the farm again on Friday. Susan (my boss) and I will both run the meeting with farm staff (we planned it on Friday). When we get back to the office, I'll continue to call agencies to follow up with an email I sent out about our end of season meeting for agencies. Then I might type up notes from the meeting with farm staff. Or I'll call this one agency to see if they decided whether or not they're bringing a school group to the farm for gleaning day. And I'll send out an email to Food Bank staff saying that they can come to the farm with us on Friday if they want, because there'll be a lot to do. I'll follow up with revisions to an article I wrote about one of our member agencies. I'll start hand writing some thank-you notes to agencies that advertised one of our brochures. And I'll do anything else that comes up. That's a really jumbled idea of what one day might be like at work. It actually doesn't sound that great, but it's amazing. It helps that I really like the people I work with. The only thing I don't like is an entire day at the office, with mostly computer work. That makes my eyes hurt. I also don't like when I finish everything and there's nothing much for me to do. I always have a list of eco-websites to check out and a stack of books on my desk, but doing that kind of background, general knowledge fortifying makes me fall asleep. I'm also adjusting to the 9-5 work week. I don't always work 9-5. I often come in early and stay late, but I get comp time for that, so I leave early too. It's kind of hard to just go to work week after week. My weekends have been entirely dedicated to relaxing, gardening, reading, going out. But it's a little depressing to go back to work again on Monday. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, and actually I have a ton of holidays that a normal first-year wouldn't have. That's good because I'm just so unused to working full-time for an entire year, not to mention year after year.