Vista Chronicles

MORE CONCERT TICKETS! Bid on two tickets (valued at $60) to see Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue and Terrance Simian & The Zydeco Experience at the Water Park Bayou Tent, part of the 2012 Burlington Discover Jazz Festival! 

Photo Credit: discoverjazz.com

The Vermont Icelandic Horse Farm has donated a 2-hour trail ride for two to the Spring Silent Auction! This scenic trail ride (valued at $160) takes visitors through beautiful Mad River Valley and Vermont’s lush Green Mountains on horseback.

Photo Credit: icelandichorses.com — at Vermont Icelandic Horse Farm Inc.

A woman in our office makes incredibly beautiful nature crafts.  She made these little…moss mushrooms??  for the Spring Silent Auction Extravaganza tonight!

If I had a garden, I’d bid in a heartbeat…with all this dough I gots lining my pockets ;)

My anxiety has been pretty out of this world lately…worse than it’s been in about a year.  I guess it was this time last year when I was sinking into a pretty ripe funk; last summer was a solid low for my behavior and mental health.  This position (getting this position, rather) helped pull me out of that.  

I think the cause is a myriad of things.  I’m not a planner (long-range, anyway) and having the FUTURE looming over me with such fierce uncertainty is a little intimidating…I say that I’m easy-going, go with the flow, don’t like or need plans, but when it comes down to it, I’m not opposed to security.  As much as I wish I didn’t need it, I like having some inclination of what’s coming, that it’s all going to be all right, that whatever I will be doing will be toward the greater goal…though I haven’t sat down to figure out what this “greater goal” is.  

Then there’s work.  As if my brain wasn’t boggled enough bouncing between two programs operating under the directive of a 2 larger sectors, one with an even grander mac-daddy on top (that’d be the feds = Corporation for National and Community Service — CNCS)…one of these programs is virtually falling apart.

It seems that at least every other week, we are hit with another blow.  It’s like playing a video game—you come to expect the monsters that are leaping out at you.  You spend a lot of the game building up amo and preparing for the fights…only CityScape’s not exactly prepared…we’re fighting with rag tag armor and faulty weapons…

Let me lay the foundations.  This program has two paid staff positions—program director and activities specialist.  And two Americorps positions—a Vista (me) and a state and national (a direct service guru)…Next year they will not receive a vista.  That’s down to 3 full-time staff (though Americorps is a temp position = 1year).  And the director has so much reporting bullshit, that really she can’t manage being on site five days a week and get all her “directory” stuff done.

Last week we received the news that the activities specialist has resigned, and it wasn’t pretty.  No two weeks, no goodbye to the kids; an explosion a long time in the making.  Ok, this was a long time coming and we can recover.  Not the process and the way it came about, but the positive effects of this resignation will out-weigh the negative.  Next?  We were hit this morning with the blow from the program director that she is resigning.  She will be here through the end of June.    I was shocked by the news but not surprised…if that makes sense.  This job has taken it’s toll on her emotional and physical health.  She is one to internalize it all and the stress has been eating away at her.  

I’m still processing everything…I don’t really know what is going to happen.  Don’t know how CityScape will recover.  Don’t know don’t know don’t know.  I’ll be more surprised, now, if Margaret stays through the summer than if she leaves…the ground is crumbling beneath our sand castle…

exhausting day of digging holes and mud-slinging!  Three Vermont Americorps teams came together today for a day of service.  We formed small teams to conduct projects throughout Montpelier.  I was part of a team responsible for digging fence posts for a community garden. 

No small task, eh!  Four foot deep holes lined with fist-sized rocks and filler with ten foot poles dropped into the center.  We got through ten installations by the end of the day…twelve if you include the two that had to be dislodged and re-posted a half a foot to the left.

Damn, too tired to turn this into a story!  Was a pretty great day.

We recently found out that we have a larger budget for the summer than we anticipated!  We will now be having 6 weeks of all day programming (9-4) with (hopefully) some field trips spattered in!

We have someone with many skills (drumming, gardening, wilderness education) coming on who will most likely lead a Capoiera workshop!

We’ll have yoga!

swimming, outdoor excursions, hiking, screen-printing, possibly some over-night back-backing trips and some awesome field trips!

…during which Americorps members from our teams (VYT = Vermont Youth Tomorrow Vista team and VYDC = Vermont Youth Development Corps state team) and other teams in the state get together to perform service in our communities. 

The Basement Teen Center is one of the sites.  We will be working on the garden…

…making a sign for the garden, and (hopefully) we will be making peace polls out of some old fence posts.

I have such an aversion to this newsletter—due yesterday.  >_>  I’m just staring at the screen.  How many times this year have I explained what a VISTA is, what I do at my site, what I’m working on…these are the points that I am to write a masterpiece article on…>_>

And. 

It’s hailing.  

Rainy day here in Vermont…

Working on a website for CityScape; working on timesheets; a quarterly report for my Americorps program — topic = what projects I’m working on @ my site and why I am an essential LIFE FORCE to my sites (their words exactly)!  

Yep.  Gotta good flow going on here.