Random Update Time!!!

Random Update Time! Nothing exciting has happened recently with the composting project, seeing as we’re waiting for the grant people to tell us if we get any money. If we don’t, well, I have to figure out some way to raise $5,000 before August. Bake sales, anybody?

          Anyway, since the Gold Award stuff is on hold, I figured I might as well blog about something related to Girl Scouts. This Saturday my troop hosted its… *counting in head*… fifth and final Camp Out in Patton Park extravaganza. The term “camp out” is used loosely here… most of the girls who are camping out order pizza for dinner rather than cooking it on a grill, and this morning when I popped out of my tent I noticed a whole lot of dads making pancakes for their kids. Apparently, the troop leaders needed their men to save the day when they realized how much they hate sleeping outside with a bunch of noisy seven year olds.

          Since this is my troop’s final year hosting, we’re handing down the proverbial torch to the next girls in line—a bunch of rising sixth graders. Yeah, I’ve noticed the age gap… it takes a lot of stick-to-it-iveness to remain a Girl Scout through middle school. It takes enough effort just to survive in middle school without the scouty label, so I pity/respect these poor Juniors.

          I’ll probably help run the event with them next year, because I can’t let things go and also I’m fairly sure they’ll need me around to keep control of the other troops. Let’s get real; they’re not much older than the Scouts they intend to lead, and will probably end up making their leaders do all the work (like my troop did in the beginning… SORRY GUYS).

           Personally, I enjoy camping. I don’t even mind peeing in the woods so long as there aren’t bugs crawling up my legs, but apparently I’m the only one. None of the little girls in my town really relish the idea of being away from their snuggly warm homes; the camp out in the park was our idea of getting people excited about roughing it while still being within a five-mile radius of their real beds, in case they got sick of the bullfrogs singing in the pond at two in the morning. (Which is a VERY loud and slightly trippy experience, I’ll tell you. When the mist falls, being near that frog-filled water is like being in a giant grey room that issues loud croaking alarms from all sides precisely when you’re about to fall asleep.)

          Anyway, over the five years it has sort of evolved into a day of themed activities, a campfire with enough off-key singing and “scary” ghost stories to last my entire life, and a night of squealing little girls eating candy and sharing secrets in their $4,098,123,513,588 tents. WHICH IS TOTALLY AWESOME. My troop uses my family’s mansion-sized tent, and we act exactly like the little Daisies and Brownies once the day is done. But during the activities, we are hard at work—because we’re the hosts, we run all sorts of games throughout the day.

          This year’s camp out was Olympics themed, and each troop got to pick which country it wanted to represent. (We were the UK, since it’s hosting the actual Olympics this year. Also we have a lot of One Direction fans in our troop.) The stations we had were volleyball, discus, gymnastics, soccer, and track & field. Of course, those are just names. Nearly every year we end up just making up theme-fitting names for Nuke’em, Frisbee, freeze dance, soccer, and a relay race. (Once we did a Harry Potter theme… we had “toss the quaffle”, Frisbee—no creative names here— The Yule Ball, quidditch, and the Triwizard tournament. The one different thing we did do was the “make your own wand” station, but we ran out of decorations halfway through and a handful of girls just got spray-painted sticks. Hey, they thought that was freaking awesome so whatever, right?).

           Naturally, since I suck at volleyball, I was put in charge of that activity station. Being the flexible people we are, the younger scouts and I played Fishy Fishy Cross My Ocean most of the time instead of actually trying to figure out the rules to our designated game. And you know what? Those girls thought I was a genius; they totally didn’t care that nobody has ever won an Olympic medal for not being caught by the shark—of course, some of them were pretty good. I think that maybe some variant of Fishy Fishy should be in the Olympics, because I can totally pick out the gold medalists from a young age. One girl just chose to run across the ocean whether she had been called or not, and if she was tagged, she cried. Needless to say, nobody tagged her, and that five-year-old Daisy won hands-down every time. I admire her strategy.

           Some Girl Scouts aren’t so admirable. Don’t get me wrong, about 95% of them are so sweet I want to put them in little display cases (not really, don’t worry… maybe). But there is always that 5% that really seems to be up to something. Either they’re kissing up to me—first mistake: I’m not all that powerful, it’s not going to get you anywhere—or they’re blaming some tiny sweetheart for the dead frog they put in a leader’s shoe or the beach ball that “accidentally” hit some unsuspecting eight year old in the face. Seriously, you can tell who’s got the psychopath gene from a very early age. I can pick the future angsty teenagers out of any lineup of Scouts. My favorite game to play when they’re all running around used to be “which one’s going to be president”, but it is definitely easier to pick out the future assassins. It’s unnerving just how many future prisoners and crazy pet-killers there are among them.

           I could go on, but I’m freaking exhausted and there was no point to this post anyway. You had to be there J

           Admirable or crazy, young or old, I love these girls and I love this camp out. I’m going to have so many separation anxiety issues when I graduate and don’t have Scouts anymore. One of the colleges I’m looking at is William & Mary, which has an amazing everything AND HAS GIRL SCOUTS. Sold. Now all I have to do is be smarter and maybe they’ll take me.

Once a Girl Scout, always a Girl Scout!

*facepalm* I think I might be a dork.

More updates on composting and the dumb school system to come, as soon as I get working on it. 

Waste Audits!

What is a waste audit? Officially, it’s where we determine the composition of the trash in a given place…in my case, the high school, middle school, and one of the elementary schools. But really, it’s just a bunch of people wearing $4 HAZMAT suits digging through the day’s lunch and sorting it into piles. I’ve done two of them in as many weeks, and I think I’m getting pretty good at it. Carolyn Dann, one of my project advisers, is amazing at this stuff. She’s done waste audits at other schools (big surprise, my stick-in-the-mud school system is one of the last ones in the area to do composting), and has all the materials. We had tarps, signs, buckets, scales, gloves, everything.

So what we did for the first waste audit was this: immediately after school on a Wednesday, CM, LD, Carolyn, my troop leader, my mom (also a troop leader) and my sister (I have no idea why she volunteered to help dig through garbage but okay) all got together to spread tarps out by the back door of the high school. Since the high and middle schools are connected—it’s a small district—we got the garbage bags from both cafeterias and lined them up, ready for dumping. The process was a little messy at first; you should see all the scribbles in my journal. (Maybe I’ll scan it in… oh my I’m getting technical here!)

So for all of you people who want to know the process, I’ll describe it for you. We did the three bags from the high school first. Step one: weigh the full trash bags. If you have a crappy bathroom scale like we did, get someone who’s not shy to hold the bags and subtract their body weight from the total. My sister is a twig, so we made her hold the leaky trash bags, and after subtracting her measly body mass from all three weighings we totaled about 69 lbs of trash. Then we dumped all that delicious cafeteria refuse onto the tarps, threw on our white body suits, and sorted everything into four groups: compostable, recycling, liquids, and the leftover waste that actually has to go to a landfill. In the end, we figured out that of the 69 lbs. of “trash”, 38 lbs. were compostable; 4.4 lbs. were recyclables that hadn’t made their way into the recycling bins; 13 lbs. were liquids that should have been dumped, and only 17 lbs. were actual trash.

We did the same thing for the middle school. Of the whopping 106 lbs. in the garbage bags, 58 lbs. were compost; 9 lbs. were recyclable; 19 lbs. were liquid; 20 lbs. were actual trash. Also, a disturbing amount of middle school kids seem to go through strange rituals with their food, and I think that there are some legitimate psychological issues that need to be addressed. I’m pretty sure the kids who stuff French fries in their chocolate milk bottles, wrap the whole thing up, and toss it in the trash with the other various creations are practicing to create future Molotov cocktails. Either that or they’re somehow summoning the dead, you never know with 13 year olds. Middle school is freaking scary—it’s like one long episode of The X-Files. I’ll never be a middle school teacher, or for that matter, a middle school custodian.

A week later we did one of the more cooperative elementary schools, and of the 71 lbs. of disgustingness, 49 lbs. were compost; 1 lb. was recycling; 7.5 lbs. was liquid; and there were 15 lbs. of trash. In the elementary school they use Styrofoam trays instead of reusable or paper ones, and they use non-compostabe/ non-recyclable milk cartons instead of milk bottles like the other schools. That’s why the recycling was so negligible—and it kind of infuriates me. Come on people, aren’t you supposed to be teaching kids how to care for the environment? Styrofoam is officially the bane of my existence thanks to this project. Also, in case you were wondering, elementary school kids never finish the grapes and carrots you pack them. They put them in the pudding they never consume and toss the whole mess in the trash among the uneaten pizza and unopened milk cartons.

And with that, I must say goodbye. All this trash talk is making me hungry.

LOL okay that was gross sorry.

A little introduction...

Composting in the school, what up?

So this blog isn't exactly starting with my project-- oh well. I've tried websites, twitter, TALKING about my project, and still, nobody really seems to care. So even if nobody ever looks at this blog ever, I will just keep typing away-- because honestly I mean what else would I do with my summer, right? 

The PROJECT. WELL. That's the fun part, isn't it? What I'm trying to do is incorporate composting into my high school. It seems pretty easy on the outside... I have an exceptional adviser, Gretel Clark (her words: "Throw my name around and people will be at your feet"), a good team of fellow Girl Scouts who are bringing composting into the middle and elementary schools, and the town we live in already requires us to separate trash and food at home. No problemo, right??

Actually, BIG problemo; we have an interim superintendent who is never around, and his stupid secretary won't let us talk to him (I found out who the evil secretary is...I'm already knitting names #taleoftwocities). And APPARENTLY, we need to talk to every single toadie and wanna-be-big-shot in the district before the town applies for a grant to help us buy composting materials. Did I mention the grant application was due yesterday at midnight? Yeah. We could have gotten a solid $1,000 to supplement what we need— $5,000—but actually since the Dolores Umbridge-like secretary decided she wanted to feel powerful and not let us see the superintendent, we probably won’t get it. Great. I really hope she doesn’t read this.

Enough of being bitter. It’s actually a fun project… This is just an introduction to my blog, I guess, because really what I’ll be doing is typing up everything I have written in my Gold Award journal.

What is a gold award, you ask? I probably should have mentioned that earlier. It’s the equivalent of an Eagle Scout project for boy scouts, only I can’t make other people do my hours. *Snaps fingers* that’s right, I said it. I have to do a lot more work. But don’t worry, boys, I still suck at tying knots and if there are moths outside when I’m camping, well, forget it. You can keep your masculinity.  

Anyway, being a Senior Girl Scout (not as cool as an Eagle, I know—I feel like my title requires me to carry a cane and hard candy in my purse), I have to do at least 80 hours of service alone. Don’t tell the Scout council, but I actually have two other Seniors who are in league with me—in the sacred tradition of not putting real names on the Internet (oops, sorry Gretel), I shall call them LD and CM. If I’m feeling creative later I’ll give them better names, but the only things I can think of right now are pretty weird and I’m not sure they’d appreciate it.

LD is in charge of the three elementary schools, and CM is in charge of the middle school, I think. Maybe I’ve got it backwards. But literally all we want to do is stick some composting bins in each school, teach the kids how to throw biodegradable crap into them instead of in the trash, and call it a day—everything should be pretty smooth, because we already have a company to come and pick up the compost and take it to their farm and everyone thinks it’s a simply wonderful idea. It SHOULD be pretty smooth, but is it? Not at all. And with this lovely introduction, I bid you good day. Environmental awareness for the win!