We coasted through this work week. We were asked to come down early. Truth be told, we could have come a week later and done our duties without failing. Programs for each grade (pre-K through 4) are already designed. Most of the programs are pretty good, but we had to overhaul one activity. The program is about how animals adapt to their environment. It included the “5 bucket” game. Each bucket has 4 clues. Kids are supposed to use the clues to guess the animal. It’s not a bad idea, but most of the clues weren’t about animal adaptations. One of the clues was totally ridiculous. Our new game has better clues, each of which addresses one part of the animal’s adaptation to its environment.

Monday we will have our official orientation. This is where we are corralled into a room. We are supposed to keep our eyes open until lunch, when we are released. Tuesday we attend a program offered by a full time ranger. Wednesday and Thursday we will sink or swim. Each day we will receive about 90 kids. The kids are divided into 3 groups. The groups will rotate through 3 programs. One is a session is led by the teacher. The second is a forest walk, led by a ranger. Danita and I will lead a beach walk. So we will do 3 beach walks Wednesday, 3 more Thursday. The beach walk is pretty easy. We talk about mole crabs, ghost crabs, and sand dunes. We let the kids run around barefoot in the sand. We dig in the sand, sift it in sand sifters, and look at the sand with magnifying glasses. I’m pretty sure the kids would be happy just to run around for an hour. There is one part of the program we won’t do. Some of the smallest sand particles are black. These are magnetite. We were told the magnetite could be picked up with a magnet. That didn’t work. Then we were told the sand had to be totally dry for this to work. We dried some sand. Totally dry. It still didn’t work. I tried using a horseshoe magnet and a metal bar, with a small gap on one side to focus the magnetic field. It still didn’t work. We had some plastic covered “wand” magnets that a few particles would stick to, but that could have been from static electricity. It didn’t impress us. It certainly wouldn’t impress 30 4th graders. It has nothing to do with the theme (what a plant or animal needs to live on the sea shore.) It’s off the program.

Yesterday was quite nice — Sunny, 65, and a slight breeze. We have a very large screened porch on the back of our house. We opened the back door and aired  the house. We spent the morning cleaning the house and porch. I took a bike ride in the afternoon. Danita did a little riding and some yoga. Then we kicked back and enjoyed the beautiful weather.

Today after Church (in Ocean City) we visited the Life Rescue museum, about how people were rescued from ships that foundered off the shore. We saw life saving equipment and techniques used 150 years ago. Then we walked out onto the boardwalk and watched the kite convention. We saw plenty of kites, including some synchronized kite flying. We were inspired to buy a tacky whirley twirley. The bicycle theme suites me; the pink flamingo is a Baltimore thing. (You can also see part of our porch and our Internet satellite dish.) For lunch, we stopped by the Island Creamery in Berlin on the way home. They have the best ice cream we have ever had. Their “one scoop” cup has as much ice cream as anybody else’s 3-scoop jumbo. I can’t begin to imagine what their 2-scoop cup must have.

We’re looking forward to traveling to Jul’s next weekend for Elizabeth’s First Communion. We will leave Thursday and take a day of “vacation” Friday. Stand by for grand-kid pics next week.

After our second week of training, we feel comfortable in assuming our forthcoming duties. We have another full week before we will do our first solo presentations, so we’re pretty comfortable. I want to go over and formalize my notes, but I will have plenty of time to do that.

Yesterday was our goof-off day. We went to Pocomoke. Our original objective was to attend an ATV fest, but when we drove by that looked like a bust. So we visited the Pocomoke Discovery Center which is a museum of Eastern Shore life, and features two river otters. We also walked their nature trail through a small Cyprus forest, followed by a more traditional forest. When land is closes to sea level, a small change in elevation (just a foot or two) can drastically change the types of plants and wildlife. Here are a few pics of the otters.

It was an interesting first week. But we also had an “adventure” that affected the entire park. Our house has industrial toilet. There’s no tank or flapper valve. It’s just a water pipe that comes out of the wall. Push a handle, the valve opens, and lots of water noisily rushes out until the valve turns itself off a few seconds later. Except our valve ran for about 2 minutes one evening last week. I reported it promptly, then nothing happened. Monday night, it ran indefinitely. There are no water cutoff valves for the toilet. The water valve for the house is buried underground and requires a special tool. Danita and I had asked several times what to do in an emergency. We received a phone number for the housing coordinator. We called her, but neither she nor we could raise the head of maintenance. She suggested we sleep upstairs (which we ended up doing). I had heard that when this happens, one should flush another toilet. This will temporarily lower the water pressure, allowing the first valve to close. I don’t know if this ever works, but in our case we ended up with two toilets pushing water down the drain as fast as water would roll through the pipes. The head of maintenance finally got the texts and voice mails, and turned the water to our house off somewhere around 11 PM. We were sound asleep by them. The park has its own water treatment plant. The water that rolled through our house for 2 to 3 hours overwhelmed all the water plant systems. Everything was fixed by 9 or 9:30 the next day. But every last person in the park knows us as the folks who had a plumbing problem that affected the water.

Whatever adventures we end up having, they won’t compare to what some visitors experience. I was thinking about writing about the couple that lost a fender and wanted to find out if anybody had retrieved it from the beach. But a better example occurred just minutes before closing on Friday. A couple called because they were somewhere in the back country, driving in the surf, and their transmission stopped working. (Unlike in the movies, driving in the surf is a really bad idea in the real world.) Nobody was on hand to help. (One needs a truck with 7″ of clearance and 4-wheel drive just to travel safely on the sand.) The only thing we could do was to text them phone numbers for the 4 towing companies that have trucks capable of towing on the sand and wish them luck. Was the tide coming in? Did their car end up under water? I guess we’ll hear the rest of the story next week.

Our week was packed with positive experiences. We visited the back country in a truck that could safely travel on sand, driven by an expert who stayed well away from the surf. We visited the Virginia side of the island, learned a lot about the ecology of the area, and saw lots of horses. We spent all of Thursday and Friday outside. It was the first two warm days of the year, so we enjoyed excellent weather with no bugs. That’s very rare combination on Assateague Island.

Saturday we drove home to swap cars. We used our known-good charging station, which worked fine. We had no problems on the drive. We’ll be taking our gas car down tomorrow. I’ll end this with pictures of the area. It’s just about what one would expect.

The folks with Danita are Brooks and Travis. They are great guys with amazing knowledge of the wildlife, history, and ecology of the area. The tombstone is the only remaining evidence of an early cemetery. (It was the only stone tombstone.) The woods area is a typical back-country campsite. There’s nothing but a vault toilet and a picnic table. The water was very clear because it was still cold enough that there was a minimum of all those very small and widely assorted living critters in the water. The last pics are general landscape.

It was an adventure, but we made it to Assateague. Our Honda is in the shop getting fixed. It was supposed to be ready Friday. We had two options. We could rent a car and driving from Assateague to home today to pick up the Honda. Or we could drive our E-car to Assateague and back. We decided to take the E-car and not return home this weekend because the forecast called for 3 to 8 inches of snow today. As it turns out, the snow petered out into nothing. But –surprise– our car won’t be ready until Monday. If we had rented a car, we would have to pay for an extra week. We made the right decision for the wrong reason.

Driving the E-car was quite an adventure. Our car’s range “guess-o-meter” said we had 105 miles of range. We decided to stop at a charging station at a Royal Farms 82 miles away, driving without heat. We made it to the charging station with 17 miles to spare. (When the car gets down to 16 miles of range, it starts issuing warnings and displaying the closest charging station. Don’t ask me how I know this!) The charging station clearly stated they took major credit cards. But there was no slot to insert the credit card. The Royal Farms folks were very nice, but they knew nothing about the charge station and couldn’t help us. After dithering for a while, we noticed a phone number on the display. We called and were quickly connected to a phone operator. We were supposed to have signed up for service at this chain of charging stations and received  a wireless card. Not to worry, the call operator was quite helpful. We could enter our credit card on an automated system. Only the cell signal wasn’t very good, and it was quite windy out, and we just couldn’t get the credit card number, expiration date, and CCV all entered. After two tries, they gave us a complimentary charging session. This was a high power station. We were fully charged in half an hour, while we went into the Royal Farms and had a cup of coffee.

Our next stop was to the local library, where we used the internet to create an account with this charging chain. We had plenty of charge to make it to the next station at a Royal Farms in Ocean City. The second charging station was in the same chain. It should have been a piece of cake, except that the station wasn’t working. That call operator sent us to a slower charger which also didn’t work. But the second call operator sent us to a third station which does work. And it’s totally free — just plug into your car and accept the joy. It wasn’t a high power charger, but it was good enough to give us plenty juice for a round trip to Assateague, while we ate lunch sandwiches we had purchased at the second Royal Farm store.

When we got to Assateague, we found that the park had purchased a Chevy Bolt and had a charging station. But we can’t use it. That’s misappropriation of government resources for private gain. Our car comes with a very slow charger that works from a standard 110V plug. Fortunately, I had packed a heavy duty extension cord. I plugged our car into that for 20 hours and got the battery up to 85%. We’ll be charging the car with our slow charger at nights and should have no problems getting a full charge for the trip home.

We spent Thursday moving into our new living quarters. Assateague uses lots of seasonal and temporary help. They have 6 houses for all their temporary workers. We have a master bedroom in one of the houses, which means we have a private bath. This is quite rare and we are very lucky to get it. Plus, for the first month or so, we will be the only people in the house. The place is quite comfortable, but is an old beach house. We are the first people to move into this house for the season. We did the check-in and walk through. After we noted all the preexisting defects and the park official left, the water stopped working. They got a maintenance man out right away. It turns out there was so much sand in the water line that the faucets got totally plugged up. They got the lines flushed and the faucets cleaned out quickly.

Yesterday was a very good day. We had our first day of training. Our supervisor is a talker, and she is exhausting. Combine that with being in a new environment, and trying to learn all the local stuff, and all the excitement we had on the trip down — we were totally exhausted by the end of the day. But the HughesNet satellite internet man arrived on schedule and installed our internet access. That works very well. We have unlimited access for 20 days, then we get 10 GB/month. That’s a good thing, because with my computer downloading Windows updates and us watching a couple of TV shows, we used 10 GB on the first day. Obviously, we won’t be watching TV over the internet after our initial 20 days.

Today we made it into town to buy stuff. We stopped at the local library and got library cards. That will be a good source of movies. I have unlimited internet data between 2 and 6 AM. If I can find legal ways to download movies, I can download at night and watch in the evening.

For the first 2 months, we’ll be working Monday – Friday. (That’s when the school groups come in for presentations.) We’re looking forward to Church tomorrow morning, and we found a good breakfast restaurant within walking distance of the free car charger in Ocean City.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

A Colombian Breakfast

The trip down yesterday was long, and the seats had no lumbar support, making them quite uncomfortable for me. But fortunately the trip was boring. Mark got sick at the last minute and didn’t make it. Danita and I started our day with an authentic Colombian breakfast from our Airbnb hosts. It was attractive and quite tasty. Ryn stayed at Jul’s guest room. Her breakfast included quail’s eggs. The consensus of the Reed household was that quail eggs taste just like chicken eggs.

But they sure look nice.

Bike Time

Our next activity was a trip to REI for new bikes. Bryan has outgrown his 20″ bike and was ready for a larger 24″ bike. Elizabeth is big enough for a 24″ bike, but she isn’t ready to balance the bike. She got a very last pink 24″ bike, but for now she is using Bryon’s old 20″. The weather was perfect for a little riding. There was plenty of riding going on. What wasn’t perfect was what I did to Pat’s car. I use Pat’s SUV to bring the bikes home. When I closed the rear hatch, one of the struts broke. The bikes were in the car and the hatch was closed, but it wouldn’t open. Fortunately, Pat and I were able to get the strut out and open the hatch when I got home.

Who is sadder?

The new member of the Reed household is Eddie. He is quite friendly. When we walked into the house, the dog didn’t bark even once. I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of this story.

Eddie and Ryn

3rd generation First Communion dress (Danita, Julia, Julia, Elizabeth)

Painting by Bryan (very impressive work!)

Easter Eggs

Ryn’s way cool Travel Bag