Marketing health

As a school assignment the Girl and three friends ran a table at the farmers' market.  They were advocating on avoiding eating disorders by keeping a healthy body image.  To get people to the table they offered a bracelet making activity, and they seemed to be pretty successful.  Over the course of the morning they kept busy, handed out information, and raised more than $50 for an eating disorders charity.

Continuing the healthy theme, it's National Trails Day today, so the Man and I took in a trail at Five Rivers. An easy one, just once around the Beaver Tree Pond, but it was looking good.  Here is the beaver lodge we photographed in April as it looks now.  We didn't see any beavers.  There were lots of chipmunks about, though, even on the road as we drove there and back.

Power to the Dads

We all ended up at the kids' former elementary school tonight, for the annual Carnival.  The Girl was volunteering (two hours straight on the fishing game, with only a bag of popcorn to keep her going - that's dedication).  The Boy met up with a bunch of friends and they apparently came up with an infallible method for winning the cakewalk.  At any rate, he brought home cake. The Man and I just went along for old times' sake.  It was a lovely evening for an outdoor event.

The Boy ran into one of his old teachers, who recognized him despite his short hair. 

Later tonight, the Man and I have been watching TV via the internet, interspersed with ads for possible Father's Day gifts.  The only suggestions so far have been for power tools.  Erm , isn't that like suggesting that all a woman wants for Mother's Day is a new vacuum cleaner or a nice array of laundry detergents?  How many men really do crave power tools as gifts (not counting our friend Dr. Wallace Rockfish)?

Gridlock

Last week it was fun to take a couple of Karen friends on an outing.  This week we were back to a more frustrating scenario - trying to place a call to National Grid.

For non-local readers, National Grid is the main power supplier for this area.  My friends wanted some information sent to them and needed to speak to a human being.  But it was hard to get past the robo-operator (if that's what you call those computer-generated voices). The voice was very polite, and it did seem to understand my accent, which isn't always the case.  Or maybe I sound more American these days? Anyway, what it wouldn't do was give me any option to ask to speak to a real person.

I found my way round it in the end - I just answered every question with "I want to speak to a human!"  After a few chirpy "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that!"s, it finally put me through to someone. Whose computer then froze, so he had to transfer us to another person.  Then there was some messing about with a phoned-in "interpreter" who couldn't speak English any better than my friend so didn't much help in the communication process as he couldn't translate back to the National Grid guy.  So I ended up speaking to the latter, but apparently he couldn't understand me properly either because he ended up emailing the wrong thing and (groan) we're going to have to do it all again.

Pledge Central

I'm involved with something called the Capital Region Fair Trade Coalition, a loose association of groups and individuals working in Fair Trade in this part of the world.  To promote our work in a public-spirited kind of way, members of this Coalition contributed FT goodies to put together in five gift baskets to donate to the local public radio station, WAMC.  Today the baskets were offered as premiums in the station's June fund drive.

Now, I pretty much loathe the fund drive, when my favourite regular radio programming stops and is replaced by desperate on-air begging for as long as it takes to raise a million dollars to support the station.  However, since I do appreciate WAMC I have always thought I should probably do my bit and volunteer to man the phones sometime.  Today, with three other fair tradey friends, I finally did that.  And I have to say it was quite fun.

There were about twenty volunteers in the room (known as "Pledge Central"), with two presenters in there with us, broadcasting live.  Each volunteer had a phone, and they rang in rotation.  When my phone rang (which in all honesty was not that often over the course of two hours) I had to go through a pledge form with the caller and collect relevant details in a friendly manner.  And that was about it.  The rest of the time was spent chatting with the volunteers seated on either side of me, and enjoying freebies such as ear plugs and samples of topical pain relief (WAMC seems to know its constituent listeners and volunteers - not all of us the springiest of chickens, a bit prone to twinges of this and that). 

There was a five minute flurry of excitement for "team fair Trade" as the FT baskets went up for grabs.  They were popular and were quickly claimed at $100 a piece, so that was satisfying, especially as in the final 75 minutes of our shift there was a goal of raising $10,000, and amazingly the goal was reached - and we played a little part in that. 

On the alert

Today has been very hot, and this evening we had an almighty storm.  My (not-usually-very-smart) phone kept beeping and sending me flash flood alerts - the same announcement every five minutes.  I don't remember it ever doing that before.  When I tried to reset it to stop repeating itself, I found out that there are three alerts options: All Alerts On; Extreme Alerts Only; and Presidential Alerts.

What differentiates an Extreme Alert from a Presidential Alert, I wonder.  Or is the latter just a warning that the President is coming, better look sharp?

Extended weekend

Since the Man was working and travelling all Saturday, he took today off.  We spent the day making progress on some jobs in and around the house and yard, trying to get stuff done before the really hot weather kicks in and the school vacation begins.  Terrifyingly, the latter is now less than three weeks away...

A Capital Time

The Man writes...just back from a conference at the historic Omni-Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC.

There was very little opportunity during the week to get away from the hotel, but the Conference Dinner was held downtown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

It's always cool wandering around a museum after hours when it is empty, and "challenging" modern art seems to make much more sense to me after a beer.

 
I also got downtown for an hour or so on Saturday evening.  I made a quick return visit to the Air and Space Museum...

 where the exercise bike in Skylab looked a bit different from the ones in the Hotel fitness suite...

I walked down the National Mall. It looked wonderful, with the newly reopened Washington Memorial at one end and the United States Capitol at the other: