This month has been as busy as all the others here at Linfield, but I am shocked that it is over already. In the first couple of weeks I had a lot of homework, but in the last two I have not had very much at all. I had heard that April was a challenging month because there is no break during the month, and that the professors pile on a lot of work. I didn’t think this is true, though. I have been really busy the last two weeks with my compost project and with starting a job.
My compost project is coming along. We now have some food waste in our compost machine. I have worked a couple of times with the garden club, digging rows and moving dirt. I am really excited about the garden, and being able to use the compost we produce on the garden. It is a long process, though, to get the compost happening. My friend and I basically decided it is too late in the year now to try to get people in the apartments composting, so we should focus our efforts on collecting food waste from Dillin. We still have to set up a schedule of taking the scraps to the composter, but we got a couple of day’s worth of fruit and vegetable scraps and put them in the composter. We also got sawdust from a near by lumber store and grass clippings from grounds. I am so excited about this, but this project has definitely posed many challenges, and I’m sure there will be many more.
I got a job working as a recreation leader at Kids on the Block, an afterschool care program for McMinnville elementary schools. I work at Columbus, which is less than a ten-minute bike ride from campus. I started the last week of the month, and am working three days per week. It is a lot of fun, and I get to spend time with kids, which I miss, because at college I am mostly around people my own age. This is great, but I miss interacting with a wider variety of age groups. I am grateful for this opportunity to work a little in the last few weeks of this semester, and to make a little money, too.
I had some really awesome recreational experiences this semester that were absolutely blasts! One of these was Bike the Pipe, which was a bike ride, organized by Greenfield members, around to sites for the proposed Palomar pipeline, which would destroy privately owned farm lands and pump LNG, or liquefied natural gas through Oregon to California. It was very educational as well as great exercise. There is no proven need for this pipeline and it would be very damaging to the area. Another fun time I had was a one-night camping trip with two girlfriends from my dorm to Detroit Lake, a little less than two hours from Linfield. We went this last weekend in April and had a blast just enjoying not doing anything but being outside and talking around a fire. It was a great escape and plunging into the freezing lake really rejuvenated me. I feel ready to attack my class work for one more month!
As April ends, I am realizing how fast this whole year has gone by so far! I am looking forward to a very busy month of May, although I am starting to get homesick again after not having been home since Spring Break. I am occasionally fed up with dorm life, like when someone stinks up three floors with rotten fish smell in the kitchen, and someone else tries to mask the smell with perfume. But overall, I really don’t mind living in Hewitt. Next year I plan to live with my friend from across the hall. We register for housing on May 4th, and are excited for next year already!