The art of leaf blowing, picking up goose poo and wrangling gosslings

It's been a busy week here at Branbury. Memorial Day weekend was a busy one, so there was lots to do Tuesday when I got back. It was pretty quiet- no one camping much after the weekend, so we cleaned campsites, the waterfront, and bathrooms. BUT on Tuesday, we had terrible rain and wind storms throughout Vermont. Just up the road was a reported tornado- unheard of in hilly Vermont! Wednesday, we surveyed the damage- a few campsite had major washouts that we couldn't fix with just a shovel and rake. We called in for a tractor and load of rock to repair the sites, which came on Thursday.

On Thursday, I spent almost 2 hours picking up goose poo on the waterfront grassy area (we don't have much of a "beach"). There was a lot of poo. Thank goodness for the pooper scooper!

 


After the poo, I got to leaf blow the campground area that had leaves and rocks in the road from the storm. There really is an art to leaf blowing. Depending on which side you want the rocks and debris on, you blow on a diagonal across the road, moving back and forth. I thought that the closer the hose end was to the road, the better. I have learned otherwise. If you hold the nozzle about knee to waist high, you get more surface are being blown at (it's hard to describe in words- I'm going to find a video that might explain better...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UmAY9tL0h0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CYdiU1sMwc

The first one shows a guy using it on a road with rocks- holding it closer to the ground probably because he doesn't want the rocks all over the place. The second video is of a lady/girl blowing leaves-pretty straight forward. When you have debris on the road, you just go back and forth and back up and go forward until you get the debris moved to where you want it to go. And most of all, you look and feel like a Ghostbuster!


On Friday, I helped clean bathrooms and found out that our swimming area had high counts of bacteria so there would be no swimming. I watched hundreds of school children figure out what to do without going into the lake. It was interesting. I cleaned grills and dumped ashes in "the pit" and worked in and around the office. I'm sure I did other things, but I'm tired and the week is a bit of a blurr right now.

Today, Saturday, was National Trails Day- a celebration of hiking trails in the National Forests and State (and probably National) Parks. Admission was free and we had activities including free ice cream (Ben & Jerry's Phish Food!) and Smokey the Bear and the Emerald Ash Borer show up for the festivities. This is all about the evil ash borer-  http://emeraldashborer.info/ So an exciting, busy day at the park, right? Ah- no. Rain and really chilly temperatures today kept lots and lots of people inside. We had more state and federal employees than outside visitors to our festivities. Oh well. Free ice cream and a day of not much to do is ok by me. We all worked hard throughout the week that today was a nice little break from the craziness. Oh and at the end of the day today, Heather, the campground host, chased (kindly) a gosling across the street so it would head back down to the waterfront and hopefully to it's family. It wasn't getting there very fast, so I walked behind it as it peeped (not honked or quacked- it was still pretty young) all the way down. It had a hard time walking over the curbs in the parking area, but we made it down. I got it to go in the water, but I couldn't see it's family anywhere nearby. I went in to check the bathrooms and when I had come out, it was back on the grass hunting for food. I left it alone and hoped the rest of the gaggle (I almost said herd, but that's cows and sheep) would come by soon and they'd all swim away. That was my gosling wrangling for the day. Yee haw!

Not only were there the adventures that I just explained, but we didn't have a truck to go around to pick up and move equipment and people and garbage bags for several days this week. On either Thursday or Friday (I'm thinking it was Friday, but again it's a blurr) we got our park golf cart and I was the first to use it. Wicked fun! The assistant ranger when I had picked him up asked, "is this as fast as it can go?" So I floored it. We'll be having some fun with that for sure this summer. Hopefully we won't break it.

So, that's my week in a big nutshell. I was going to write a cool Memorial Day blog, but I didn't get a chance. I spent the day weed whacking around the farm and getting poison parsnip in the process. not good. I've also been doing some thinking about my teaching career- I'll get into that another time. For the centillionth time, my patience is wearing thin. That's all I'll say about that right now.

And yes, centillionth is a word. I looked it up to make sure.