Sunday, November 17, 2013

Finished Our First Assignment

We've been here at Enchanted Rock for 4 weeks.  It has taken a while to get going on projects.  We only have to work 24 hours a week for the site.  That means we both work 2 days a week, 6 hours each of those days. 

Our first couple of weeks we spent our time checking cars for parking permits, cleaning the bath houses, and checking campsites for permits.  That left the remaining five hours to pick up trash.  We finally convinced the staff that we were willing and able to do much more to help out.  

Finally, we got our first project - painting 21 deer blinds and making repairs to any that needed it. We hopped right on that project.  The hunt here in the park is the first week in December so we were under a deadline to finish.

While painting, we found two wasps nests, one mouse nest with several hairless babies, and one bull snake.


Most of the blinds were in pretty good shape but there were a few repairs to be made:

Even though we ran out of paint twice (and had to create custom blends by scavenging partial cans of leftover paint), we completed our tasks this past week. 

On to the next project!
Teri

3 comments:

  1. Nice job on the blinds. I'm glad they gave you something productive to do.

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  2. Don't think I've ever volunteered any place that didn't have some painting to do ;-) Looks like you did a good job. (also never volunteered anywhere that only wanted 24 hours total... Bill would go crazy)

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    1. The hour requirement sure is low. We used to work 24 hours each (min.) at LBJ State Park, but Texas Parks & Wildlife did a review of their volunteer system and determined that most parks were asking park hosts to work only 24 hours total. So they standardized the requirement.

      We actually worked two extra days to get the blinds finished, and will continue to work extra when we have a "good" project to work on.

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