[My summer thus far...]

Summer is more than 3/4 done and I suppose now is a good time to reflect. This summer felt...short. Darn you summer school! I shake my fist at you! What a bust...in the end, taking summer school or not didn't make that big of a difference in terms of easing the course load for next year. Silly me decided to take one extra credit on top of the ones I need to graduate just because Bioremediation sounds like a "fun" course - man I'm such a nerd - and most probably will be useful for getting into environmental engineering.

This summer also happened to be my first summer in a long time being umemployed although it wasn't by choice. I must really suck to have high schoolers being picked over me for unskilled jobs. What a bummer. So instead, I spent most of the past month doing volunteer work over at Sherwood Park (in the Mt. Pleasant/Eglinton area) and as an ambassador for the Conservation Council of Ontario's Doors Closed campaign. Despite not getting paid and the sometimes grueling hard work, I'm quite enjoying myself at both of these very different environments. At Sherwood, it's 2 hours a day of cutting out very nasty weeds (sometimes needing to wade through a forest of thistles to get to them!) or hauling giant pails of mulch around while being baked under the hot sun. It's physically demanding work but the appreciation you get from passerbys and the sense of accomplishment after chopping up an 8ft burdock makes it all worthwhile. =) Janice, our supervisor and the rest of the volunteers are all so great and because I'm the youngest, it feels like I'm the baby. =P

I've just started work with the Conservation Council yesterday and already I'm enjoying myself so much. It's a bit like last summer's work in that we have to go around door-to-door in the Chinatown area to encourage stores and restaurants to keep their doors closed when their a/c is running. Some people are mean and pretend they don't understand English so that you'll go away but for the most part, people are quite cooperative, some even showing genuine concern about the environment. My team members, Brian and Corinna and I heard the funniest thing today. It was around 3pm when we went inside a bar type restaurant to give our little schpiel when this drunk man interrupts to ask what we were doing. So we tell him we're going around trying to spread word about our energy-saving iniative and he starts asking us why we aren't doing anything about the bad weather that's been going on lately. Umm...does it look like we control the weather?? So we just ignored him for a bit, knowing that the dude was probably already plastered. Poor guy was sitting alone with a pitcher full of beer at 3 in the afternoon. As we were about to leave after having talked to the owner, drunk dude says to us "Your efforts against Mother Nature are futile." like it was something out of Star Trek. We managed to keep a straight face on until we got outside where we burst out laughing. Toronto's got too many crazies I tell ya. My fellow CCO teammates are just so cool. =D

And that's all I've got to say. Camping tomorrow!! I'm excited!!