A sample text widget
Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis
euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.
Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan.
Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
|
 I’ve spent the afternoon churning out work in the lovely Birdie’s Cafe on Main Street in Westminster. Confession: The title of this post might have been a little misleading. I am not actually interning at coffee shops this semester. However, I have found that they are lovely places to complete work for my internship.
Let me tell you about my internship itself before I get to the fun stuff. This semester, I am interning at the Carroll County Health Department. My job is to spend three hours a week making edits and suggestions to written content that the Health Department plans to post to their new website in-progress. I’ve also been helping my supervisor learn a little bit about how HTML works by indicating in the documents I have been editing what words need to be formatted as headers. In the process of completing this internship, I’ve learned a lot about web and health literacy, which I think are important things to know about regardless of whether I work for another health department again.
Now here’s the fun stuff–because so much of the work that I do does not require me to go to the Health Department (and because there isn’t much space for me to do that work at the Health Department), I can work pretty much wherever I choose. Often, I find myself cramming in internship work on Thursday nights in my dorm room, since I often meet with my supervisor on Friday afternoons. However, I occasionally do internship work at local coffee shops.
On afternoons after meeting at the Health Department, I’ll head to JeannieBird Baking Company, where the pastries are delicious. Since they close at 5 (which is actually kind of late for a bakery), I choose this option when I don’t foresee myself working for very long and only want to get an extra half an hour or hour in.
Today, however, I decided to go to Birdie’s Cafe, since I was in more of a latte mood than a pastry mood. (JeannieBird has good pastries but no specialty coffee. Birdie’s has specialty coffee but no real pastries.)
I thought I’d only be here for about an hour (I’d initially wanted to take a nap right after my internship meeting), but I’ve been here for two-and-a-half hours and counting. (I will have to make myself leave for dinner soon though.) At least 75 percent the songs I’ve heard while here are also songs on my iPod, and the gloomy April weather outside has made this this setting particularly cozy. Enough people have come and gone for me to not feel isolated, but it hasn’t been so noisy that I can’t concentrate. And of course, the wifi is free : )
I think I’m going to have to squeeze in a few more Birdie’s trips before I graduate next month — the amount of stuff I’ve been able to get done while here has been phenomenal!
On Saturday, my friend invited me to go to Baugher’s with her to see the bunnies.
Baugher’s restaurant and market is about ten minutes walking from campus. My broken toe wasn’t too happy about this, but it was entirely worth it to see six soft little critters! Each year, the week leading up to Easter they keep bunnies outside their market area and the public is allowed to stroke them, though a worker said we shouldn’t pick them up as someone had once dropped one!
  
We stayed with the bunnies for over half an hour, and enjoyed watching them interact with each other and other customers. Two of them were very inquisitive, leaping around anyone who came near, and the other four stayed snuggled up together, hiding from everyone.
In yesterday’s post, I talked about how my Writing for Nonprofits classmates and I hosted fundraiser at Panera Bread to benefit Walk a Mile in Her Shoes. I also mentioned that later in the week, we did another fundraiser, an open mic night.
Our class recognized that the right restaurant fundraiser can bring in a lot of money toward a good cause. However, we didn’t want to solely rely on restaurant fundraisers, so the half of the class that wasn’t responsible for putting together our Panera fundraiser organized an open mic night for McDaniel students and performers from outside of McDaniel.
The open mic night planning group was responsible for booking equipment, creating flyers, recruiting performers, and promoting the event. Unfortunately, because they inadvertently planned the open mic night for the Friday night before Easter, only about 25 people came to the event.
However, while smile, our open mic night was mighty. The people who performed were seriously talented. Two women gave spoken word performances of their original poems. A string trio consisting of a guitar, a mandolin, and a cello performed Civil War-era jigs and other folk music. Representatives from Common Ground on the Hill sang a Pete Seeger song and an Appalachian folk song, playing steel guitar and banjo. One student belly danced and another did a fun guitar cover of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up.” A few brave students even volunteered to read poems after the pre-scheduled performers were finished. I would have to say that the two poets at the beginning, the string trio, and the Arcade Fire cover were my favorite performances of the evening.
The entrance fee for this event was only $2, and even though only about 25 people showed up, we managed to raise over $100 thanks to the extra generosity of attendees who probably aren’t students. I’m thrilled to say that this event and our Panera event raised nearly $350 to donate to Walk a Mile! I’m so proud of us!
I went home for Easter weekend for one main reason: a concert. I did want to see my family and my dogs, but it was the nearby show starring Celtic Thunder, a six-member singing group with a seven-member band all from Ireland, that really made me want to drive six hours total to spend less than 48 hours in my hometown.
I attended the concert with my mom, my grandmother, and a family friend. On our way into the event center, I was given a yellow bracelet to mark that I’m under 21 and can’t have anything alcoholic from the bar, including Celtic Thunder themed drinks. I got a program, we took our seats, and then we waited for some of my favorite singing voices to start.
The show was two and a half hours long and I enjoyed every minute of it. It was a Best Of tour, so I knew all the songs. It was fantastic to take a break from schoolwork and spend a significant portion of it around a crowd of people that like the same music I do.
The rest of my weekend was filled with more family, Holy Saturday blessed lunch, and the return of a show based on my favorite books: Outlander.
I am glad to be back on campus with work to do, but a weekend of my favorite things and no homework was much needed recharge time.
I absolutely love spring at McDaniel. If I am going to be perfectly honest with myself, one of the reasons why I studied abroad in the fall was so that I could be at McDaniel during the spring. I definitely appreciate the spring weather, but my favorite aspects about this semester are the lectures that take place at McDaniel. Over the past week, I have been able to attend four different talks that were truly thought provoking and educational.
Each academic department and honors society usually brings a speaker to campus during this semester. For example, last Wednesday, I attended a lecture hosted by the German Club. The lecture was titled, “After Happily Ever After: Grimm Realities in the Fairy Tale Kingdom,” and was presented by Dr. Walter Rankin from Georgetown University.
Dr. Rankin was a very animated speaker and for the first half of his talk, he discussed the history and cultural uniqueness of the Grimm Brothers. During the second half, Dr. Rankin created connections between the themes in the Grimm Brothers’ tales and elements in the film, “Gone Girl.” One of the most interesting points Dr. Rankin brought to my attention was the American obsession with the question “why?” This can be seen today as we have a plethora of movies that include backstories. We even have whole movies dedicated to backstories (think “Maleficent”).
I am always amazed at the variety of lectures that McDaniel hosts every semester. While I want to hear every talk, unfortunately time makes this impossible. I do consider myself lucky to attend a school where these lecturers and topics are available to students.
|
|
