Hooray for me! After 3 days this week, I’m officially re-certified in Occupational First Aid, CPR, and the use of the AED (Automated External Defibrillator. I have a new breathing mask, and am up to date on the latest 30:2 breathing ratios.
On a side note- anyone ever notice that Mr.Body the CPR dummy is always a hairless male? There’s never any females…. I wonder why… (I’m kidding, of course!)
I moved this summer. And as a part of the new place to live, told the new landlord that I’d redo the garden. This involved removing all of the rock from the ground, replacing the ‘weed barrier’, and then putting the rocks back down. While all this was happening, I had to bang in a few new wooden edging panels and think about what plants I wanted to put in the flower bed.
These are the before (you can see the barrier, the overgrown, etc):
What’s funny is that when I started this process, I had a shovel and a tarp to one side. As I started working, I was by myself.
Within an hour, I had 2 children sitting on steps and watching me. Within an hour and a half this number was 4 with 3 more in and out as the work progressed. Picture me shovelling up a bunch of rocks, tossing them to the tarp and being questioned by kids over everything from what I was doing, to asking about flowers, to etc. Eventually, they asked could they help. Naturally, me being me, I sent them off to get permission from their moms, and let their mom know where / who I am and what I’m doing. They came back and suddenly I had multiple little helpers with small hand trowels, and a pair of shovels, eager to “play” in the dirt and have it be “ok”.
3 hours later, with the rocks and old weed barrier removed…the squares for the barbeque area in – and new rocks being put down by my roommate (who arrived home from work in time to laugh at my barrage of helpers):
5 hours later – everything was put back in place, and thanks to the neighborhood kids – I had a great welcome to my neighborhood. Check out the difference:
Happy Valentine’s Day! This week has been another busy one. One of the best things about where I work is that we always try to do our best to help the community via charity.
On Thursday night, I and 16 other people from eBay Dublin got together in partnership with Serve the City Ireland and we put together 200 boxes for the under privileged.
We glued together the boxes, added tissue paper, put in the items, and then closed them up with a bow and a card for each one.
What’s amusing is that I originally volunteered to write half (100) of the Valentine cards. Jose drew the outside of the card –
and Once they saw my penmanship, creativity, and artistry, however, I ended up composing the inside of all 200 cards! My hand was sore at the end – and so was my shoulder (seriously – who writes ANYTHING anymore – let alone 200 cards!) but it was well worth it.
Ever wonder what 200 care boxes look like? Well, now you know:
