I am rather dirty

I'm still having so much fun here, I'm really glad there are so many awesome people on campus. Yesterday was pretty slow, all we had were physicals and one meeting. All my bits seem to be in order, although the Tetanus shot they gave me is starting to sting. Last night me, Ross (one of my roommates), Mae, and my pod leader Nelson all went grocery shopping for meals for us and the pod we're sharing a kitchen with. I volunteered to cook one night, I'm gonna make that simple chicken, spinach, mushroom, feta sautee I like with some rice pilaf. It was rather daunting trying to shop for 26 people; I ended up buying five packages of mushrooms and spinach and about ten pounds of chicken. Our total grocery bill for both pods came to about $900, which was kinda crazy. I was planning on going to check out the local dive, Harvey's, but since shopping took us so long I ended up just turning in early, which turned out to be a pretty good idea since we had a pretty intense day today.

Our first community service project was today, working outside the California state agriculture building on the development of a demonstration garden. Yesterday another Americorps team went through and cleared most of the ivy growing on the land they wanted, so today we dug moats to control water flow, removed the last few patches of ivy, and started aerating and planting various edible crops. I mostly did digging and root removal. At one point got a little overzealous with a shovel and ended up cracking one of the buried sprinkler heads, which resulted in the sidewalk flooding when they turned on the sprinkler system for the new plants. Oops. I helped them dig up and clear out the pipe though, and they'll replace the head soon. It was good hard work, and I'm considering doing some of my individual service project hours working on finishing that garden. Afterward we went and toured the Capitol building, which was pretty cool. Nice summaries of each area of California (apparently there's a place just called "Lake") and artwork, including this huge bronze bear that Schwarzenegger recently bought. It was a cool way to see downtown Sacramento, which was actually really quiet all day. Tomorrow we have the day off aside from TB test results, so I think I'm going to go exploring the city a little more, see what's around. I gotta go shower now, I'm covered in dirt from digging all day.