Miscellaneous

Sunday night, I got a flat tire. I'm pretty sure it happened after going up a gravel driveway that had been washed away in spots due to all this rain we've been having. My valve stem was torn, which allowed the air to escape my tire, while the tire itself was still perfectly fine.

Anyhow, today I went to Tire Discounters and got the tire repaired for free. I was pleasantly surprised that they offer free valve stem replacement for the lifetime of your tire if you buy four from them (which I did about a year ago). And to think I was gonna go to Walmart and pay $20-$25?! Which would still have been a cheap fix by the way. So far I have gotten lucky to only tear up my car in fairly minor ways haha

Since summer work has come to an end, I've been looking for small ways to make money until I land another job. One of my bright ideas was to sell green beans from our garden. My dad had way more beans than he cared to fool with, so I offered to take them off his hands. I picked 25 gallons of beans in approximately five hours. My plan was to sell them online. I had someone interested who asked me to pick all the beans and then call them back and tell them how many I had. When I called back, they said they had already bought some. Bummer. So we ended up taking them to the Amish auction instead. 

Tonight, I helped my parents put up corn. My job was to cut corn off the cob, which wasn't too difficult once I got the hang of it. I came close to cutting myself a couple times, but fortunately no trips to the ER were necessary. My mom took a picture of us cutting up the corn, but I don't have a copy of it to share with you quite yet.

P.S.   

I now have the blogger app on my iPad, so hopefully you will be seeing posts more often from me. I hated the hassle of dealing with my ancient laptop to post frequently before, but now I don't have that excuse. 

Until next time, 

-miss ellaneous 

Recipes Anyone?

It's squash & zucchini season, y'all! What have you been doing with the veggies that you've gotten? At home, Mom usually breads the squash and fries them in a cast iron skillet or slices, marinates, and grills them. I have only tried a couple other ways myself, one being the zucchini noodles with marinara sauce for a delicious alternative to spaghetti noodles. I have also made squash/zucchini bread which is usually scrumptious! I don't think I've ever had one of these recipes that I didn't like. But, I know there are MANY more ways to fix them, so please share your recipes too!

Yesterday I decided to use one of my squash in a zucchini bread. I found this recipe on yummly and I liked it because it combined bananas, zucchini and chocolate chips all in one! The fat and sugar in the recipe didn't seem too excessive either, compared to some recipes I found, so I went for it. I replaced the zucchini for yellow squash, the canola oil for coconut oil, and I sprinkled chocolate chips on top! Here's my version of the recipe:

Ingredients: 

• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup coconut oil (Alt: canola, vegetable) 
• 1/2 cup sugar (granulated) 
• 2 cups zucchini/ yellow squash (grated)
• 4 ripe, mashed bananas 
• 1 T vanilla extract
• 3 1/2 cups flour (all purpose)
• 1 T ground cinnamon 
• 1 1/2 t baking powder
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips 

Preparation: 

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. In a large bowl beat eggs. Add oil, sugars, and vanilla and beat 1 minute more. Add mashed banana and grated zucchini and beat again until well combined, about 1-2 minutes. 
3. In another bowl, whisk together flour, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
4. Stir flour mixture into wet batter until well combined.
5. Stir in about 3/4 cup of chocolate chips.
6. Divide batter evenly between two load plans. Use remaining chocolate chips to sprinkle on top of batter. 
7. Bake 35-45 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean after being inserted into the center. 
8. Cool about 10 minutes before transferring out of pan and on to cooling rack.
9. Enjoy! It's perfect warm, with some milk! 

I also recently found this recipe for Zucchini Fritters. It sounds tasty. 

Share some of your recipes with me too? 

The Farmer's Daughter

New Job!

I began my new job a week ago. I am now back at CELTS at Berea College as an Americorps VISTA.

History of VISTA
Kennedy had the vision for VISTA and Johnson found the need for these volunteers when he started his "War on Poverty". The premise of VISTA is that volunteers live at the poverty level and serve the community where they are living by increasing capacity of existing programs or creating new programs. All of the volunteer efforts are supposed to help eradicate poverty. The number of volunteers grew over the years. In 1990, Bush founded the Commission on National and Community Service. AmeriCorps was born and VISTA became part of that. Today there are about 8000 volunteers all working to eradicate the core causes of poverty. 

How I ended up here
Okay, so that's VISTA in the big picture. How does that relate to CELTS? I didn't intend to apply to VISTA really. Actually last summer I was sort of turned off by VISTA when I learned that it's focused on indirect service. My only experience had ever been with direct service so office work sounded horrible. If it hadn't been for Heather approaching me about the position, I wouldn't have ever considered it. In fact, I've learned that Heather actually applied to have a VISTA for this role with me in mind, hoping that I would want to do such a thing.

What I'm doing
Here at CELTS my official title is Training Resource Specialist. That does not mean that I am currently a specialist in training resources. It means I do a lot of research and thinking in order to create training resources. My main focus is on the tutoring program here, which offers tutoring to K-12 students. In the past few years, the tutoring program hasn't been as effective as it could be simply because no one has had the time to make changes to the program in accordance to changing educational thinking and college schedules. Hopefully my experience with the program, my education background, and my experience tutoring other places will help me come up with a plan to change the program. We do have some ideas but making them happen is the hard thing. Currently I am restructuring the referral process and the assessment portion of the program. It's quite a bit of computer work.

What it's like
It is strange being back in CELTS just a bit. Currently there are only a handful of summer student workers here, but I imagine when the students get back on campus full force I will have to adjust. Many of these students are people that I worked with when I was a student so making the adjustment from student to staff is somewhat difficult. Since I won't be in a direct leadership role over the students, it should be fine though. Basically the only students I'll be working with directly are my former teammates on One-on-One anyway and I already was their student boss anyway. I look forward to being able to help this program and to learn more about education and teaching. Already I've learned so much about the elementary learning standards.