Sunday, November 29, 2009

Turning around a Fail

Well, I'm three months into my "year of deconsumption" and I'm 1 for 3. I started out strong with my full month of no alcohol - but, the last two months have been pretty weak. Part of the issue might be that a year is a long time to stay focused on anything. Also, I think that some of the months I chose were either redundant or off message. So, I'm consolidating a little bit. See my new schedule on the right. I'll be back at the end of December to preview January.

Monday, November 9, 2009

November already

Well, as you can probably tell - October's decluttering did not go too well. I packed up a box of books that's still in my room - that's about it. And so far, volunteering in November hasn't gone much better. These two months have been difficult mostly because they are rather tangential to the overall point of this blog, which is "deconsumption".

But, today I found a site which might help out with November. It's Maryland Volunteer Centers - a site which has links to various volunteer links around the state. On the Baltimore site I was able to search by zip code and activity type (environment, healthy community, arts & culture etc).

Here are some of the positions that interest me the most:

1) Research Assistant/Data Entry for Baltimore Health Department - It involves conducting surveys and data entry. Don't know how interesting it would be - but, I would like to be more involved with community health. Although I work in the health field I don't work with directly with community health departments in large cities.

2) Serving meals and/or mentoring at "Our daily bread" center - I might start with serving meals just to check it out and then look into mentoring. The volunteering I've done with South Baltimore Learning Center has been very fulfilling. I've been working with Willie for over a year now and I'd like to do more of the same kind of work.

Anybody have other suggestions?