My Life As a Staff Chick
Mar. 17th, 2012 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelI got to be a staff chick today.
A poison staff chick.
The spouse and I volunteered for a clean-up of invasive plant species at Belle Isle. The weapons available were big saws, medium saws, little curved saws, loppers, and herbicide wands. They're like bent PVC pipes with a valve to control the herbicide flow and a sponge at the tip to apply the poison directly to what you want to kill, which in this case was the stumps of honeysuckle shrubs. Asmyaru can attest, I'm pretty short, so I opted for wand duty instead of the sawing'n'hacking part. We had a little squad of volunteers-- a couple of guys with saws, a guy and a girl with loppers, and me with my poison staff. There was one other poison user in the group, but she was hardcore and carried a saw and the herbicide wand. As we worked, one of the cutters would bring down a shrub and then call out for herbicide, and then I'd dart through the underbrush to them, hold the wand to the stump, wait a few seconds until the severed end of the stump turned nice and green, and then on to the next victim.
My husband, who approaches RPGs from perspectives that are not rooted in Fire Emblem, called me the team mage. :)
We had a pretty good squad of people with some experience in recognizing the species we wanted to kill and in removing said species, but we got dispersed through the forest over the course of an hour or so, and then a bunch of, er, trainees showed up. Suddenly I was the sole poison user in a group of about twelve college-aged kids who couldn't recognize honeysuckle on sight (but they learned, fast and well). Things got a little crazy then. I was running back and forth to answer the calls for herbicide, getting my hair caught on low branches, getting my clothes snagged on hawthorn and wild rose and raspberries, and crawling over fallen logs to reach stumps that hadn't been cut in a really strategic manner. I was also afraid my wand's poison would run out, which would mean a very inconvenient return to the "base camp" for a refill.
But we managed to clear out one small corner of the forest pretty well-- we hauled away about a hundred feet of brush, stacked three feet high by the roadside. It was a very nice way to spend an unbelievably summery St. Patrick's Day morning.
A poison staff chick.
The spouse and I volunteered for a clean-up of invasive plant species at Belle Isle. The weapons available were big saws, medium saws, little curved saws, loppers, and herbicide wands. They're like bent PVC pipes with a valve to control the herbicide flow and a sponge at the tip to apply the poison directly to what you want to kill, which in this case was the stumps of honeysuckle shrubs. As
myaru can attest, I'm pretty short, so I opted for wand duty instead of the sawing'n'hacking part. We had a little squad of volunteers-- a couple of guys with saws, a guy and a girl with loppers, and me with my poison staff. There was one other poison user in the group, but she was hardcore and carried a saw and the herbicide wand. As we worked, one of the cutters would bring down a shrub and then call out for herbicide, and then I'd dart through the underbrush to them, hold the wand to the stump, wait a few seconds until the severed end of the stump turned nice and green, and then on to the next victim. My husband, who approaches RPGs from perspectives that are not rooted in Fire Emblem, called me the team mage. :)
We had a pretty good squad of people with some experience in recognizing the species we wanted to kill and in removing said species, but we got dispersed through the forest over the course of an hour or so, and then a bunch of, er, trainees showed up. Suddenly I was the sole poison user in a group of about twelve college-aged kids who couldn't recognize honeysuckle on sight (but they learned, fast and well). Things got a little crazy then. I was running back and forth to answer the calls for herbicide, getting my hair caught on low branches, getting my clothes snagged on hawthorn and wild rose and raspberries, and crawling over fallen logs to reach stumps that hadn't been cut in a really strategic manner. I was also afraid my wand's poison would run out, which would mean a very inconvenient return to the "base camp" for a refill.
But we managed to clear out one small corner of the forest pretty well-- we hauled away about a hundred feet of brush, stacked three feet high by the roadside. It was a very nice way to spend an unbelievably summery St. Patrick's Day morning.
