Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Volunteers and volunteering

Sometimes Walter tells me the word volunteer is a synonym for 'sucker'. Actually it can be. You know you attend a meeting and end up having promised to take on an enormous task without having opened your mouth on the subject. Yes that does happen. However being a volunteer is a good thing. You get to give back a little.

Today and tomorrow I am volunteering and a local marketing organization's annual conference. In addition to herding cats (I mean working with exhibitors), I will also get to attend the event for free and meet other marketing people. So I help the association and I get something out of it in return. That is not a bad volunteer arrangement. The herding cats part can be a little stressful but usually not bad. I did it last year and I think everyone was still friends at the end.

Yesterday I attended my support group and have now volunteered to help the organization put together a program. That I just find to be interesting and I like helping that organization. However I didn't go there to volunteer, I went to be supported. You never know how your day will turn out. That's what makes life interesting some times.

Now I do have a volunteer mystery going on in my garden. This is another type of volunteer. These are plants you plant one year as annuals and they reseed themselves and volunteer to appear another year. But if you can't remember exactly what they looked like (I had a bad case of chemo brain and stress last year) and they aren't exactly where they were last year, how do you tell them apart from weeds. I also was very productive a week or so ago and went out a spread a packet of seeds that was a mixture of annuals and perennials. I am not exactly sure what they look like either and there were 10 different kinds of seeds in the packet. I have weeds, volunteers, and new seedlings all mixed up. I guess I will have to postpone the weeding for a while. (I can tell the Japanese Knotweed from everything else - it is quite evily distinctive!)

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