Tag: Devon

We worked at the Clowder House at the Animal Rescue League (ARL) this morning. We have been working at the Clowder House since we started volunteering. It is a 2-story cat housing unit built in 2017 to provide additional space for long term housing for cats who are not ready for adoption. Volunteers have to receive special training to work here as they may be dealing with cats with behavioral issues. While there may be more challenges working with cats at the Clowder House than the adoption area (taking precautions not to get bitten or scratched), we also learned that much of what affected the cats’ behavior come from their unpleasant past experiences (being abused or neglected, living in feces-filled homes etc). Thanks to the caring staff and volunteers, some of the cats do develop trust and become calmer over time, and they are moved to the adoption area.

These week we were cleaning a section of Prairie Ridge park and an area around Centennial High School. It is probably a good sign that Prairie Ridge was actually pretty clean and didn’t have a lot of trash to pick up. The area around Centennial had a significant amount of trash and broken glass near the parking lot, so we were able to make a bigger impact there.

This week’s clean-up was around Promenade Park. This area was recently used for the town’s fireworks display and Summerfest. Some of the taller grass and tree areas were definitely in need of cleaning. If we were competing by weight, Devon probably would have won due to the complete brick that he found.

This week, we are cleaning the trail around DMACC Lake. We were excited to be joined by several children and families from my piano studio. Many of the children do not know each other well and one way to relieve performing anxiety during recitals is knowing you have a friend in the audience. So we paired up the children as well as the parents during this clean-up, giving them a mission, on top of cleaning up the park, to find out what they have in common with each other.

We are very thankful for the children and their families taking their time to join us this evening making our city cleaner.

We conducted our Summer City Clean-up in Georgetown Park today. This was three days after the 4th of July. We were surprised by the amount of fireworks remnants found in the park. We spent an hour picking them up, and we were not even half way through the park. We decided to return on Saturday morning to continue our clean-up.

While we were excited to have our bags filled, it felt bittersweet as it makes us question why our fellow residents were littering our parks. Our clean-up activities proved to be an enlightening experience. As on days where we don’t find much trash, we may feel uneventful, while we should be feeling grateful that our city is clean with the help of our responsible residents.

Our Summer City Clean-up brought us to Lakeshore Drive this week. Most of the trash were found in and near the pond. We hope the ducks and frogs were happier with a cleaner pond.

This summer, we decided to initiate a program to clean up our city every week. Our Summer City Clean-up begins today along the trail on North Ankeny Boulevard. While the trail was quite clear, there were lots of trash along the road. It was also very kind that the garbage man had offered to take our trash.