Friday, September 12, 2014

venture vermont: the wrap-up

last friday i finished putting together my documentaton for the venture vermont challenge. the department of forest, parks, and recreation prefers either to have your photos and such on cd or dvd else in googleplus.

oh, goodness, what a nightmare googleplus is!

because it's really well suited for SHARING ALL THE THINGS WITH ALL THE PEOPLE, but it's not so good at letting you control your formatting or your layout and let's face it: i have a blog and i have a number of other accounts on which i share things, but google is only flexible if you want to put ALL YOUR THINGS on google and even then it's a clustertangle.

so i tried that for a couple of hours, threw up my hands, and decided to simply keep my super nice formatted albums over at flickr and toss the bare minimum of the photos onto some discs.

of course, the photos aren't much good without the accompanying texts, which are here in the blog.

so as a compromise i tossed the photos and videos with some minimal labeling onto discs with an accompanying document in paper form and also in pdf that's essentially the blog posts about the sections of the scorecard. the pdf document on the disc has live links in it, so they can fire that puppy up and see it more or less the way i like it, plus they have the discs.


the organized photo albums are here. i am particularly proud of the field guide album.

the playlist of videos is here.

and now, to tie it all up in one linky place, are the posts of the past week detailing each section of the scorecard:


i was so excited to finish the challenge that i couldn't just drop it in the mail; i felt that a field trip to the mother ship was in order.

so i sent an email to the DFPR to ask if i could hand deliver, and on friday afternoon i went to the big shiny state office building to hand in my packet. it gave it a little ceremonial finish, and i got to meet the people in the office.

the state parks are maybe the front end flagship thing you think about when you think of the DFPR, but they administer and care for a lot of things in this state that make the place so nice. a lot of state forests just sit there kind of quietly and you'd barely even notice the parcel was there, but i tell you whut: if someone came and put up condos on those parcels you'd notice in a big fat honkin' hurry.

and the venture challenge could have been written as one big promotion of state parks, but it wasn't. it was written like a thing to encourage people to get out and enjoy outdoor activities, which is a super smart long view of the thing, because if you have a population that uses outdoor spaces, you have a population that cares about state, federal, and municipal parks, forests, and wilderness areas.

and if you take a longer view, a population that gets outside to play tends to be a healthier population, which drives healthcare costs down.

now, i needed very little coaxing to go out and play. i'm currently on a daily geocache streak that started last november first. i go outside to play every. single. day.

but this challenge gave me some extra reasons to pay attention to my little friends the frogs and the flowers. i had to really work on firebuilding skills. i took a closer look at my state parks.

and now i'm going to get a pretty shiny medal.

i LOVE shiny things!

next season i am thinking of using my medal to visit EVERY state park and forest and doing an activity in each.

hey, DFPR! you want to set me up with a challenge about that?


No comments:

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails