End of Week 5

These days I buy my coffee from the hot drinks vending machine on the first floor of Hutchison Hall. I'm up to at least 2 cups a day- sometimes I bring some coffee from home in a glass pickle jar. After all, what environmentalist actually buys their coffee from a vending machine on a daily basis? -it just seems wrong.

But, yesterday morning I didn't bring any coffee from home and so I descended the stairs to the vending machine. Inserting my dollar bill, the green lights lit up, acknowledging I had a credit, “$1.00.” I pushed the buttons, “1-A-3,” for a large, black coffee. However, in lieu of a plopping-down of a paper cup, and a spilling-out of coffee, my dollar bill was instead spit back out at me and the machine alerted me, with its' green lights and bleeping, “WINNER!” Winner?! Yes, I won my Thursday morning coffee from the vending machine on the first floor of Hutchison Hall. I took my dollar bill back from the machine slot, grabbed my coffee that had emerged, and, with a laugh, walked back upstairs to our office to start our day of work.

Last week or so, we received office supplies. The luxury of being able to print out a document, staple the pages together, 3-hole punch it and add it to our binders was to be ours... I retrieved the supplies (a three hole punch, a stapler, tape, a tape dispenser, and computer paper), all of it neatly fit in a cardboard box, from the CS department to bring it back to our Sustainability office summer home. On my walk back over, as I approached the Hylan building, the door opened... No one was around, no one had touched the button to electronically open the door...the door simply opened for me. The door opened for me and, clutching our box of office supplies, in I walked, with a laugh, back up to the sustainability office...

These 2 events really did happen. And now I can't help but imagine similar occurrences taking place in our larger sustainability efforts—doors suddenly and miraculously opening, and money flying at us... “you are a WINNER....” “Yes, this really should happen, here are the resources, let's make sure it happens.”

Today marks the half way mark of the summer Campus Sustainability internships. We are making great progress. We also have a lot of information to pull together in the next 5 weeks. I'm inspired daily by my fellow co-workers. We are individually and collaboratively collecting and synthesizing many resources, building many new relationships and creating new connections throughout our own University as well as with individuals involved in sustainability efforts throughout the country. We'll keep knocking on doors, opening the ones we can, and being thankful for the support we do receive. Of course, I think we'd all be excited for some more doors to open on their own and free coffee too.