I love being a part of Windermere Real Estate. Perhaps my favorite part of being a Realtor here is Community Service Day. There’s always a lot of grumbling, at least on my part, in the days leading up to it. I think about past projects and the year we had way too much to do and the year we didn’t have nearly enough. I think about the time we cleared the Audubon trail at Columbia Park and how the park guy kept urging us, “Oooo, just a little more. You can knock this part out in twenty minutes,” and forty-five minutes later, just as we finish the area he said would take half that time, he’d pop up, like a gopher, and say, “There’s just a little more. You can knock this part out in twenty minutes.” I think about how exhausting it is. And how, even though I work out six days a week and lift weights on two of those days, I am always sore the next day, somewhere, in muscles I didn’t know I had.
But I love it because I’m helping. I am contributing to the betterment of my community. I’m living out the Golden Rule that day (even if I flub it sometimes the other 364 in a year).
This year, we did some major landscaping at the old Police Station in downtown Kennewick. We removed the old shrubs and trees, lots of rocks, the old ground cover and some sod. We put in new borders, ground cover, flowers and trees, and spread new rock. The YMCA will be using this building and they were thrilled with the changes.
In a neat little twist, this year the Windermere Foundation got in to the act. If I tweeted and used the Twitter hashtag #wrecsd when writing about my Community Service Day activities, the Windermere Foundation contributed $1 for every tweet to the Windermere Kids at the Y fund – up to $25,000! I did not tweet twenty-five thousand times, but I did tweet about nine times, and added a picture, too, for most of them.
If you are on Twitter, follow me – http://twitter.com/carimcgee. Go back through the stuff on Friday the 18th and you can see some of what we did.
If you’re not on Twitter, then check out the KNDU story. At the 26-second mark, you can see me almost fall, but my coworker helped me out and spared me from future years of remembering the year I twisted my ankle!