Elizabeth Downie's blog

 

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My name is Elizabeth and I hope you will join me in support of the

National Wildlife Federation's Great American Backyard Campout!

Donations will be accepted until July 31, 2012

 

Let's play some GABC trivia! 

Question: What percentage of kids play outside daily?

A) 50%   B) 10%

C) 25%   D) 75%

Answer: C 25%

Yes, that is sadfully correct.  Only 25% of kids play outside daily—as opposed to 75% a generation ago!

On Saturday, June 23rd, I’ll be joining thousands of families across the country to help American children explore the great outdoors and take the first steps to happy, nature-filled, healthy lives.

National Wildlife Federation’s Great American Backyard Campout will provide an opportunity to open the door and spend a night filled with exploration and fun under the stars all while helping our nation’s kids!

That’s where you come in. NWF’s Great American Backyard Campout is family fun with a purpose: helping American kids benefit from outdoor time. By supporting my fundraising efforts, you can help raise awareness of the important work of NWF programs like Green Hour, Nature Find, Trees for the 21st Century, Certified Wildlife and Schoolyard Habitats that help get kids outside and connected with nature.

Find out how you can make a difference by visiting my personal fundraising page or join me along with the thousands of people who will gather in backyards, neighborhoods, communities and parks to take part in a night that can mark your family’s first step into a lifetime filled with healthy, outdoor fun.

Donations will be accepted through July 31 and are tax deducatible.

I would like to thank you in advance for your support!

- Elizabeth

 

 

Join us for the Geocaching 101 and Advanced Geocaching Courses at The BEST Center at Genesee Community College!  Everyone is welcome!

Today, more than 1.6 million geocaches have been hidden, and found by more than 5 million people worldwide. On this past Leap Day alone, over 79,450 people logged a cache or an event, which is more than double the amount from four years ago!

Want to learn more about geocaching?

Don’t just hear about it - EXPERIENCE it! 

Register NOW and get your cache on!

GPS units will be provided (or bring your own!) and each person will get a free geocaching swag item!

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Geocaching 101

Saturday, April 14 • 9:00AM - 12:00PM • Batavia Campus

Wednesday, May 23 • 6:00PM - 9:00PM • Batavia Campus

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This information. and much more, can be found at The Animal Rescue Site.

To vote for Volunteers for Animals, please click HERE!

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Hi!  I'm writing to tell you about The Animal Rescue Site $300,000 Shelter+ Challenge of 2012 - together with Petfinder.  The Animal Rescue Site is awarding $300,000 in grants to eligible Petfinder.com member rescue organizations to help animals.  The grand prize in each voting round is a $5,000 grant, and there are many other prizes!  Visit The Animal Rescue Site to vote every day and learn more.  You don't have to register, and voting is FREE!  Support your favorite shelter and vote today! 

How long is the Challenge, and how can we increase our chances?
This voting round begins on January 9, 2012, and ends at midnight (PT) on March 18, 2012. There will be other voting rounds throughout the year - more chances for your organization to win! The more friends you can rally to vote for your favorite rescue organization, the better its chances of winning. Every vote, every day counts - shelters can pull ahead even during the last few days with enough support. Get people involved! Your favorite rescue organization is counting on you!

What kind of grant could my shelter win?
Seventy (70) grants will be awarded for a total of $75,000 to eligible Petfinder.com members during the very first voting round of the 2012 Challenge. The grand prize will go to the eligible Petfinder.com organization with the highest accumulative votes for the duration of the Challenge as specified in the rules.

The Prizes Are:
Grand Prize:  One $5,000 grant!
Dark Horse Grand Prize:  One $2,000 grant!
Dark Horse Runners Up:  Five $1,000 grants.
State Winners:  Fifty-one $1,000 state grants
  (50 U.S. states and Washington D.C.)
Canadian Winners:  One $1,000 grant will be awarded.
International Winner:  One $1,000 grant will be awarded.
Weekly Winners:  Ten $1,000 grants will be awarded, one for each week of this voting round of the Shelter⁺ Challenge.

The seasons in Western New York are not always cooperative, so you really need to be able to accept all four of them – when you can get them.  Because of this, I have a wide variety of hobbies that keep me busy throughout the year.  During the winter, I enjoy watching the Sabres play hockey and getting outdoors to go sledding on a steep hill, snowshoeing through a local park or even start the occasional snowball fight with my soon-to-be 5 year old niece.  In the fall, I enjoy taking long walks on leaf-covered country roads, taking a trip to the local orchard to pick a peck of apples or that perfectly round pumpkin, and watching Buffalo Bills football.  The spring brings out the kite-flyer in me and allows me to start up my two-mile a night walks around the block with my husband, preparing me for the upcoming warmer weather.  I like to do a lot of camping in the summer, aerobie tossing with friends and my casual 20 miles rides along the Erie Canal on my recumbent bicycle.  However, there is only one hobby that I can do year round, and it is one that I am very passionate about.  That hobby is geocaching.

I’m sure most of you have heard of geocaching, but you may not know what it is.  Geocaching is an outdoor, high-tech treasure hunt.  You go out into the world with a hand-held Global Positioning Satellite receiver, or GPSr for short, and find hidden containers called caches.  Once found, you make a trade of a small trinket and then log your find.  So, I would like to share with you some of my geocaching experiences.

I started caching in late July 2010 with my husband and we go by the caching name of “authorized users.”  To this date, we have found over 130 caches!  Included in that number are the caches we found to complete the Seaway Trail GeoTrail, which entailed a month and a half journey along the Great Lakes, from northwestern Pennsylvania to the Thousand Islands region of upstate New York.

If asked whether I prefer to cache in urban or rural areas, I would definitely tell you that I prefer to cache in rural areas.  The caches in rural areas require more hiking and really expand your mind to a much farther capacity for your search. 

One of our most favorite local caches is called “Bruce Wayne’s Lair” which is located near the old mining caves in Akron, NY.  We trudged through about two feet of snow for about an hour to get to this cache, mostly because we took a wrong turn, but it was the most fantastic location to visit.  Not only do the caves have a rich history, they also have, what I call, upside down icicles!

“Did You Say Ohio?” was a very fun multi-cache, putting a play on the town name of Akron.  This cache  took us to various historic buildings and businesses in Akron, NY.  I have lived in this area for over 15 years and had never visited the places I was taken on this cache.  This actually happens quite frequently, so I really appreciate the opportunities it give me to open up my eyes to the historic and natural places that are right in my own backyard.  Unfortunately, this cache has been archived.

After three days and a lot of research, I was able to figure out the riddle to the first part of a puzzle cache in Olcott, NY, called “She’s A Lady… Bug!”  The puzzle was actually a picture of several ladybugs with different patterns of spots on their backs.  To figure out the puzzle, you had to decrypt the pattern into a math problem to determine the coordinates of the final location of the cache.  I figured out the puzzle just as winter hit, and we only make it to Olcott during the warm months.  Once the weather breaks, we will conquer that cache!  I have a very special trinket of a wind-up ladybug that I plan to place in the cache once we find the final, in tribute of the complexity of the puzzle.

Also, we just recently experienced our first earthcache, which was in Akron Falls Park, and it was spectacular!  It took us to an overlook of one of the falls and we had to describe to the cache owner our experience at the location, how much water we thought was coming over the falls at the time of our visit and what the weather was like while there.

I could go on and on about my geocaching adventures and journeys, as I have become truly passionate about this hobby.  As a momentum, I like to keep a photo-journal of our finds, so that we can later reflect on the awesome adventures we have had, and even some funny blunders, that we have had while caching.  To keep up with the times, we just created a Twitter account so that our friends and family across the country can experience our journeys and finds with us in real-time.  We hope to have a webpage up for our family and friends to see our photo-journal, but that is still in the creativity stages. 

My niece loves to come with us and calls it “treasure hunting.” She does a really good job of watching out for the pirates who may want to steal the treasure.  I just think that everyone should experience this wonderful hobby – it is a great, fun and healthy pastime for people of all ages and lifestyles.

I would like to invite you to follow us on Twitter!  We can't explain everything about our experiences in only 140 characters, but you will at least know that we are out there and you can look up our detailed logs on www.geocaching.com after our posts.  Find us on Twitter as @authorizedusers (make sure it s all one word and plural!)

Also, feel free to check out our profile on www.geocaching.com.  If you do not have an account, it is absolutely free to sign up!

We hope to see you on the trails soon!  May you steer clear of muggles and be rich with cache! 

 

 

 

Genesee Community College Toastmasters Club

Cordially Invites You to be our Guest at

EAST MEETS WEST

An Evening of Global Communication and Dining

Menu: Sushi, Wraps, Salad, Pizza, Dessert, Beverages

 

Keynote Speaker:

Patrick Ho, Founder and CEO of Rochester Optical

 

Speech Contest:

Best Impromptu – Best Speaker – Best Evaluator

 

GCC TOASTMASTERS CLUB CHARTER CEREMONY

 

Basket Raffle!  Door Prizes!  Entertainment!

 

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

5:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Genesee Community College

Conable Technology Building – Room T119

One College Drive, Batavia, NY 14020

 

Purchase tickets in the Student Activities office!

(585) 343-0055 x6261

$5.00 for GCC Students/Employees

$10.00 for Non-GCC Students/Employees

Free Admission to all Toastmasters International Club Members

 

RSVP by April 25, 2011 to:

Aoi Kitagawa, AKitagaw@my.genesee.edu

 

 

Press Release from Genesee Community College, 3/22/2011 For more information contact: Donna Rae Sutherland, 585-343-0055 Ext. 6616 Genesee Community College Brings Home a Rube Goldberg Victory March Madness might have had a lot of local sports fans wearing orange, but when Genesee Community College traveled to Syracuse to this past weekend they ended up coming home with a win - for their Rube Goldberg Machine. The concept behind Rube Goldberg Machines is simple. Using household items, a team of at least four students must construct a mechanism that can accomplish a simple task in the most complex way possible. Using things like pool balls, a baseball bat and glove, DVD covers, a plinko board, a fishing reel, a Barbie doll on a zip line, a computer printer, dozens of plastic soda bottles, darts, a derby car and lots of engineering ingenuity, five GCC students constructed a machine to water a plant and compete against Syracuse University at Onondaga Community College this past weekend. With this recent win, the students will load their plant watering device into a truck and travel to Purdue University in Indiana to enter the National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on March 26, 2011. GCC Physics Professor Michael Crittenden explained that when he asked his classes if anyone was interested in attempting a Rube Goldberg Machine, no one spoke up right away. "A couple of days later, a few students said they'd like to try it," Crittenden said. "They've taken responsibility for it themselves and they're still doing a great job." Engineering students David Simmons (Arcade, NY), Matt Klotzbach (East Pembroke, NY), Nick Rider (Holland, NY), Jen McLure (Pavilion, NY) and drafting student Tom Langley (Arcade) had been working tirelessly before the competition to put their machine together. For the last four weeks, they spent at least 20 hours a week developing their project expecting stiff competition at nationals. According to the Official Rulebook for the 2011 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, teams must adhere to strict guidelines according to size and time. The contraption must fit within a six by six by six foot space and complete the task with a minimum of 20 steps - within two minutes per run. The exact definition of a "step" according to the Rube Goldberg Machine Rulebook is to simply transfer energy from one action into another action. Rube Goldberg, an American cartoonist who passed away in 1970, was known for the series of cartoons he would draw involving complex, winding devices that perform simple tasks in complicated ways. The students are judged on a recognizable theme for the machine; their demonstrated Rube Goldberg "spirit;" team chemistry; and how well the machine works within the given criteria. Genesee Community College students say they're aiming for the gold this weekend, but Crittenden is positive that no matter what happens, it will have been a fun trip for the College's first Rube Goldberg competitors. "If we get gold or last place, we'll be having fun and that's what's important," he said. "Also, this builds a lot of practical skills such as teamwork, imagination and persistence. So, we'll be trying it again. We're making this up as we go along but we hope to get a club together next year."