The RGP April Wrap Up
Finally, we made it a whole month cleaning every day.
April Fools, you idiots! I missed 2 days this month which is once again terrible and embarrassing, but we did enough to keep the chains moving and there were some high points. Welcome to the month in review.
April is the month we took WPB by storm — and fully got to see some of the good ol’ nature. This is one of the trees downtown. Definitely sawed off a bit, which is not great, but imagine the treehouse you could build in this thing. Get real. This tree could actually be heaven for monkeys, let alone lizards. These banyan trees grow from seeds that grow in other plants, making them sort of a creepy parasite, but still incredibly cool stuff going on.
Among some of the new go to spots to clean is this field, captured above at sunrise on a blurry camera lens. Some call it artistic. This is right off Australian Ave, a main street, and therefore there’s always a huge amount of trash to go around. Only con is the weird little plants whose seeds stick to your sneakers, which can get annoying very quickly when out on the hunt.
Another shoutout goes to Mercer Ave, which is, as seen above, right next to the railroad tracks. The road itself also gets a good amount of trash. This is a breeding ground for trash, akin to how the western coast of Africa is a breeding ground for hurricanes due to its own variety of natural factors. Nature is pretty cool man. Feels a little less “natural” cleaning this area than the field but there are still some decent birds that come down here. The weird thing is every time I find a can here, its shredded into a million little pieces. Bizarre. Literally nowhere else on Earth have I seen trash shredded like this. Ominous.
As far as other favorite clean spots, have to shoutout this field by the office. There’s a more reasonable banyan tree here as well as always good lizards. The trash also flows, which is not a problem for us, only for the environment. This is truly a place that we can clean on the regular, as some of the locals appear to enjoy drinking in this field. Natty Ices in particular. Now that we’ve wrapped up the new cleanup spots, it’s time for the highs and lows of the month — this time starting with the lows (because we’re crazy).
Lows
- Did not clean every day. Missed 2 days. One after a concert and the other on a busy day with a trip to the airport involved, but still unforgivable. I will lose sleep over it.
- Been lazier in the mornings. With trash less accessible here than Baltimore, it’s become difficult to clean every morning. On one hand that’s good, because people take better care of the place, but on the other hand it’s bad because it’s just tough to find the good content. Having said that, when we get to downtown, there’s always good spots.
- Getting little plant thorns all over your pants/sneakers. Very annoying. Tough to show face anywhere without cleaning them all off first and it can be tedious.
- The painting. Found an exciting painting, only to discover, after bringing it home, that the picture was severely water damaged.
Highs
- Great wildlife. Have seen an abundance of exciting lizards, which leap all over the place and look very cool, iguanas, which go stupid, and a variety of birds and cool plants. Some nice cacti as well. Definitely positive variety.
- Variety of spots to clean. In Baltimore, we cleaned a 3 block radius and weren’t really out in nature besides saving items from draining into the Chesapeake. Here, the wildlife is abundant. Can’t complain.
- Great nature trails. Goes hand in hand with the other two, but really enjoyed the trips to Apoxee trailway and Grassy Marsh preserve (or something like that) pictured below.
- Side note about the Apoxee trailway — there were some excellent birds here, as well as sweeping marsh vistas, which I don’t really feel like uploading at this time. You have to go all the way to photos, and then pick one and name it, and then export it, and then find it in downloads. Too many steps at this point.
- And finally, an electric group clean with 20+ bags cleaned with many, many generous coworkers. This was a highlight of not only the month, but probably the year to this point. It’s truly awesome to see when so many people pitch in to make great things happen.
Thank you to all these people who came, and who rocked their excellent RGP hats (which you can buy at theregrowthproject.com), and thank you to all my readers who enjoy the blog itself. We’ve cleaned 2491 bags to this point. We will clean many more. If you love what we do, follow theregrowthproject on Instagram and subscribe to pitch on on patreon. May is the month we don’t miss a day. Back after it !!!!!!!!!
