Volunteers Swarm NoMi! (pictorial, part 2 of 2)

Guest post and photos by the Hawthorne Hawkman

Whenever we experience tragic events, they always seem to overshadow the little day-to-day things that go on in our community and in our lives that make things better. It's been a tough weekend for a lot of people and there's no way around that. But our neighborhood benefited from the hard work of as many as 200 or more volunteers from the Target Corporation and the Pohlad Family of Companies. I don't want to forget that either. So what follows are a few other shots of the Cottage Park cluster work...



Volunteers seemed especially excited to get rid of chain link fences, which can be unsightly and not conducive to a sense of community.



The biggest task seemed to be construction of a retaining wall, as seen below.



I also met Chad Schwitters of Urban Homeworks and his cute-as-a-button daughter. She was eagerly searching for earthworms, then putting them in this jar that had been dug up:




(Nerdy Hawkman “Lord of the Rings” parody alert) The volunteer crew also unearthed this rather disturbing artifact:



NoMi legend has it that when the drilling for geothermal power in the EcoVillage is complete, the Chosen One will hurl this sculpture into the molten core of the earth. Once destroyed, the power of Slummy the Squirrel will be vanquished forever and NoMi will begin a decades-long reign of eco-friendly prosperity and housing code compliance.

But good fortune was already smiling on us. Jay Clark of CURA was dropping off kids from the Farview soccer team. Fresh off a 1-0 victory, they stopped by for lunch and we got to bask in the glory of our star athletes once again.




A special thanks goes out to everyone who works to make NoMi a better place.