Wear your Madison House T-Shirt tomorrow, April 21st, for a chance to win some FREE Chick-fil-a!

On April 7th – with the help of some enthusiastic student leaders – we ran around grounds giving out Chick-fil-a coupons to U.Va. students who were wearing a Madison House T-Shirt.

Here are some of the volunteers and student leaders we spotted last time.

Our goal is to raise awareness by encouraging volunteers to wear their t-shirts on Grounds and to recognize some of them for their thorough commitment to community service!

Today at pet pals I played with the coolest three dogs ever, excluding my own of course. These dogs were all in one cage together, which almost never happens unless three dogs are really friendly and need more than one buddy.

What was strange about my time with these dogs was I didn’t know any of their names. The reason I was able to play with these dogs was because one of my good friends Taylor Harbin, an experienced dog walker, had asked me to play with a group of dogs who were being kept in the back room. They were going to be back there until they lost a little bit of weight and could be walked by regular volunteers.

However, she had never told me what their names were. I never realized how hard it is to play with a bunch of dogs when you don’t know their names, so I made some up.

So for the next hour I played and exercised with “Pistachio”, “Shocko”, and “Clinton”. It was seriously some of the most fun I’ve ever had volunteering at the SPCA.

Eventually my friend Taylor returned and told me the names of the dogs. But when I called them by their real names, they didn’t respond at all. It made me realize that many of the dogs at the SPCA are given names when they get there, in many cases the names they have mean almost nothing to most of these dogs. Nonetheless by the end of our time playing together I felt like these three dogs and I had legitimately bonded. If I didn’t know my parents would kill me for bringing home three more dogs, I would have adopted them then and there.

In one of my previous entries I said I always write down the names of the dogs I walk. That day, I realized it should be less about the long list of dogs I’ve walked and more about the dogs themselves that I’m helping and the extraordinary feeling I get from doing it.

Your Pet Pal,

Dan

This week at Trinity, I was able to settle back into the old groove of helping my grandparent play bingo. She is blind, so she hands me the chips and I place them on the correct numbers. We are both very competitive about the game, and as numbers are called, I make sure to tell her how the board stands and what critical slots we need to fill. The bingo prizes consist of bags of cookies, floral t-shirts, and stuffed animals, and it is enough to induce an intensity across the cafeteria as chips are played and numbers called.

We all still talk and make quiet jokes to each other when our cards get so close to BINGO but fail. It is all right because (my grandparent included) elderly smiles are exchanged. Talk of the weather and a nice church service to look forward to keep minds light.

Someone prematurely yells “Bingo!” from down the hall, just to alert elderly glances of doubt and confusion but inevitably, evolving laughter, and I enjoy my position as the “chip placer,” helping my grandparent help herself to a game of luck and expectancy.

I tell her, “Aw man..we’re close. Just two more spots..,” and she smiles and says, “Good now.” Then someone yells, “Bingo!” not prematurely, and elderly glances look up with a hope at doubt and a joke, but seeing another eager, winning face in return is answer enough for the competition to end. It ends with me telling my grandparent, “Well that’s how it is. You win some. You lose some.” And she answers with, “Yes. But I do like to win.”