I volunteered on the Hash House for the State Champs Rogaine this year – I was planning on minioning and cutting up a lot of mushrooms or something, maybe grabbing a map and taking a short hike and there was going to be sitting in a camp chair with a book. As it turns out we didn’t have a hash leader yet so I volunteered myself and recklessly volunteered![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nm2 to be my copilot (we always need more experienced hash leaders, besides it’s fun).
The Rogaine name suggested a need to dress up so I spent the entire event wearing a white dress shirt, black suit jacket and a lovely white cravat – bottom half was track pants and hiking boots ;p the Hash Coordinator S. was very fetchingly dressed in a shirt & jacket, blue bow tie, shorts and boots.
Saturday 9:00 – 12:30 Shift (15 people rostered on)
I was up at 6:30,nm2 made it over just after 7 and we were on the road by 7:15 – we made good time and were at the campsite by 8:30. The tent/pavilion was already up and our team starting to assemble so we launched into a frenzy of setting up the tables, BBQs, bain marie and gas cookers in a way that sort of matched the official map but also took into account the weather predictions and people’s most recent experiences. Heh, it was a good chance to meet people and have intense scientific-ish conversations about rain angles and access to walkways.
Once we got our setup the way we wanted it I did the pre-rogaine food stocktake and we started hauling food out of the truck – the Hash Coordinator provides the list of food ordered and by this time the food deliverer has ticked things off, he’s ticked things off and I’m just confirming the food made it to the camp site and that I know what we’ve got. Mmm 20kg of bacon, and woe, no hash browns. They’ve been discontinued as a food item because of wastage. I love fried potato :(
We got our hash team working on food preparation – vast amount of pre-made cheese toasties to assemble, huge slabs of cake to slice, boxes of tomatoes and mushrooms to cut up, sausages to ‘de-link,’ lettuces to wash and ‘things’ to find and defrost.
Nm2 headed back to the nearest place that sold cooked chicken so we had warm food to feed the various volunteer teams for lunch once the event started (no BBQs running yet!) and I wandered around double-checking we had everything set up, getting the hash roster established and sort of chatting a lot. 12pm saw the event start and suddenly we went from looking at a sea of fit looking types with backpacks to a relatively tiny puddle of volunteers.
Saturday 12:30 – 1:00 Shift (0 people rostered)
We put on the volunteers lunch which included![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chaosmanor’s delicious vegan-friendly not-butter-not-chicken. I’m trying to partially compensate for the number of times vegetarians have to stare wistfully at the ‘real’ food and eat the salad. I sat down for the first time in six hours .
Recycling has hit a point where some volunteers bring a trailer of different bins which we keep in a Hash Staff Only tent so we can separate meat scraps, non-meat food scraps, paper & cardboard, glass & aluminium, plastic, eggshells, and landfill. We don’t make them available to regular people because they don’t get the bins right – I assume everyone competing is too tired to cope :p These people are fantastic and mean our landfill is reduced to a fraction of what it used to be.
I was fascinated and disappointed to learn that while the bread wrapping has one of the ‘recycle’ triangles printed on it, there aren’t any facilities who will take it.
Saturday 1:00 – 3:00pm Shift (6 people rostered)
All that prepping paid off – the task list said things like ‘make cheesies’ and ‘cut up mushrooms’ so we hung about, chatted, poked our setup and I was a little bit smug but hopefully inoffensively so. We ended up digging trenches in case we got as much rain as predicted and generally being organised.
S. (our fabulous Hash Coordinator) arranged for a soup kitchen to run independently out on the course so they grabbed the spare burners, bread rolls and 40L of soup and vanished. At the time they laughed at the 40L we gave them but eventually came back with only 5L left over so that turned out to be some nice estimating on S.’s part. We sent out a care package of hot cheese toasties for them with the Vetting team later that night.
We also put together five large boxes of mixed fresh fruit for the Vetting team to put out on the course at the water drops – the stocktake had a little ‘!!!’ next to the bananas and they turned out to be a little green – people ate them anyway.
Saturday 3:00 – 6:00pm Shift (6 people rostered)
We had a lovely mix of experienced hash volunteers and brand new people so we mixed it up and gave people broad roles or tiny ones depending on their comfort levels – that was fantastic for me – I had people who wanted to look after one thing with intense concentration and people who roamed and sorted issues out as they arose. We were up and cooking by 4pm when we officially opened for business and provided a slow trickle of food.
Mostly we then attracted the horde of tiny (and filthy!) children who were busy climbing all over the massive as yet unlit campfire (they temporarily fixed the ‘unlit’ aspect until W. put it back out again *grins* feral little pyromaniacs…) and hurling themselves into the nearby creek. I had brief fantasies about putting shock collars on them that zapped them if they approached the cakes more than once an hour.
Saturday 6:00 – 10:00pm Shift (6 people rostered)
By 7pm I was happy our team knew what they were doing and we were cheerfully feeding the hordes that came in before dark, just after dark, and were trying to get back in around dark but hadn’t quite managed it (there’s a few of those). We knew there was going to be rain so we expected most teams to come in overnight and want food. I leftnm2 with the team and went to our tent (which nm2 had kindly assembled for us earlier) to try and sleep as much as possible.
Saturday 10:00 – 2:00am Shift (4 people rostered)
Sleeping!
Saturday 2:00 – 6:00am Shift (2-4 people rostered)
The Admin volunteers toldnm2 they expected teams to start heading out again around 4am so when she came to bed at 1:30 she let me sleep another 2 hours and I was up again at 3:30 to catch up with the 2-6 shift. We had two people on, mostly maintaining existing hot food stocks and dozing in chairs and I gently started prepping for breakfast.
By 4am I’d put out all the standard breakfast cereals, we had porridge warming, all the bacon was in a box by the meat BBQ and I was well on the way to having cracked 20 dozen eggs – I am so glad we do all the food contact wearing gloves, I hate the sensation of egg white on bare skin. There was a busy patch from 5-6am where I just fried a lot of bacon and accepted being frantically busy but once the 6am shift trickled in we settled in nicely.
We scared poor S. because we’d run the internal truck lights all night (where all the food and fridges are) and they were… suspiciously dim. They successfully started the truck up with a battery and ran it for a little while to recharge the truck. Note for next time – make sure the late night shifts know how to turn the light on and off and why they might want to do this!
Saturday 6:00 – 10:00am Shift (8 people rostered)
Busy! We had, in addition to our usual hot foods on the BBQs, a pancake cooking and egg scrambling team plus all the breakfast foods and other activities. Phew. ‘Other activities’ include things like keeping a continuous supply of hot water available for us to wash our dishes and Rogainers to wash theirs. We also keep a hot drinks station going with coffee, tea, herbal tea and milo plus a fruit bowl and a lot of cake – by this time the kids had eaten all the bananas and were making headway into the apples and mandarins as well. Nm2 had the brilliant idea of keeping the mixed berry compote sitting on the bain marie and eating it warm-ish which went very well with the pancakes and the porridge.
Saturday 10:00 – 1:30am Shift (15 people rostered)
We switched out of breakfast mode abut 10:30am and got rid of the porridge which had assumed epic glutinous proportions (you need good upper body strength to work the soups and stews station I tell you) and started playing ‘guess how many people will want lunch.’ This mostly involved observing how many people the wet weather had encouraged to head home early, and asking Admin how many teams were still out on the course. I also started preemptively stocking taking and counting up everything we hadn’t used – like 10, darn it, 10 tubs of yoghurt in various flavours and 15 x 3L of milk. We barely dented the mushroom, tomato and onion supplies either. I think the wet weather meant a smaller turnout than expected and more people left early – plus, less attraction to the cold foods.
We condensed a lot of our food supplies (the rack of trays holding the bread eventually exceeded my height AND my ability to stand on tiptoe and put more on top) and started cleaning what we could. We were serving the last of the hot foods by the time the Rogaine results were being read out (12:30) and getting seriously into the cleaning and stacking phase. Random awesome people came and gave us extra help so by the time we’d stashed all the non-perishable food, recycled all the perishable food (a fantastic combination of the volunteers taking food home and our special recycling volunteers and their trailer of different bins) we were well positioned to start taking down all the equipment and stacking it next to the truck.
We had one minor injury. E. accidentally poured hot oil over her hand changing the grease trap for the meat BBQ so the First Aid Officer made her sit with her hand in a tub of cold water for 20 mins. E. refused to be ‘retired’ from duty and continued to participate vigorously from her perch on one of the equipment tubs. Since she’d done it successfully a number of times before we decided the process was OK but that accidentally squeezing it and causing it to overflow over your hand wasn’t good technique :p
Admin started taking down our tent/pavilion around the washing station – next time I’ll move it outside – and we were winding up the last of the pot cleaning and getting ready to start playing Truck-Tetris a little after 1pm. I grabbed a garbage bag for all the aprons and tea towels to take home and wash for the next event and thanked everyone for being such a great team.
Saturday 1:30pm done!
nm2 got our personal gear stashed in the car while we were winding up the Hash Tent and I helped take down our personal tent after – we copped a small amount of water over the night – lots of intermittent rain and wind so I wasn’t too fussed about packing up perfectly – need to dry the gear properly at home anyway.
We cranked up the music, fought over the controls, and headed home.
nm2 to be my copilot (we always need more experienced hash leaders, besides it’s fun).The Rogaine name suggested a need to dress up so I spent the entire event wearing a white dress shirt, black suit jacket and a lovely white cravat – bottom half was track pants and hiking boots ;p the Hash Coordinator S. was very fetchingly dressed in a shirt & jacket, blue bow tie, shorts and boots.
Saturday 9:00 – 12:30 Shift (15 people rostered on)
I was up at 6:30,
nm2 made it over just after 7 and we were on the road by 7:15 – we made good time and were at the campsite by 8:30. The tent/pavilion was already up and our team starting to assemble so we launched into a frenzy of setting up the tables, BBQs, bain marie and gas cookers in a way that sort of matched the official map but also took into account the weather predictions and people’s most recent experiences. Heh, it was a good chance to meet people and have intense scientific-ish conversations about rain angles and access to walkways.Once we got our setup the way we wanted it I did the pre-rogaine food stocktake and we started hauling food out of the truck – the Hash Coordinator provides the list of food ordered and by this time the food deliverer has ticked things off, he’s ticked things off and I’m just confirming the food made it to the camp site and that I know what we’ve got. Mmm 20kg of bacon, and woe, no hash browns. They’ve been discontinued as a food item because of wastage. I love fried potato :(
We got our hash team working on food preparation – vast amount of pre-made cheese toasties to assemble, huge slabs of cake to slice, boxes of tomatoes and mushrooms to cut up, sausages to ‘de-link,’ lettuces to wash and ‘things’ to find and defrost.
Nm2 headed back to the nearest place that sold cooked chicken so we had warm food to feed the various volunteer teams for lunch once the event started (no BBQs running yet!) and I wandered around double-checking we had everything set up, getting the hash roster established and sort of chatting a lot. 12pm saw the event start and suddenly we went from looking at a sea of fit looking types with backpacks to a relatively tiny puddle of volunteers.
Saturday 12:30 – 1:00 Shift (0 people rostered)
We put on the volunteers lunch which included
chaosmanor’s delicious vegan-friendly not-butter-not-chicken. I’m trying to partially compensate for the number of times vegetarians have to stare wistfully at the ‘real’ food and eat the salad. I sat down for the first time in six hours .Recycling has hit a point where some volunteers bring a trailer of different bins which we keep in a Hash Staff Only tent so we can separate meat scraps, non-meat food scraps, paper & cardboard, glass & aluminium, plastic, eggshells, and landfill. We don’t make them available to regular people because they don’t get the bins right – I assume everyone competing is too tired to cope :p These people are fantastic and mean our landfill is reduced to a fraction of what it used to be.
I was fascinated and disappointed to learn that while the bread wrapping has one of the ‘recycle’ triangles printed on it, there aren’t any facilities who will take it.
Saturday 1:00 – 3:00pm Shift (6 people rostered)
All that prepping paid off – the task list said things like ‘make cheesies’ and ‘cut up mushrooms’ so we hung about, chatted, poked our setup and I was a little bit smug but hopefully inoffensively so. We ended up digging trenches in case we got as much rain as predicted and generally being organised.
S. (our fabulous Hash Coordinator) arranged for a soup kitchen to run independently out on the course so they grabbed the spare burners, bread rolls and 40L of soup and vanished. At the time they laughed at the 40L we gave them but eventually came back with only 5L left over so that turned out to be some nice estimating on S.’s part. We sent out a care package of hot cheese toasties for them with the Vetting team later that night.
We also put together five large boxes of mixed fresh fruit for the Vetting team to put out on the course at the water drops – the stocktake had a little ‘!!!’ next to the bananas and they turned out to be a little green – people ate them anyway.
Saturday 3:00 – 6:00pm Shift (6 people rostered)
We had a lovely mix of experienced hash volunteers and brand new people so we mixed it up and gave people broad roles or tiny ones depending on their comfort levels – that was fantastic for me – I had people who wanted to look after one thing with intense concentration and people who roamed and sorted issues out as they arose. We were up and cooking by 4pm when we officially opened for business and provided a slow trickle of food.
Mostly we then attracted the horde of tiny (and filthy!) children who were busy climbing all over the massive as yet unlit campfire (they temporarily fixed the ‘unlit’ aspect until W. put it back out again *grins* feral little pyromaniacs…) and hurling themselves into the nearby creek. I had brief fantasies about putting shock collars on them that zapped them if they approached the cakes more than once an hour.
Saturday 6:00 – 10:00pm Shift (6 people rostered)
By 7pm I was happy our team knew what they were doing and we were cheerfully feeding the hordes that came in before dark, just after dark, and were trying to get back in around dark but hadn’t quite managed it (there’s a few of those). We knew there was going to be rain so we expected most teams to come in overnight and want food. I left
nm2 with the team and went to our tent (which nm2 had kindly assembled for us earlier) to try and sleep as much as possible. Saturday 10:00 – 2:00am Shift (4 people rostered)
Sleeping!
Saturday 2:00 – 6:00am Shift (2-4 people rostered)
The Admin volunteers told
nm2 they expected teams to start heading out again around 4am so when she came to bed at 1:30 she let me sleep another 2 hours and I was up again at 3:30 to catch up with the 2-6 shift. We had two people on, mostly maintaining existing hot food stocks and dozing in chairs and I gently started prepping for breakfast. By 4am I’d put out all the standard breakfast cereals, we had porridge warming, all the bacon was in a box by the meat BBQ and I was well on the way to having cracked 20 dozen eggs – I am so glad we do all the food contact wearing gloves, I hate the sensation of egg white on bare skin. There was a busy patch from 5-6am where I just fried a lot of bacon and accepted being frantically busy but once the 6am shift trickled in we settled in nicely.
We scared poor S. because we’d run the internal truck lights all night (where all the food and fridges are) and they were… suspiciously dim. They successfully started the truck up with a battery and ran it for a little while to recharge the truck. Note for next time – make sure the late night shifts know how to turn the light on and off and why they might want to do this!
Saturday 6:00 – 10:00am Shift (8 people rostered)
Busy! We had, in addition to our usual hot foods on the BBQs, a pancake cooking and egg scrambling team plus all the breakfast foods and other activities. Phew. ‘Other activities’ include things like keeping a continuous supply of hot water available for us to wash our dishes and Rogainers to wash theirs. We also keep a hot drinks station going with coffee, tea, herbal tea and milo plus a fruit bowl and a lot of cake – by this time the kids had eaten all the bananas and were making headway into the apples and mandarins as well. Nm2 had the brilliant idea of keeping the mixed berry compote sitting on the bain marie and eating it warm-ish which went very well with the pancakes and the porridge.
Saturday 10:00 – 1:30am Shift (15 people rostered)
We switched out of breakfast mode abut 10:30am and got rid of the porridge which had assumed epic glutinous proportions (you need good upper body strength to work the soups and stews station I tell you) and started playing ‘guess how many people will want lunch.’ This mostly involved observing how many people the wet weather had encouraged to head home early, and asking Admin how many teams were still out on the course. I also started preemptively stocking taking and counting up everything we hadn’t used – like 10, darn it, 10 tubs of yoghurt in various flavours and 15 x 3L of milk. We barely dented the mushroom, tomato and onion supplies either. I think the wet weather meant a smaller turnout than expected and more people left early – plus, less attraction to the cold foods.
We condensed a lot of our food supplies (the rack of trays holding the bread eventually exceeded my height AND my ability to stand on tiptoe and put more on top) and started cleaning what we could. We were serving the last of the hot foods by the time the Rogaine results were being read out (12:30) and getting seriously into the cleaning and stacking phase. Random awesome people came and gave us extra help so by the time we’d stashed all the non-perishable food, recycled all the perishable food (a fantastic combination of the volunteers taking food home and our special recycling volunteers and their trailer of different bins) we were well positioned to start taking down all the equipment and stacking it next to the truck.
We had one minor injury. E. accidentally poured hot oil over her hand changing the grease trap for the meat BBQ so the First Aid Officer made her sit with her hand in a tub of cold water for 20 mins. E. refused to be ‘retired’ from duty and continued to participate vigorously from her perch on one of the equipment tubs. Since she’d done it successfully a number of times before we decided the process was OK but that accidentally squeezing it and causing it to overflow over your hand wasn’t good technique :p
Admin started taking down our tent/pavilion around the washing station – next time I’ll move it outside – and we were winding up the last of the pot cleaning and getting ready to start playing Truck-Tetris a little after 1pm. I grabbed a garbage bag for all the aprons and tea towels to take home and wash for the next event and thanked everyone for being such a great team.
Saturday 1:30pm done!
nm2 got our personal gear stashed in the car while we were winding up the Hash Tent and I helped take down our personal tent after – we copped a small amount of water over the night – lots of intermittent rain and wind so I wasn’t too fussed about packing up perfectly – need to dry the gear properly at home anyway.We cranked up the music, fought over the controls, and headed home.
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