Welcome back!!

I hope you all had a great break. I took advantage of the peace and quiet to go visit my family in Pennsylvania  a couple of times. Four different family dogs to play with, a lot of things to help my parents with around their house, good food, time with family and even a couple of drinks and a few games of pool with my niece. Perfect break! So, my batteries are recharged – let’s hit the ground running for spring semester!

A couple of things I’d like for you to keep in the back of your mind for later –

Move Out Trash – Beginning on May 7th and running until June 1st, I am again offering this FREE service to undergraduates living outside of university housing. You will have an amazing amount of trash when you get ready to move out this year and I’m going to help you get rid of it. It is EASYand it is FREE, but you must make an appointment via email. For more information, please check out my regular website.

JH-U-Turn 2012 –

“JH-U-Turn” is designed to help reduce waste and support a great cause by asking students to donate their end of school year items including clothing, furniture, books, electronics and household items.

All items donated will then get a second chance at being useful when they are sold at bargain basement prices at our JH-U-Turn sale on June 9^th, 2012, 8am until done! The sale will be held in the Ralph S. O’Conner Recreation Center on campus and is open to the public. 50% of the proceeds of this sale go directly to the United Way of Central Maryland and 50% goes to the Johns Hopkins Neighborhood Fund, part of the university’s United Way campaign.  Last year, we raised $8,000 and I hope this year will be bigger and better.

Dorm residents can watch for the “ABF” donation boxes that will be placed in the dorms the week of move out. Off campus students, faculty and staff  can donate their items by making an appointment for pick up via emailing me OR make an appointment to drop items off at one of 6 ABF ReloCubes that will be placed in the community.

Volunteers are needed in every stage of JH-U-Turn, May – June. I’ll need help with the off campus donation pick ups, placing the donation boxes in the dorms, picking up the full donation boxes when we “storm the dorms” move out weekend and setting up and running the sale. Email me if you or your group is interested in volunteering. For more information, please check out my other website.

A little “house keeping” –

You know how much I want to promote all of the cool things that you do throughout the school year. I appreciate all the invites to Facebook events that I get and all of the requests that I get to publicize your events/causes/business adventures. I literally can not keep up with all of the requests! I am trying to create a calendar for this blog that I can use to share upcoming events. I will also try my darnedest to post about some of your requests using this blog. Please understand that I’m just passing information on. Just because it might end up on my blog, do not take that as some kind of endorsement specifically from me. We’ll see how this works. PLEASE feel free to email me with a) news of student run events/businesses/causes and b) feel free to let me know whether you want to see stuff like this on my blog or not.