UFO Festival

My first volunteer duty at the McMinnville Downtown Association was to help out with the UFO Festival. MDA's involvement in terms of activity vendors included the alien souvenirs and cotton candy. This year, there was a large volume of volunteers so instead of helping out at the cotton candy stall, I was instead assigned to the Pet Costume Contest.

Together with 4 other volunteers, our jobs were to be the MC and judges. Basically everything was adequately prepared by Kris: from the table, pens, sign up forms to award certificates and dog treats. A girl was the MC and the rest of us were judges. At first everything seemed quite chaotic with everyone all over the place with their pets; but eventually a little bit of improvisation and flexibility helped settled things. Some of my friends came and attended the contest, but I could see that they were not that entertained. The pets and their costumes were, of course, the center of the show. But more activities could have made things more interesting and make up for the owners' efforts to dressing their pets. All we did was having the contestants lined up and walked their pets as their names were called. I guess we had too little time to plan so that was all we could do. I think I am over-analyzing things...after all, this was my first task and my enthusiasm was not sufficiently fed. Nevertheless, I heard that last year people were much crowded at one place and the change in location had helped a lot.

After the contest, Kris assigned me to sort through the garbage at the alien stall. By 5, the cleaning services arrived and it was time for me to go. Kris promised to keep me updated with the next assignment which, according to her, would be "not as fun". The first thought that came to my mind was "Finally, maybe I'd get to make some flyers and paper work next". But as I recall from MDA's yearly schedule, the next event on calendar is McMinnville's Farmers' Market. More vendor work, perhaps?

Overall, I think I had a nice first day volunteering at the MDA today. I like to help out, and don't mind running errands or doing mundane tasks. It was fun getting to know Kris, who was super nice and I could see that she and Ginger had put a lot of effort into keeping everything running smoothly and under control.