A Good Ol’ Day

At MBB, there are four phrases that express what we’re all about.

Bring a hammer. Use your outside voice. Take the stairs. Enjoy the ride.

Each year, Good Day gives us a chance to deliver on all four of them at the same time. Maybe not literally, as this year’s activity relied more on shovels and pruners, and we might not have taken any stairs when trekking across 120 acres of undeveloped land – but you get the idea. Good Day is when we get out of the office, roll up our sleeves, get to work and have some fun – all together, all in the name of doing good. This year it fell on October 20, a perfectly brisk fall day.

First, we all showed up to work in matching t-shirts. Don’t worry, it was planned. And they were really cool shirts. At 11:00, we gathered in the kitchen for an early lunch of pizza. Because what day largely considered to be “good” doesn’t involve pizza in some way? Then, we bundled up, shut down and headed out, boarding a bus bound for west Lenexa where over the next three hours we would eventually plant 250 small oak tree saplings as part of a stream bank stabilization project.

Once there, we learned a couple things.

First, we learned that we knew nothing about correctly planting trees.

Then, we learned that planting trees is hard work. Like really hard work.

As the day wore on, we also learned that we are very efficient tree planters. Three sites down, we thought we were headed back to the bus (at the beginning of the afternoon they told us we’d be planting trees at three different sites). Way ahead of schedule, we were led to an unexpected fourth planting site – where we probably did our least-inspired planting of the day.

To put it bluntly, we were hurtin’. And our collective latissimus dorsi was screamin’. At this point, Good Day very much took on a “we’re all in this together” mentality. Meaning we dug in, got it done and still managed to laugh at Richard’s root ball jokes (and still had a blast).

Fourth and final site complete, with 250+ trees successfully in the ground across 120 acres of land, we boarded the bus once again. Except this time, we were headed for our local watering hole, Grinder’s. As you might imagine, the chatter on the bus was not quite at the same level it was pre-trees. However, the crew had no problem catching a second wind upon arriving at Grinders to find pitchers of cold beer waiting on the patio.

Yes, our arms were tired from heaving shovels into clay, dirt, mud and rocks all afternoon. But never are we too tired to lift a pint of beer. Or two. OK, or three. But mark our words, nobody had more than three beers.

Jokes aside, Good Day turned out to be a raging success. People will certainly talk about it for years to come. This was the Good Day to which all subsequent Good Days will be compared. Pretty cool, too, seeing as the four-person planning committee is all in their first year at MBB. Or maybe I’m just saying this because I was one of the new kids on the planning committee.

Thank you to Bridging the Gap and the Heartland Tree Alliance for the fun day and fresh air. Thank you to Grinder’s for the patio and abundant sunshine. It was certainly a good day and we had a great time.

For a non-verbal recap of our Good Day fun, check out the video below.