2015 End of Year Post

Things have been relatively smooth, but we are facing the single problem we faced last year. In November, I scheduled two breadruns for my group, both of which ended with the bakeries being sold out and thus, we were unable to really do anything. However, the easiest and most logical way of dealing with this, will be to up the amount of breadruns we schedule, so I'll probably shoot for 3 per month instead of 2 in the coming year. Aside from this though, nothing new is happening since this project is quite simple.

Last Year

I'm feeling quite optimistic for this year. I already asked Ricky again if he wanted to do bread runs like we did last year and he said yes. So that's one major point for getting started done, definitely quicker than both my sophmore and junior years. Secondly, we already know what we want to do and how to do it from our experience last year. The only problem would have to be being told that the bread run stores are full. However, my counter will be simply signing for more bread runs, with my plan being to increase our monthly bread runs from two last year, to three monthly.

Conclusion (March Post)

As I am writing this post, I have just concluded my powerpoint, and am also working on my reflection paper. Anyway, March for my MAD project was quite disappointing. Ricky and I signed up for 4 total breadruns hoping to make up for our lost time in February and yet none of them went through because all the shops we signed up for sold out before we could visit. If anything, it just goes to show that some plans, no matter how easy or simple they may seem, can fail due to circumstances outside your control. After all, we really had no idea of knowing what stores would sell out and it was just a matter of bad luck for us that we couldn't do breadruns. To sum up though, I'd rate my MAD project for the year as a semi or bare success, as we were able to do several (3) breadruns succesfully. However, knowing the high possibility of failure being very apparent in breadruns, I believe that what we should have done to avoid this would have been to simply sign up for more and just hope that we'd be able to go.

March Update

As I'm writing this, I just got off the phone telling FeedingHk that our bread run store once again ran out. I suppose it's a good thing that these stores are capable of selling everything and making money, but it is definitely frustrating for me to have signed up for so many bread runs and received a large amount of messages saying that our opportunity is gone. Of course, there's also a part of me that is glad that it sold out due to my own laziness, but I do want to go on more runs for the sake of having a successful MAD project. That being said, my plan is to go as I had previously stated as scheduling a bread run once every week for March to make up for our losses in February and possibly due the same in April depending on how many bread runs Ricky and I do in March.

February Update

Good news and bad news. First of all, the trip on January 27 went perfectly! We returned around three bags of bread and we even managed to coordinate ourselves with another ICS MAD group doing bread runs, which made it a lot more fun. Of course, there were some problems, primarily how late we had to do this. I left at around 8:30 and got home around 11:00. To give an example about how hard it can be, I had to write an assignment for my AP Enviro class that would require writing up to 1,000 words long. When I got home, I typed as fast as I could and was luckily able to submit it at 11:45. There's even more bad news though. First of all, for some reason, there are no February bread runs on the FHK website. In response, I plan on doing 4 bread runs at least in March to make up for our lost bread runs. However, scheduling bread runs are going to be even harder now since Ricky got a job. We haven't talked about specifics, but I believe that he is trying to arrange his work for only Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (Bread runs are only on Tuesday and Thursday) so hopefully he can arrange that. It is definitely possible that we can work around Ricky's work dates, but putting bread runs in some of his few free days are going to make his academic life a lot harder as well, so this is quite a tough situation but I believe that we are more than capable of managing it.

New Year Status

Its been a while, and so far we've technically done three bread runs by now. However, of those three, we only went out on one of them because the two bakeries we were scheduled for apparently sold out their stocks on closing time, so there was no bread to run. This just goes to show that things almost always don't go the way you've planned. My response to this is just to schedule more breadruns. I've got one planned for next Tuesday and I'll probably aim for three bread runs in February.