Yesterday was Big Sunday here in the city of angels. What is that, you might ask? No sporting event, but a day for folks to volunteer at several dozen different projects happening all over the city. My stint was working at ReDiscoverCenter.org, a rather interesting place that takes donations of left over commercial and industrial materials and turns them into spare parts that can be used by youngsters to assemble their own art projects. Think of a gigantic storeroom filled with all sorts of stuff like reams of paper, retail byproducts, spools of thread, and stuff like that, and having a bunch of five year olds descending on all that and making inventive craft projects out of it. I was helping with some manual labor to get their stuff organized. It was a fun morning, although my shoulders are sore today. At one point, a group of us were taking apart several gross of furniture legs. I kept thinking about the folks in China (or wherever these legs were from originally) putting them together. I guess that the order of things, and it certainly will be more useful to have several bins of spare parts rather than something else to fill up our landfills around here.

While I wasn’t doing anything crafty — the point of this post isn’t about me really — but talking to the volunteer coordinator there I was reminded of this wonderful museum in St. Louis called the City Museum that takes the same idea and expands to an entire museum. If you have never been, it is almost worth a trip on its own. You can get something of the feel from their Web site, but it is really like taking the idea behind the found art assemblage of the Watts Towers and adding a truckload of stuff like found at ReDiscover Center.

At least 25,000 of us volunteered yesterday. It probably is the only time that people in LA are doing something fun outside of their vehicles, and interacting with strangers (other than post-quake meetings on their front lawns).