I guess it's worth reporting that I have a summer job lined up.
And that I got inducted into a freshman honor society. Alpha Lambda Delta.
Been home 3 weekends in a row. Kind of looking forward to staying put.
Finals are next week. I got my study guide done for one class and the paper for another. Not much motivation to study, even though there are classes I really ought to do so for.
Found one of my old friends from middle school on Facebook. She's a mom. So strange to imagine!
Anyway I better go try to work on study guides...
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
don't have much to say
I'm just going to quote an old hymn.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee. Tell me Thy secret, help me bear the strain of toil, the fret of care...
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee. Tell me Thy secret, help me bear the strain of toil, the fret of care...
Friday, April 9, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
family ties
So my grandfather is in the hospital again and has been for a week+, and my grandma finally relented and let us move their stuff into an apartment in Glenwood.
It was a busy weekend for Easter and I am still rather tired from the moving and from the large amount of traveling I have been doing (about 560 miles worth). At least I get to sleep in tomorrow and I only have one class then.
I've gotten my calculus homework done, so hopefully I did it right. I will be going in tomorrow to ask.
Not much else to report.
It was a busy weekend for Easter and I am still rather tired from the moving and from the large amount of traveling I have been doing (about 560 miles worth). At least I get to sleep in tomorrow and I only have one class then.
I've gotten my calculus homework done, so hopefully I did it right. I will be going in tomorrow to ask.
Not much else to report.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
New Orleans posts up!
I'm not going to put up pictures, partly because I have so many it would take too long to upload, and partly because I just don't want to.
Start about halfway down the page, that's where part 1 is.
Start about halfway down the page, that's where part 1 is.
New Orleans part 4 (Thursday, Friday, Saturday)
Thursday, March 18
This was our last day working on the house, and to be honest, we were glad to go. There was a lot of frustration that had built up, because we’d work hard on a project only to be told we did it wrong by the project manager, and so we had to re-do it. He hadn’t shown up on Wednesday and didn’t show up until after we ate lunch, then gave us several large projects to try to complete. It was irritating. However, Andrea and I finished the Bathroom of Doom as best we could.
We completed to the best of our ability 4 rooms (master bedroom, master bath, secondary bedroom, and Bathroom of Doom), but there were several others that needed completion (kitchen, living room, front room, another bedroom).
After working we went back to the church to shower off (lukewarm this time) and get ready to see a presentation on the Katrina effects. Unfortunately we didn’t realize it was next Thursday, not this week, and so we changed our plans. We went out to supper in the French Quarter for the girl’s birthday at a place called Montrel’s Bistro. I had crawfish bisque and the house salad. The bisque was sneaky-hot and burnt my throat, but it tasted good. The house salad tasted good. For dessert we went to Café du Monde for beignets. These are kind of like funnelcake or fritters, with a ton of powdered sugar on them. I got 3 in my order and when we returned to the church, I measured the left over powdered sugar. It was just over ¼ cup. Wow.
We walked through part of the French Quarter and then went back to the church. It looked different in the dark, but it was still the French Quarter with its air of mellowness. There was a man playing saxophone as we waited in line for the beignets. It felt comfortable, in its way. I wouldn’t mind visiting again.
Friday, March 19
We got going around 8:30 for the trip home. We drove straight through. I got annoyed because the girl who was navigating kept flipping the radio channel and kept turning it up, until it was at ¾ the power of the speakers. The van was vibrating from the bass and it made my head hurt. Plus she didn’t navigate well.
Our final gas/bathroom stop was in Missouri, and we drove on. Between Fairfield and Oskaloosa we hit a snowstorm. What a difference from New Orleans, where we were going around in tee shirts! At Oskaloosa, a different girl was going to navigate, and I had the atlas, so I said to go on Highway 34, while she said take 63, and so the driver got annoyed, stopped, switched with the other driver, and then we listened to her. We ended up taking about three hours to go what should have been less than two hours’ worth of driving. On 92 we nearly hit a deer, but the driver never lost control, and we made it safely back to Indianola. I was so tired (because I’d been awake since 7:00 with no naps) but I was happy to be back safely. God heard my prayers.
Saturday, March 20
We got here at 2:30ish this morning. It was tiring but it was good to be back. I’ve had today mostly to myself, which has been a good de-compression day. I did some homework and catching up on things, and did laundry too. In conclusion, this trip was a good one, but not as life-changing as I would have hoped, since we never got to meet the homeowners. I got to see and do new things, and that was a good thing.
This was our last day working on the house, and to be honest, we were glad to go. There was a lot of frustration that had built up, because we’d work hard on a project only to be told we did it wrong by the project manager, and so we had to re-do it. He hadn’t shown up on Wednesday and didn’t show up until after we ate lunch, then gave us several large projects to try to complete. It was irritating. However, Andrea and I finished the Bathroom of Doom as best we could.
We completed to the best of our ability 4 rooms (master bedroom, master bath, secondary bedroom, and Bathroom of Doom), but there were several others that needed completion (kitchen, living room, front room, another bedroom).
After working we went back to the church to shower off (lukewarm this time) and get ready to see a presentation on the Katrina effects. Unfortunately we didn’t realize it was next Thursday, not this week, and so we changed our plans. We went out to supper in the French Quarter for the girl’s birthday at a place called Montrel’s Bistro. I had crawfish bisque and the house salad. The bisque was sneaky-hot and burnt my throat, but it tasted good. The house salad tasted good. For dessert we went to Café du Monde for beignets. These are kind of like funnelcake or fritters, with a ton of powdered sugar on them. I got 3 in my order and when we returned to the church, I measured the left over powdered sugar. It was just over ¼ cup. Wow.
We walked through part of the French Quarter and then went back to the church. It looked different in the dark, but it was still the French Quarter with its air of mellowness. There was a man playing saxophone as we waited in line for the beignets. It felt comfortable, in its way. I wouldn’t mind visiting again.
Friday, March 19
We got going around 8:30 for the trip home. We drove straight through. I got annoyed because the girl who was navigating kept flipping the radio channel and kept turning it up, until it was at ¾ the power of the speakers. The van was vibrating from the bass and it made my head hurt. Plus she didn’t navigate well.
Our final gas/bathroom stop was in Missouri, and we drove on. Between Fairfield and Oskaloosa we hit a snowstorm. What a difference from New Orleans, where we were going around in tee shirts! At Oskaloosa, a different girl was going to navigate, and I had the atlas, so I said to go on Highway 34, while she said take 63, and so the driver got annoyed, stopped, switched with the other driver, and then we listened to her. We ended up taking about three hours to go what should have been less than two hours’ worth of driving. On 92 we nearly hit a deer, but the driver never lost control, and we made it safely back to Indianola. I was so tired (because I’d been awake since 7:00 with no naps) but I was happy to be back safely. God heard my prayers.
Saturday, March 20
We got here at 2:30ish this morning. It was tiring but it was good to be back. I’ve had today mostly to myself, which has been a good de-compression day. I did some homework and catching up on things, and did laundry too. In conclusion, this trip was a good one, but not as life-changing as I would have hoped, since we never got to meet the homeowners. I got to see and do new things, and that was a good thing.
New Orleans part 3 (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)
Monday, March 15
We had to get up for a meeting at 8:00 in the church’s sanctuary turned warehouse, and there we were assigned our house to work on. We learned that the organization that we were working with (LA United Methodist Disaster Relief) was likely to shut down by the end of the year. This saddened us, because they focus on the least, the last, and the lost. But we took heart in the fact that they had done so much already, something like $85 million worth of work (I think), and in that we were going to help them do more.
We loaded up our van with tools and found our way to the house. It had 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, a nice kitchen/dining room area, and a large living-room. It turned out that we were doing finishing work. We didn’t know what to do at first, because there was no supervisor to tell us what to do until about 9:30, and this supervisor came in, told us what to do, and then left. This was definitely different from my experiences with Habitat for Humanity! In Habitat there is always someone there who knows what they’re doing, someone to ask questions.
Andrea and I started working on what we would later call the Bathroom of Doom. Whoever put the walls in the house did a poor job. The walls were not straight, and the bathroom was not square. One wall was longer than the opposite, and the door was narrow, and the floor wasn’t straight either. But we made it work throughout the week.
We put in baseboard and quarter rail. I got to the level of professional with cutting 45 degree angles using a chop saw. I also scraped my backside on a pipe that was sticking out of the wall. It hurt. But I had a semi-warm shower so that was nice.
Tuesday, March 16
A new group came to stay with us, a group of retirees. They had money and would go out for supper instead of making food in the church’s kitchen. I don’t remember much about Tuesday’s activities other than in the evening, everyone else went to the French Quarter and I stayed back because I was A, tired, and B, needing some peace and quiet, and C, a little nervous about going to the French Quarter at night. It was a relaxing evening. I also got to talk to three middle-aged ladies for a while. It was pleasant to have adult conversation. Four of the girls on the trip just drove me bonkers because they were loud and juvenile (granted, they were freshmen/sophomores, but that’s no excuse) much of the time. At least they were having fun, right? I just didn’t associate with them much, and tried to keep my mouth shut when they grated on my nerves. The shower this night was cold.
Wednesday, March 17
Since it was St. Patrick’s Day, I wore green while we worked on the house and afterward. It turned out that Thursday was one of the girls’ birthday, and so two of the girls, one of the guys, and I sneakily made muffins while the other girls took her out to play tennis with the racquets that they bought on Tuesday night at Wal-Mart. They ended up not being able to play tennis anywhere, but they still stalled so we could get the muffins made.
This was the day we visited the Lower Ninth Ward. I took pictures but they don’t do the desolation justice. It was extremely saddening. However there is hope. Brad Pitt’s Pink Project has built about 10 homes that are super-energy-efficient and have solar panels and the like, and these houses look like they could actually last in a flood. The really sad part though, is the way there’s old, beat-up houses right by these new, high-tech houses. It’s jarring.
We got lost on the way to the Lower Ninth Ward, and it was strange because the area we ended up going through (which was near Tulane University) was so spruced up and the houses looked more expensive, better built, etcetera. And then we found our way to the Lower Ninth Ward. It was such a contrast.
I went to bed by 11 but apparently the other girls stayed up much later decorating the downstairs for the girl’s birthday surprise. It is hard to sleep when the light is on and you are light-sensitive. I had a warm shower though, so I didn’t get too grumpy.
We had to get up for a meeting at 8:00 in the church’s sanctuary turned warehouse, and there we were assigned our house to work on. We learned that the organization that we were working with (LA United Methodist Disaster Relief) was likely to shut down by the end of the year. This saddened us, because they focus on the least, the last, and the lost. But we took heart in the fact that they had done so much already, something like $85 million worth of work (I think), and in that we were going to help them do more.
We loaded up our van with tools and found our way to the house. It had 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, a nice kitchen/dining room area, and a large living-room. It turned out that we were doing finishing work. We didn’t know what to do at first, because there was no supervisor to tell us what to do until about 9:30, and this supervisor came in, told us what to do, and then left. This was definitely different from my experiences with Habitat for Humanity! In Habitat there is always someone there who knows what they’re doing, someone to ask questions.
Andrea and I started working on what we would later call the Bathroom of Doom. Whoever put the walls in the house did a poor job. The walls were not straight, and the bathroom was not square. One wall was longer than the opposite, and the door was narrow, and the floor wasn’t straight either. But we made it work throughout the week.
We put in baseboard and quarter rail. I got to the level of professional with cutting 45 degree angles using a chop saw. I also scraped my backside on a pipe that was sticking out of the wall. It hurt. But I had a semi-warm shower so that was nice.
Tuesday, March 16
A new group came to stay with us, a group of retirees. They had money and would go out for supper instead of making food in the church’s kitchen. I don’t remember much about Tuesday’s activities other than in the evening, everyone else went to the French Quarter and I stayed back because I was A, tired, and B, needing some peace and quiet, and C, a little nervous about going to the French Quarter at night. It was a relaxing evening. I also got to talk to three middle-aged ladies for a while. It was pleasant to have adult conversation. Four of the girls on the trip just drove me bonkers because they were loud and juvenile (granted, they were freshmen/sophomores, but that’s no excuse) much of the time. At least they were having fun, right? I just didn’t associate with them much, and tried to keep my mouth shut when they grated on my nerves. The shower this night was cold.
Wednesday, March 17
Since it was St. Patrick’s Day, I wore green while we worked on the house and afterward. It turned out that Thursday was one of the girls’ birthday, and so two of the girls, one of the guys, and I sneakily made muffins while the other girls took her out to play tennis with the racquets that they bought on Tuesday night at Wal-Mart. They ended up not being able to play tennis anywhere, but they still stalled so we could get the muffins made.
This was the day we visited the Lower Ninth Ward. I took pictures but they don’t do the desolation justice. It was extremely saddening. However there is hope. Brad Pitt’s Pink Project has built about 10 homes that are super-energy-efficient and have solar panels and the like, and these houses look like they could actually last in a flood. The really sad part though, is the way there’s old, beat-up houses right by these new, high-tech houses. It’s jarring.
We got lost on the way to the Lower Ninth Ward, and it was strange because the area we ended up going through (which was near Tulane University) was so spruced up and the houses looked more expensive, better built, etcetera. And then we found our way to the Lower Ninth Ward. It was such a contrast.
I went to bed by 11 but apparently the other girls stayed up much later decorating the downstairs for the girl’s birthday surprise. It is hard to sleep when the light is on and you are light-sensitive. I had a warm shower though, so I didn’t get too grumpy.
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