One week in, and lots of work done already!  On Tuesday we went to Coghill Elementary school to get ready for Friday's playground build.  There was a ton of lumber to be sorted out, measured, and cut (I got to use power tools, i'm pretty BA!), and a lot of dirt to be moved around...there was always something to do, so it felt like a very productive day.  Wednesday Troy (our sponsor from the Recovery School District, who is 3rd or 4th generation New Orleans-er) took us around on a tour of the city.  It was really crazy to drive through the 9th ward where the levis broke, because after the hurricane the pictures showed mass destruction and debris everywhere and now there is nothing but overgrown grass, and occasionally a set of steps that lead up to absolutely nothing.  The houses that are there seem weird to me, a WI native, because they are built on cement blocks, or even higher posts to keep them off ground, and back home, most houses have a basement because the concern for flooding is minimal.  There were also still a bunch of abandoned houses that nobody could afford to come back to after the hurricane.  There were a lot of new houses constructed though, Brad Pitt invested a lot of money into reconstructing houses that would be able to withstand the weather that is New Orleans.  So as depressing as it was to see the all the destruction and how much work is left to be done, it was also inspiring to see how much has been done.

Thanksgiving was surprisingly excellent.  In the morning some of us went to the City Center where they served a giant Thanksgiving lunch.  There were a ton of volunteers there so the only thing we ended up doing was putting cups on the table, and in the end I served 2 plates of food.  For the rest of the time we were able to stand around listening to the entertainment they brought in, which was a bunch of "southern music."  They had a few jazz groups, which were awesome.  One of the guys played a mean trumpet, and had a wicked jazz voice, and the rest of the performers were awesome, and really embodied New Orleans (I thought).  Irma Thomas (I think is her name) was a grammy winning vocalist, and she performed a few numbers during lunch. There was also a gospel choir that performed.  The whole event was really really fun and exciting.  That night about 6 or 7 of the teams in the gulf area got together and had a pot luck thanksgiving.  Originally we were worried that there would not be enough food for so many people (because estimating proportions for ~70 people on a tiny budget is pretty difficult), fortunately we were very wrong and there was plenty of turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, pumpkin and pecan pie for everyone to be stuffed and bring some home.  It was also really great to be able to see some former Pod 18-ers, and other friends that I have been missing since the end of CTI.  Gold 2 went to bed pretty early after Thanksgiving, because we had to be on the road at 6 o'clock the next morning for our playground build.

I signed up to lead a group of volunteers on Friday in building tree benches and goal posts.  I was a little nervous because I had no idea how to build a tree bench or a goal post.  Fortunately the directions were thorough and the volunteers were patient and actually listened to me--everything went very smoothly, and in the end the benches held me up when I sat on them.  The process was a lot of fun, and it was crazy to see how quickly the playground went up.  Everything was pretty much in place by 2 o'clock, and all that was left was to fill in the mulch (bleh).  After most of the mulch had been cleared off we tried to take the rest on the one giant tarp that it was dropped off on, we did not realize how heavy that stuff is.  It was probably hilarious to watch about 50 volunteers huddled together trying to move a massive tarp of mulch.  At 2:30 the playground was done and we took some ceremonial pictures, but we weren't allowed to play on it because the cement still had to dry...how anti-climatic.

Even though the playground build was done, AmeriCorps still had to work cleaning everything up and putting away tools at the recovery school district.  Our day actually lasted from 6-6, and when we were done, we were exhausted.  Some of us were troopers though, and headed back to bourbon street.  Fortunately we just used it as a guide to get us to Frenchman St, which had a much more local feel, was a lot more interesting, and smelled a lot less like booze, horse sh*t, and vomit.

The hostel is now decorated for Christmas, and I will be home in just a few weeks!!!!

NOLA

I just spent a week in a van. More specifically a 15 passenger van without a back seat, so 3 people to a seat for 5 days. That story ends well. Everyone from Gold 2 is alive and well in NOLA!

We got in to our housing around 1 and Troy, our sponsor came out to greet us, and wowwed us by already knowing our names, yet we still sat through another super cool icebreaker to get to know each other a little bit better. Troy, and Marny, the VISTA we are going to be working with both seem very very cool. Troy is very laid back, and seems to go with the flow, but also has a passion for what he is doing. I am very much looking forward to the next couple of months working with him. This week we are doing a mass playground build (I believe we are working with an organization called KaBoom) on the day after Thanksgiving (aka black friday).

Our housing, which was only finalized days before our arrival, is at Marquette Hostel. Gold 2 has an entire section of the hostel with our own kitchen and dining area, 1 and a half baths, and two bedrooms with 3 sets of bunk beds in each. It is snug, but I like it...there are a few different courtyard areas that we can access, and the neighborhood feels safe (in the Garden District). We are also just a 20 minute walk from Bourbon St, and very near Magazine St, and I am sure a bunch of other great places that I will eventually get to explore. We had the weekend off so we spent the nights wandering around Bourbon St (very provacative) and also around the neighborhood during the day. I am not sure what I expected of New Orleans, but it seems exactly how it should be with giant southern mansions/houses and these giant almost rainforest like trees all along the street. I know it has only been a weekend, but I already love it here!

It has been a really excellent last few days in Sacramento. Picking up from when I found my keys...
Thursday morning we had a service project with the Sacramento parks and rec department. We cut down a bunch of hedges, and then cleaned up the trimmings we cut down. We were done by 11:30, so we took an early, and long, lunch. After lunch the TL's got together to discuss what we would do in the afternoon. So, for an hour we played in the park, and then proceeded to go home because there was nothing left for us to do. We spent the afternoon soaking up some sun, and went out for Mongolian Barbeque for dinner (awesome!). That night there was a talent show, and let me tell you there is quite a bit of talent out here in AmeriCorps...most of the show was guitar playing and singing, some acts were funny, and some were just down right amazing. I don't think that the world is ready for my talent yet though, so I just sat back and enjoyed. Friday morning was our induction ceremony. There were a couple "inspiring" speeches, and we mumbled our way through the AmeriCorps pledge which we are working so hard to memorize, and then went back to campus for a catered lunch. After lunch some Gold 2 members decided to entertain ourselves by doing a TL scavenger hunt...so we went around the kitchen taking pictures of all the green shirts. We didn't say anything we just snuck up all "stealthy like" and took a picture then carried on like nothing had happened. They were pretty creeped out, but we thought it was hilarious. In the evening we went back to the climbing gym and spent a few hours climbing and bouldering around. We got back just in time for an open mic poetry reading that some corps members put on. There was a surprising amount of talent in the audience (even though most poetry goes right over my head), but I was sitting next to my favorite cynic, so I'm not sure I was the best audience member.
Saturday our team picked up some stuff from Target, and basically just got ready to leave on Monday. Saturday evening I went to an event called Second Saturday in downtown Sac, where a bunch of art galleries were open late to the public. There was some really awesome art to look at, and again, like with poetry, some of it just went right over my head.
We went to a couple bars downtown, and I have officially become a lightweight because after a mere 3 drinks (spread out over the evening) I obtained a pretty hefty hangover. This is another demonstration of how I "get my poor on."
Today was my last day in Sacramento. I was able to spend a lot of time with the people I am going to miss most. There was a lot of cuddling with my former pod mates, and again more game playing in the lounge again (for old times sake).
I am really going to miss a lot of people, but I love my team, and am really, really excited about getting down to New Orleans, LA (NOLA). There is a lot of work to be done down there, and I can't wait to be there as a member of the community, and not just as a tourist.
Look out NOLA, here we come!

Today was a strenuous day, let me tell you. We didn't have PT, so I was able to sleep in until 6:20. We had to meet at 6:45 to muster before our service project. We headed out to the parks of Sacramento. We stood around for a fair amount of time, and then went to a different park to do work. We were trimming hedges. We cut them approximately in half. There were a ton of us doing it, so we got done pretty early. We took a lunch break at 11:45. Then after a long lunch, we went and played on the playground waiting for further instruction. At approximately 1, 1:30 we came home, because there was nothing else to do. AmeriCorps NCCC is just too good.

This was our last week of training. It feels good to be done. We had to do a project briefing, which felt a bit like homework, and I am glad I am not back in school.
Yesterday was awesome...after a few unfortunate events. First of all, I spilled over half of my Nalgene onto my bed, it soaked all the way through, so I couldn't even flip over the mattress to sleep on the dry spot, it was wet all over, and it looked like I peed. After that, I lost my keys, which included the key to my room, my AmeriCorps i.d., my driver's license, my key access to the building, and a credit card. And that all happened right before we were going to leave, so I was really flustered. But...we went to a place called Sky High Trampolines, and we rented a trampoline court which was made up of about 15 trampolines, and split strategically in half to be ready for a dodgeball game, and all the walls were trampolines too. It was so cool, and we spent the whole hour playing dodgeball, and I had a lot, a lot of fun! I hope I have an opportunity to go back, but we leave very very soon, so that might be put on hold.
When we got back, my keys had still not shown up, so even though I had a ton of fun trampolining and had forgotten all about it, I was pretty upset when I returned to my unfortunate situation. There was a community event called "guess the straight person" which had a panel of LGBT... members, and we had to try to discern who was gay and who was straight after they answered a series of questions. It was not anything demeaning, and no fingers were pointed like "you acted this way so you must be gay," but it was meant to demonstrate how any one trait does not make someone gay. It was a really funny activity, and afterwards, my friend bought me sympathy ice cream because he felt bad about my keys (everyone here is so nice).
After the sympathy ice-cream, my keys showed up, and when I went to bed my matress was dry enough to sleep on, and everything ended well here in AmeriWorld.

The end.

ISPs

Well, the weekend wasn't too exciting. I hung out with a friend watching youtube videos Friday night, and was in bed by midnight. Wild nights in AmeriCorps. Saturday I went to St. John's which is a women's shelter, and sorted through clothes in the warehouse. For three hours I sorted through bras--black, white, and tan bras, from size A to size H. Victoria's Secret could hire me. Saturday was even more dull than Friday night. I watched some movies in the common room. Fortunately there is a girl here who went to cosmotology school, so I also got a haircut for excitement Saturday night. It is awfully short, but it seems to have gone over well. Sunday morning I went to an organization called Project R.I.D.E. It is a horseback riding facility that offers lessons to children with special needs. They had a spaghetti dinner the night before, and we went in the next day to take down the tables and chairs, and set up so they could carry on with their riding lessons. The very best part of it was the hot breakfast: scrambled eggs, bacon, and the best biscuits I've ever had (yes...better than McDonalds). This is how I "get my poor on these days" (direct quote from one of the administrators here), I accept lots of free food. Besides breakfast they sent us home with tons of candy, sunflower seeds, and yes, even left over spaghetti. It was a quiet weekend, but all was well. Today I lost my roommate :(. I picked up a new one, a teammate, she's cool, but I will always miss Deiy.

7 Days til we leave for New Orleans!

I am still super excited about going to New Orleans. I don't know if I mentioned it last time, but we are going to be staying in the Ninth Ward, which is in the right near downtown, and one of the parts that got hit the hardest (mind you this is what I have been told, and I haven't really fact checked). But CTI (Corps Training Institute) is carrying on like normal, getting us ready to face the world in a civilized manner. We have different roles on the team that we will be taking on. I am a Peer Helper on the team. I will be one of two confidantes for the team. We spent a day training for the position, and again, it was a nice review of my Communication Studies degree, but it was all pretty pertinent to the position, and I think I will enjoy and do well at my position. Other things that seem to be the norm here is me getting hurt. Like I mentioned, I wiped out on the stairs the other day, I have run into a fair amount of walls just walking around, and find a new bruise nearly daily. The sad part is, we haven't even gotten to the manual labor where injury is much more likely than during days and days of training. Wish me luck in New Orleans. We have also been carrying on with the 5 am PT, and this may be hard to believe, but I get a little hyper sometimes at 5:30 in the morning. I actually really enjoy being there. Its pretty neat being able to watch a sunrise too, I am used to sunsets. Which I also get to see a lot of. It has not rained since that first week when I arrived, so the sunsets have been beautiful, however, some WI lovin'--the sunsets at Lakeview Dr can't be beat.

Today we had another service project. We headed down to a wildlife reserve (that actually reminded me a little bit of the backwaters of the Wisconsin River [or at least a glance of them, since we were surrounded by fields]). We spent the day planting, protecting, and watering over 200 trees. It was a lot of fun, we just paired up, and so I got to spend the day just chatting with my teammate, because it was pretty easy work planting the trees. In the afternoon we set up the irrigation system, but it didn't quite reach all of the trees, so some of us (me included in the us) had to fill buckets from the river and water the trees by hand. I will be so strong by the end of the year, everyone watch out.
Now, I have the weekend off, but I will be spending some time doing ISP's in downtown Sac, so I was not able to go along on the camping trip to Yosemite that a bunch of my friends are doing. I will survive.
And again, to end on a happy note, I leave for New Orleans in 10 days!!!!

I'm headed to New Orleans...suckas!!
So, I've had some more lively training, getting us ready to brief and debrief our projects; all the while we were still not informed or what our projects would be. I also, in the mean time, had a friend in quarantine. She had a slight flu, so she was quarantined, but she was on the first floor, so we were able to go talk with her through her prison screen. I guess I haven't done anything too exciting since I last wrote. But, we did find out where our first project is. Mark (I don't know if I have yet identified him, but Mark is my TL, team leader), such a joker, found out before us and so we were heckling him all day yesterday, so at dinner he told us we had to have a quick meeting afterwards, and he lead on that it was because we were in trouble. At the meeting then we all had to close our eyes and open our hands, and he handed a clue to each of us, and then he sprinted out and said see you tomorrow. The clue was worthless though, it just told us we were leaving on Monday November 16th. Today we got another clue that we may have small lobsters in the kitchen. We deduced that it was on a coast, but didn't think too much of it, because there is a running joke about lobsters. So finally at 5 (everyone had to wait until 5) Mark gave us a final hint, and then we had to run up to a different room where he had all kinds of information for us. In the race to get there, I biffed at the bottom of the stairs, slipped on some water and went all the way down. So, the project is in New Orleans. We are maintaining (so painting and building and what ever else) a building/set of buildings they have set up in New Orleans to try to improve the education system. They are trying to spend the money on education, so maintainence tends to fall through the cracks. Being in New Orleans will give us tons of opportunities for ISPs (Independent Service Projects) and lots of opportunities to spend money on good food and beef up. I can't wait!

Camp Mendocino

So, yeah...Gold 2!
It was obvious the first couple days as a team that everyone had some reservations, and perhaps was holding on to their pod love (at least I was) but then we went to camp, and life is much different, and we are much closer! Training has been mediocre, I find myself struggling to stay awake, even when it is interesting. It might have to do with the 5:30 PT, but it could also have to do with the subject matter...hard to say. So Mendocino was a nice break from the norm. The van ride up was alright, but it was quite squishy, and the roads were quite windy; 4 hours later I was not feeling very well when we arrived. But the we had a tour of the camp and had some free time outside in the redwood forest, and things got much better. We were spending time as a team when Alex and I heard howling (Alex was previously on my pod), and we thought someone had stolen our howl...but low and behold there were fellow pod 18ers looking for us, we will never be separated. After dinner we played the "Newly Team Game" and turns out we were able to guess a little bit about eachother because we tied for first (we were split up into 2 groups and had to guess the same person for a question like "who is the most likely to dutch oven themselves in their coveralls?"...yes, that was really a question, and no, I was not chosen). That night we had a campfire and sang songs and all kinds of cheery camping stuff, and went to bed around 10 (more and more like you, Dad, every day). To get to sleep I put on long underwear, sweatpants, wool socks, a thermal longsleeve, a sweatshirt, and I think my vest, crawled into my sleeping bag and pulled my extra blanket over my head, and proceeded to get the best sleep ever, until of course I got up at 5 for PT, and found it very difficult to get out of my sleeping bag. Fortunately we warmed up to the cupid shuffle, and they played lots of music during it, so I was actually sweating and shed a few layers (I was not ready to shower though). After breakfast we had some service learning, but then had more free time to wander around the redwood forest. It is a very big and wonderful place. We then had to form a giant blind caterpillar to build trust (it was complicated, just know that I did not die) and then split into teams and began our day of outdoor training. We had to work out this number game, and then a balance game, which weren't incredibly difficult, it just required some strategy, and our team initially struggled with the compromising and talking it out, but our facilitator offered us some strategic clues on how to compromise, and everything seemed to work much smoother after that (although not without some kinks here and there). Once we learned more about each other through that, we proceeded to the fun stuff...the climbing wall, the high ropes course, and the zip line that took you through the forest and over the river (or should I say over the river and through the woods, I did hear Christmas music at the store today). After dinner we played zoo and zumey and some other sort of camp games, and then there was another camp fire, and more singing, and also a bed time story. A group of us huddled under a hollowed out redwood and listened to someone with a superb story telling voice read "The Wump World." I happily went to bed to be rudely awakened by my duck clock at 5 again. Although on Saturday, PT was a hoot! It was Halloween PT with zombie push-ups and franken-sit-ups, and vampire jumps (really just some regular PT with wicked names). We finally did some service this morning (we thought we were going to the camp to help fix it up for the winter, when in fact we only did 3 hours of work), and then spent a lot of time doing "unorganized team bonding." Just think about how your tax dollars are paying for me to play in the woods with my team...Thank You! That evening there was a gold unit bon fire where each team had to perform a skit, everyone's was really good, so I was nervous to go, but fortunately we got a few laughs. After the fire we participated in "trick For treat" where we went around to stations solving riddles or puzzles or playing games. One game we had screaming contests, and another one involved making halloween noises on a bridge. I know I was placed on the right team because one activity was to spell out a word with your bodies, and Gold 2 spelled out "POOP."
Mendocino was pretty much over for us after that, we had some really great pancakes for breakfast and then headed back to Sacramento. Here is a lovely little story though:
I really hate driving...do not enjoy it at all, but I obtained my driving record in case I wanted to drive at all. I did not, but only two other people on my team are able to drive so far, and the requirement is 4 (since you have to switch drivers every 2 hours). So I was forced to take the driving test, and forced to drive the 15 passenger bus for 2 hours on our way back from Mendocino. I suppose it wasn't that bad, but still, I was not pleased.
But to end on a happy note, we had today off, and the last two dinners we ate as a team, I spent a good majority of the time laughing so hard I thought I was going to pee!