How are Things on the West Coast?: Slick but Working.

Yesterday's 'Blog':
This is my first shot at handwriting a 'blog' if you will. I would go about blogging like this more because I love the actual handwriting part, I just dislike the personal dictation to myself required to change medias. By the time I start typing my journal words in the text box of Blogger I already begin to judge and rewrite everything that I had previously iterated. I'll try not to do that with this one.
Today (well its probably my yesterday by the time I post) holds the current record for being the muddiest workday yet. For the first time since starting this Americorps venture I feel like we truly earned dirty uniforms. All the Habitat people commented on our clean pants on day one. Though I am a fan of clean pants I am glad we will be swapping our crisp trousers for some with a little more character and sense of work ethic. I think they warrant a little more respect.
I would love to eventually post a blog while I'm here that starts out by saying "Today was a normal day". The fact of the matter is that I have yet to even come close to normalcy. Today for instance (yesterday for those keeping track) meant waking up earlier than normal and donning our swanky Americorps polo shirts for a trip to a local country club. I'd say that beats normal since I was just getting used to drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups and trying to take off my hard hat without smearing mud all over my safety glasses. The reason we got a sip of high society was because a Habitat for Humanity breakfast was taking place. For some reason I was under the impression we would be eating at this breakfast as guest but I should have known better. We're NCCC. No one wants to invite us to a nice breakfast. We're fine kids but we usually smell like salty old bread and have unusually wrinkled clothes. So in the world outside of my mind (the real world that is) we worked the breakfast. At the risk of making our charitable hosts at Habitat sound...well, uncharitable I should go ahead and let you know they did feed us a great breakfast and always treat us really well. Now I can go back to being a little more sardonic.
I was in charge of checking in the upstanding guests of the banquet hall which overlooked a very beautiful view of what I think is Mount Jefferson but we all mistook for Saint Helens for some reason. I even got to speak with the Mayor during this check in. Now as to if it was the mayor of Portland or Gresham I do not know but I'm going to say Portland so I feel a little more important myself.  After having used most of my brain power on using power tools and moving heavy objects as of late I feel a little out of place schmoozing it up in a country club. Nonetheless it was kind of exciting to have something different to do.
After the breakfast we went to the Portland Metro Habitat headquarters to do a little work there. Though many of the houses they work on are in need of attention so are the offices of Habitat. I was pretty excited about working there because it meant wearing our snazzy, yellow rain suits. I feel so important wearing those things as though I am some secret Hazmat trained government employee sent in to deal with some horrible catastrophe. Actually I'm just a government employee in a cheap rain suit raking leaves. That aside I still like to feel important. I didn't just rake leaves though, I also cleaned out muck from under their siding. That's important stuff you know. If Habitat doesn't have to spend money buying new siding for their HQ this year that's all the more money going to build a house. At least that's how I like to think about it.
After some office time we went to a site that I haven't mentioned in my earlier posts. I haven't mentioned it because I had no idea we would ever be visiting it as it was pretty clear that our time would be spent at Lents Landing and Jubilee. It was cool to see a different site though as this one was in a much earlier state of construction than its sister sites. It was at this new place where we really, really got muddy. I was very excited. Why? Because I like wearing my rain suit.  I even made up a song about it. Wanna hear it?

I'm so happy in my yellow rain suit,
My yellow rain suit,
My yellow rain suit,
I'm so happy in my yellow rain suit,
I could rake leafs all day (this could easily be changed depending on the work site)

I'm so happy in my steel toe boots,
My steel toe boots,
My steel toe boots,
I'm so happy in my steel toe boots,
I could stomp in them all day

And so on it goes depending on whoever feels like picking up the next first. I'm pretty sure I stole this little ditty from 'Yellow Submarine'. Actually I'm sure of it.
So that was my high class and muddy day.
Oh but I did want to mention I ran three miles in 40 degrees and pouring rain. It was amazing.

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Now for today. As we won't divide into teams until tomorrow we all hopped in the van to go to Lents Landing for some indoors work. More so than any other day that we've been here I feel like today was a real workday.  Us NCCC folk split up to tackle several different projects alongside some of the regular volunteers at the site.  Ellen and myself worked with a volunteer named Keith who helped us figure out how to put toe kicks underneath all of the cabinetry. It took us quite a while to figure it out for ourselves but when Ellen and I did we were very proud. Later in the day we affixed gutter drainage areas with pvc pipe.  I'm so used to having a lot of small time projects consume my day that it was strange to have just two big things to occupy my time.

I helped cook burgers for the team tonight. Everyone was really pleased with my work which made me feel pretty good about the whole night.

Here's a few pictures to help catch you up. Hopefully I'll get our work site photos from my teammates soon: