NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Week 7

Another week in the rear-view, and with it, another project.  Our last day with Habitat is this coming Wednesday, and we start the three-day drive back to Denver on Thursday.  It’s hard to believe that our time here is already over, but I feel blessed to have gotten this project at all.  Habitat work has been really rewarding, and all the friendly people and weird traditions have made New Orleans a great place to live.  A fond farewell, Louisiana.  Thanks for the music and the food!

The big news from this past week, Parents! (More specifically; mine!) My mom and dad came down from Washington last weekend and we had a great time acting like tourists.  We rode the street-cars, we took a steamboat tour of the Mississippi, we ate oysters, we toured the Tabasco(®)  Factory, and even saw a Mardi Gras parade. It was really great to see them, and it was great for them to escape February in Spokane.

Here are a couple pictures from the weekend:

On the Steamboat Natchez(®,™)

Touring the Garden District. 

Did you know that Andrew Jackson and the ghost of Archie Manning (®,™,$) won the battle of New Orleans in that house? Wait…or was that the one where Anne Rice lived when she wrote “Transformers 2”?  I think it was something like that. Our tour book was kindof confusing.

Krewe De Vieux parade, The first big one of Mardi Gras, and the only one that goes through the French Quarter.  And if you can’t make it out, that float is sperm-ies with hats.

Lagniappe:

Same as last round, we had to turn in a reflection; a poem or a picture or something to reflect on our project and our time in New Orleans.  Once again I made a stupid postcard.

Bye you, Bayou!

NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Weeks 5 & 6

Back in the saddle.  I apologize in advance for the hundreds of triplets of dozens of fifties of niners of words in this week’s update.  It’s kindof wordy, and short on pictures.  It’s been a busy couple of weeks.  I have visitors this weekend, and the Carnival parades are starting up tomorrow, so I can assure you, next week will have lots more pictures.  

With just a little over a week left here, we’re into the home stretch in New Orleans, and it has truly flown by.  Since this project is about over, we finally got our assignments for next round.  I don’t know how I keep weaseling my way into awesome projects, but the next two months should be pretty incredible.  We’re going to be camping and building trails at a national park. And not just any national park… Tell ‘em christracker:

Honestly, I don’t have a very good idea what to expect, but I do know that we’ll be working for ACE (Arizona Conservation….um… Empire? Enstitute maybe?).  I also know that we work nine days at a time- camping with no running water, possibly in the snow.  And we might see Robbie Knevel try to jump a motorcycle over us.  We’ll get four-day breaks, where we’ll stay in Flagstaff and try to shower off a week and a half worth of sweat and dirt.  I could not be more excited for the whole experience.  Sleeping in tents, pooping in the ground, arm wrestling buffalo, hunting grizzly bears for sport.  Ooh Wee! 

Also since last update, our team lost two members for underage drinking.  It sucks, but they acted dumb and got sent back to Denver.  As it happened, they were both of the other guys, leaving me as the only male left on our team. It has been kinda nice having my own room again, but I found myself watching “She’s the Man” with everybody last week (admitting that out loud hurts my head).  When our dryer broke this week, there were bras and other lady-clothes on the ceiling fan in our living room.  Dear Americorps, please send a friend who doesn’t have ovaries. Or at least send Amanda Bynes dressed like a boy (That’s a “She’s the Man” reference for those of you who still have your dignity).

Lagniappe:

Finally, a quick appeal on behalf of Americorps.  New budget cuts, proposed last week in the House of Representatives would cut all funding to Americorps, ending all the meaningful and necessary work that 85,000 people do all across the country.  Americorps helps non-profit organizations, regions hit by natural disasters, and the poorest communities around our country, and cutting such a great resource for those who need it most seems ass-backwards.  As a current employee, I find what Americorps does very important.  

If you agree, please flip off your Congressman.  If not, flip them off anyway.

Or, if you prefer to handle your problems like an adult, here's a petition (thanks!):
http://www.change.org/petitions/save-americorps

NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Week 4

Buhhh Baahh Ba Na Na Na! Go Pack Go! Nothing brightens my week like Hines Ward tears. How long does a Seahawks fan hold a grudge?  Five years and counting.

The last week or so at work have been a bit scattershot.  Habitat is kindof in a lull right now, before the big rush of volunteers that come every year for spring break.  Unfortunately for us, that means that all of the houses that they’re working on are just about finished, and the big exciting projects (putting up walls, roofing, alligator moats) have gone away.  We’ve been working with on smaller, finicky things like hanging drywall and cabinets.  Drywall is like a big jigsaw puzzle, trying to make all the pieces fit snugly.  Hopefully the work will pick up a bit soon, and I can wash the white drywall powder out of my hair. I feel like I’ve spent too much time at Pablo Escobar’s house.  Or maybe I just need to switch to Head and Shoulders shampoo.

This weekend, the Americorps team that we visited in Baton Rouge came down to New Orleans for the Super Bowl.  Our friend Sam is from Wisconsin and a huge Packers fan, and we had a great time yelling at the TV at the sports bar we went to.  Here are some pictures from our weekend.

Bourbon Street:

This balcony bar had a 3 for 1 beer special.  Like, as in buy one get two free.  This city has it out for my liver.

Sam, and I right after the game. The happiest boy in all of Louisiana.

Lagniappe:

When we first got to New Orleans, Nathan signed up for daily motivational texts from “the Universe,” and every day at breakfast, he reads one. Here are some of the better ones:

"Thoughts become things… Choose the good ones"

-The Universe

"Honor uncertainty, it's the seed from which all-knowingness comes"

-The Universe

"Simple is as simple does; you are poised for greatness"

-The Universe

So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.

NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Week 3

Bon Jovi everybody! (That’s French for “Hello.” I’m super cultured now.)  This week in New Orleans was a little slower, but definitely in a good way.  We’ve gotten into a rhythm with work and we’re starting to settle into our little Habitat lifestyle.

This week at work, we mixed a whole bunch of cement.  The cement comes in 80 lb bags, and we made it through at least 250 bags; enough for a sidewalk and a driveway.  It was exhausting, but it looked really nice when it was finished.  (Had they rented a mixer, it would have taken a half hour, not three days, but whatever.  Habitat needs to keep their volunteers busy, so a lot of the things we do seem kindof inefficient.)

This weekend, most of our team made a trip up to Baton Rouge for a night.  Another Americorps team is staying there on the LSU campus, and we stayed with them.  After two plus months spending every waking moment with the people on my team, it was great to hang out with some friends that I don’t share Q-tips and bathroom cabinetry with.  And we made the most of the company.  After a great pizza dinner (and a large tab at the bar across the street), we wandered down to the lake/pond/mudpit across the street from their place.

It was a hilarious night, and a great break from the day to day in New Orleans.  The next morning we walked through the LSU campus.  Did you know they have a live tiger (their mascot) in a cage there? Like at a zoo?  I wish that my alma mater, Western Washington, had a caged Viking (our mascot) on display at all times.  He could wear his pointy hat and you could watch him pillage things from behind safety glass.

Lagniappe:

Lastly, a quick update on postcards. I’ve gotten a few since the Christmas break, and here are some highlights.  First, thanks to Miss Olga Z for this chestnut:

And to Water 7, thank you for this one:

I don’t know what the turtle just told this woman, but she’s taking it pretty hard.  Turtle cancer maybe? 

Goodbye until next week.  Or as the French say, “H'ordeuvres!”

NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Week 2

Alright, another week down, and it was another busy one.  We'll start with a pretty picture:

Work these last few weeks has been great.  We’re working with Habitat for Humanity, building houses for low income families.  For anybody who doesn’t know what Habitat does (like Amish maybe?  Or mermaids?), they build houses with volunteer labor and sell them (for the cost of materials) to families who qualify.  The families are also given no-interest loans, so all in all, it’s a pretty cheap way to get into a new house.  We’ve been working outside, which is a great, and it’s really cool to see tangible change each day when we leave.

It really is amazing to see how fast the houses go up.  From start to finish, it takes three months to finish a Habitat house, but in the first two weeks we’ve been here, we’ve seen one house go from a 2 X 4 skeleton:

…to a full on house, with a roof, siding, windows and doors:

We’ve also gone out four or five days to make repairs on existing houses.  We replaced a lot of window trim. We also spent one day removing insulation, which meant rolling around in cat piss and itchy fiberglass under a house for three hours.  The best part of doing repairs has been seeing different parts of the city.  We got to see St Bernard parish, the West Bank, and, closer to home, Musicians Village:

The city commissioned Habitat to build forty or so houses all next to each other, and sold them to musicians. The houses are all new since 2005 and account for every building for a quarter mile in the Upper Ninth Ward. It’s only a few blocks from our house, and I had no idea it was there until earlier this week.  It is a really neat little community and a positive reminder of what we’re here working for. 

Habitat work is exhausting.  I go to bed at 9:00 PM sharp now, but we have made time on the weekends to go downtown.  There is so much in New Orleans to rave about, with the live music, the po-boy sandwiches, the bars, the street performers, getting to wear a t-shirt in January, more live music, etc. etc.

There’s like infinity fun things here! Maybe twofinity!

Last week we fixed window trim for a guy named Chip in Musician’s Village who plays a lot downtown. On Saturday, a few of us went to the French Quarter to watch him play.  His set was really fun, and he gave us some CDs after, which was really nice of him. Then we got some to-go beers.  This city rules. 

Lagniappe (a little something extra):

I’ll end with a brief mention of something very childish: Code Blue.  What is Code Blue you ask? Nathan told me about it.  It’s part holiday (supposedly, its Jan 29 every year), part “Avatar” homage (get those 3D glasses ready for some blue crap!), and all synchronized BM.  There are four steps to a successful Code Blue Day:

1: Tell your friends

2: For the next six days, eat as much blue food coloring as you can handle

3: On Code Blue day (January 29) take a blue poop in a public toilet. 

4: Don’t flush and enjoy knowing that you confused the hell out of someone.  (You BLUE their mind! Get it? HaHa! Somebody hi-five me!)

Happy Holiday! 

NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Week 1

What a week, what a week. Living down here and starting fresh with a new job in a new city has been profound, intense and exhausting.  New Orleans has a lot to offer, and it’s a lot to take in.   

While we’re here, we’ll be staying in a Habitat house in the Upper Ninth Ward. The same kind we build at work.  They look like this:

3 bedroom, 1 bath, 10 people.  It’s a little claustrophobic compared to the freedoms we had in the Denver dorm (but we do get BUNK BEDS!!).  I’m actually enjoying our house quite a bit so far. It’s more of the Americorps experience that I’d been expecting than we had living in Denver.

It has been plenty challenging though. We didn’t get water until late Thursday night, and no hot water until Friday night, so that meant four days of driving to do our dishes or take showers.  Americorps is going to give me an ulcer. They gave us keys to another Habitat house a mile away that we used to clean our dishes and ourselves.  Our first night in town, after a long day driving in from Texas, we went to shower only to find the shower house flooding.  We think that when they turned on the water to the house, they didn’t go inside, because both of the washing machine intakes were wide open and spraying water all over the laundry room. When we got there, there was a good half inch of water on the floor throughout the entire back half of the house.  Americorps is going to give my ulcer an ulcer (like Russian nesting dolls.  Russian nesting ulcers!).

We got in Monday night, and Tuesday they had us at the build sites, working with the Habitat crews.  I’m going to save any talk of the actual work until next week.  With a week as busy as this one has been, my actual job got put on the J.V. blog (along with a sorta funny poop joke and a breakdown of my 5 favorite kinds of Grapefruit (Did Ruby Red make the list?!?)).

Tuesday night, Megan and I went to the House of Blues in the French Quarter to see a Girl Talk concert. 

The show was crazy.  He danced around on stage behind a wall of laptops, while two guys ran around on stage shooting water and toilet paper into the crowd.  He also had a giant video screen, big confetti filled balloons, and a bunch of people on the stage dancing. It was pretty awesome.

Reminders from 2005 are everywhere.  We’re living in the Ninth ward, which is home to many of the New Orleans projects, and only a mile or two from the levees. Our neighborhood is mostly black (99%) and even more mostly vacant (The silence at night is a little unsettling).  Even six years after the hurricane hit, it seems like every other house is in shambles; falling apart and boarded up.  The lived-in houses on our block are the ones that stand out from the rest.  All the boarded up houses, and even a bunch of the lived in ones still have the spray paint from the search crews that checked the houses right after the hurricane.

The top is the date the house was checked, the left and right show if the place has power gas or other hazards, and the bottom is how many dead bodies they found inside.  As a newcomer to the city, it’s really a lot to take in. Over 1800 people died. The scariest part is that the city is no more prepared for a hurricane than it was in 2005.  The levees were built back almost exactly as they were before Katrina hit, so another hurricane would easily flood the city all over again. 

Having said all that, there has been rebuilding done.  It’s just the scale of the whole thing.  There is so much work that needs to be done to bring the city back, it seems daunting.  But it’s absolutely worth it.  Downtown is so vibrant- full of music and friendly people- that it deserves to be built back.  It’s just- how do you weigh the vitality of a city against the possibility of another calamity? 

Oh well, these heavy thoughts are above my pay grade anyway.  I hit shit with a hammer.  

NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Prologue

So, who’s been to the Quality Inn in Amarillo Texas? We’re on the first day of our road trip to New Orleans, and that’s where we’re staying tonight.  Which means one thing: another check mark on my bucket list!  Woo Hoo!

After a pretty awesome Christmas break, I flew back to Denver for a week of briefing/ debriefing before our next round of projects in starts up.  As I mentioned a while back, we're going to New Orleans to work with Habitat for Humanity building houses. It was all I could do to stay patient through all our meetings, presentations and sitting.  We recapped our last project and planned/ packed for the upcoming one, but my mind was in the bayou.

Between meetings this last week, few of us accompanied my roommate Erik to a bar called Crocs to watch the Sugar Bowl. Crocs is an Ohio State bar, and Erik is a Buckeye alum, so he taught us all of the cheers while Ohio State was beating Arkansas.  If you talk enough shit about Michigan it’s really easy to fit in with Buckeye fans.  After a few beers, the two of us ended up signing up for the halftime hot-wing eating contest.  Right after signing up I got cold feet and wanted to leave, but then I remembered that’s what some pussy Michigan fan would do. We stayed, and somehow I won.  We had to put back seven hot wings and a beer, and I had a come-from-behind victory to win $20 in bar money.  I practice eating every day, and it turns out I’m starting to get good at it. Erik got fourth, so all he won was some fiery discomfort and a hi-five from an eating champion.

Saturday, we left Denver in our big van, and we’ll be on the road until late Monday night.  We travel to all the non-Denver projects by 15 passenger van.  Here’s a picture of Guvvie Lovie, our green chariot, and my home until Monday:

Like I mentioned at the top, we’re in Amarillo tonight, and we’ll be in Tyler TX tomorrow, before getting to NOLA on Monday night.  Christracker has a breakdown of the trip:

The trip is going well so far, but we’ll see how I’m feeling about it after another two days of van naps, ipod games and rubik's cube.  When it's actually my turn to drive, there's alot to remember because driving government vehicles for Americorps has an ass-ton of rules (less than a shit-ton, more than a normal ton).  In addition to the usual “wear seatbelts” and “no meth” driving rules, we have lots of others. Here are but a few:

1. No driver can drive for more than 2 hours
2. Nobody can ride shotgun for more than 2 hours
3. No more than 8 total hours of driving in a day
4. No drive-thru’s
5. No Parking Garages
6. No driving faster than 65mph, even if the speed limit is higher.
7. No running yellow lights. Or green lights.
8. The driver can’t talk or blink

Those last two aren’t real, but still; Uncle Sam takes his shit seriously.

This coming week will be exciting. We’ll be finishing our roadtrip, starting work, seeing a Girl Talk concert, and getting to know New Orleans.  CANNOT WAIT!  I went on Google Maps yesterday to see where we’re living, and this is what came up.  

Veloceraptors live in the yard.  Hopefully they’ve fixed it up at least a little bit since this picture was taken. Or at least taken the boards off the doors and windows so we can get inside.

Giddy-up Guvvie Lovie! On to N’awlins!