Service! Finally!

Eventful day today. We finally had our first service project! Not just boring classroom type stuff! My team went to the Habitat for Humanity Home Improvement Outlet. On our way there, my team leader Christina said that she fell on her arm yesterday during the death hike and that Vaughn, our ex army nurse unit leader, looked at it and said she should get it X-Rayed. And also, a girl on my team was feeling a little flu-y, so she needed to go to a doctor also. So Christina said she would drop us off at the outlet and take herself and the other girl to urgent care. It turns out that Christina's wrist is most likely sprained, not fractured, and that my teammate has swine flu. Yes, for real. She had to move out of her dorm to be quarantined in another dorm building. Someone has to wear a mask and bring her meals to her. Everyone has already been really paranoid about getting sick, and I'm sure it's about to get much worse.

The Habitat Outlet was cool. They collect donations of home improvement-type items and sell them for less than half what they're worth. I think they also sometimes buy stuff to sell for cheap. When we first got there, they split my team up. Five of us on my team were there all day, helping to organize the warehouse, which is quite large. For most of the day, a teammate named Marie and I organized floor tiles. If we found any tiles that didn't belong to a set of at least 60, they were trash. That means we had to go through hundreds of 4-inch ceramic tiles that had many many many different textures and SO MANY shades of white and off-white. Some would look the same, so we'd put them in a pile together, then discover that one was 1/4 inch bigger than another. It pretty much scrambled our brains. After a while, we couldn't even tell if they were the same color or not. The most satisfying part was that the hundreds of tiles that were trash would go on a cart, which we would take to the dumpster. The dumpster was right outside the door, so we would wheel the cart to the door and then have to grab the tiles off and literally throw them into the dumpster. Why is breaking things so satisfying sometimes? I don't know, but it was fantastic. The other people who weren't there all day went out to a home restoration project. I think they gutted a kitchen or something. They came back all excited with all these demolition stories about how cool it was. I sorted tiles. No fair!

On the plus side, we were told to bring our brand new AmeriCorps-issued work gloves. Interspersed with all the excited tile sorting would be the arrival of the Habitat truck that had been out collecting furniture and appliance donations, so we would go help unload it. My brand new work gloves don't look so brand new anymore. They're real work gloves now, after one day of use!
Remember how I'm a huge dork? Here are my gloves on the left, and my roommate's still new, still attached-by-the-plastic-tie-thing gloves on the right. I felt bad that I didn't take any pictures today. Have I mentioned how I'm a huge dork?

Oh, and I almost forgot about lunch. While the five of us who were working in the warehouse were eating lunch in the break room, this giant grizzly man with one of those shirts with the sleeves cut off and scary tattoos came in to eat. He told us in an awesome slightly Hispanic accent about how he got his undergrad degree in electrical engineering, then hated electrical companies, then got a masters in psychology, but also hated that because his boss always tried to make him give his patients prescriptions. Apparently, psychiatrists get a percentage of the money people pay for their prescriptions. Then he starts talking about how most people's problems come from worrying about what other people think. Then he tells us about how people wouldn't expect that with all his education, he also spent 12 years in prison. Then he tells us about his time in Vietnam. Then he tells us about how we should never let other people control our happiness, fear, etc. The five of us combined said a total of about 15 words for like 20 minutes. It was awesome and terrifying at the same time.

And also, it snowed today. Just flurries in the morning, then it turned to rain in the afternoon, then snowed pretty heavily in the evening. I volunteered to drive the monster van back to campus from the Habitat outlet. I thought that if I could drive through heavy snow in 5pm traffic, I could drive through anything.

Tomorrow: Wearing the steel-toed boots for the first time to try to break them in. I'm nervous!