AmeriBlog: And again...

...Sorry for the long absence. I'm getting worse and worse at the regular updates, aren't I?

On Monday, we were in the Little Auditorium (yes, that's really its name) ALL DAY. The Red Cross was here talking about disasters ALL DAY. ALL DAY is a really long time to be in one room that has uncomfortable seats with negative two inches of leg room. Half of the stuff the Red Cross talked about, we had already been told in another Red Cross meeting. The other half could have been condensed to about a quarter of its length. But apparently now we're prepared to go help if a disaster strikes.

Monday night there was a talent show. You know how in talent shows like this, some people are pretty good, but most people not so much? Most people were really pretty good. The first act was a guy doing a stand up comedy routine, and it was WAY better than most talent show comedy. The only joke I can specifically remember is when he was talking about the different units. He said something like "Isn't the Sun unit kind of redundant when there's a Fire unit? Why do we need a Fire unit and a Giant Ball of Fire unit? Just add a Two Cavemen with Sticks unit, and we'll be set."

This guy (not from my unit)

did a bunch of impressions, which were AMAZING. These guys

did a ground guide dance. Remember driver safety day, and how you need a ground guide when you back up the AmeriVans? They did a dance with the ground guide arm motions. Here we see them turning right. Halfway through, they crashed the "van." Half of them fell down and the other half did CPR. It was pretty funny. I think my favorite part though was Carl (in plaid) and Matt (both from my unit):

singing "Wagon Wheel," which somehow seems to come on every other time we're in the vans. When they were done, Matt left the stage, and Carl started playing "You Belong with Me" by Taylor Swift. In the middle of it, Shawn:

jumped on stage in his sunglasses, cut Carl off, and said "I'm sorry Taylor, I'm going to let you finish, but Beyonce had the best video of all time!" (Remember when Kanye West did that to Taylor Swift at the Video Music Awards?) Then Carl ran off the stage, and "Single Ladies" by Beyonce immediately started playing, and Shawn did the entire dance. It was hilarious.

Yesterday was interesting. Let me tell you a little story. I had read in a few different places before I got here that roommates here on campus are assigned randomly. It will be someone in your unit, but your roommate will not be on your team. Understandable, right? You go out on a two month spike project where you eat, sleep, work, and live with your team. Probably the last thing you want to do is come back to Denver after those two months and still be living with one of those people. Well, when the teams were all announced last week, there were FIVE pairs of roommates on my floor (my floor is all Sun unit girls) who were on the same team. The solution? Not just refrain from putting roommates on a team together in the first place. No, lets make them all switch rooms so they're not with a teammate. Luckily, my roommate Stephanie isn't on my team, because we get along really well. In addition, there is a division of NCCC called Fire Management (they go out and fight wildfires). Fire management people are all in the Earth unit. One Sun unit girl, Ayla, decided to join Fire Management, so she had to switch to the Earth unit. She apparently has to switch rooms also, to move to the Earth floor, leaving her roommate Ashley without a roommate. After all the unit switching happened when the Fire Management people were decided, Sun got two new people from Earth, Jim and Lauren. Yep, you guessed it, Lauren now needs to move to our floor. The logical solution would be to put her in with Ashley, Ayla's old roomie, but Ashley and Lauren are on the same team so that can't happen. So now that means that there are six pairs of roommates that need to be split. Two pairs traded last week (one person from each room switched with each other), so now there are only four rooms that need to change. That's an even number, making it super easy. One person from each room trades with each other, right? Well, yesterday morning a fellow Sun girl (Sarah) came up to me and asked what my room number was. When I told her, she said "Oh, I think either you or your roommate are going to have to move." Yes, you are correct in what you're thinking, that makes ZERO sense. Obviously I didn't take this too seriously since it didn't come from a leader or anything, but I was concerned. Later, at lunch, Sarah came back over to me and told me what specific room I was moving into. Now I decided to investigate. I called Christina to see if she knew anything about this, and she didn't. I called Nichole, our Sun UDA (which I think stands for Unit Development Assistant, but I'm not sure). She's like our liaison to Vaughn and the big wigs. When I told her my name and room number, she said exactly what Sarah had said, that I was moving to that other room. I tried to convince her that it made no sense and how much easier it would be if they all just switched with each other, but I wasn't sure it worked. Then I saw her later when she sat in on my team's Project Briefing (which I'll explain later), and she told me I don't have to move! Woo hoo!

Anyway, back to AmeriCorps stuff that happened yesterday. In the morning, we had vehicle and tool check out. My team was issued a cargo truck that the Fire Management people usually use. (They don't need them this round of projects because all the Fire people are going to New Orleans to do Habitat for Humanity. Every other round, I think they'll be fighting fires somewhere.) We also got issued sleeping bags because we'll be sleeping all in one big room in the lodge. We also got rain gear. What do you think of when you think of rain gear? If you think of this guy

then you've got a good picture of our rain gear. Only there's a hood, not a hat. And also some yellow pants that come up to our shoulders. (Yes, there will be pictures.) I guess the thinking was that it won't really protect us from the cold we should be expecting, but at least it'll be waterproof. We also got 10 handsaws. We're lumberjacks, remember? Apparently lumberjacks wear yellow rain slickers.

We also had our project briefing. This is where we put on our dress uniform (white polo, black BDU pants, and steel toes) and go in a room with Vaughn the unit leader and Ray the Assistant Regional Director (I don't think that's actually his title, but something like that) and tell them all about our project - where we're going, what we're doing, living arrangements, media plan, physical training plan, service learning plan, etc. (This is where Nichole was sitting in and gave me the news about not moving.) It was fine. It wasn't nearly as scary as everyone kept making it seem.

Today was Veterans Day, and we had the day off. When I say day off, I usually mean day to get some ISP (Independent Service Project) hours done. I went with 7 other Sun unit people to Food Serve America, which is like a warehouse food bank kind of place. For the first hour or so, we stood there with thousands of onions and put them in bags of 4. Know what looks disgusting? Smushed, rotten onions. Know what smells disgusting? Smushed, rotten onions. There weren't too many really bad ones, but enough to make it not a very fun job. We also had to wear lunch lady style hair nets. Who wants hair in their smushed, rotten onions? After that, we worked an assembly line packing one each of various kinds of frozen meat into boxes. I was at the beginning of the line having a (mostly) friendly competition with a guy named Cody from my unit about who could set up the flattened boxes faster.

And now some pictures that didn't fit in anywhere else in this post: