Who Dat Sayin’ They’re Gonna Beat Dem Saints?

On Sunday evening, most of us went to the French Quarter to find somewhere to sit and watch the Saints game. We looked in a lot of different places, but everywhere was either too crowded or not a very young crowd. We decided to go back to Magnolia Grill, where we ate dinner the first time we went to the Quarter. It was a cool little place that wasn’t crowded then, and they had good drink specials and nice TVs. We got there pretty close to the start of the game and it was empty. More people came in later, but not many. It ended up being really fun because the chef and the waiter were both rooting for the Vikings, and the manager guy and the other worker were for the Saints. The workers all kept yelling at each other. I don’t know if any of you watched the game, but it was a pretty exciting game. It stayed really close the whole time and ended with a tie. The Saints won the coin toss to get the ball first in overtime, then won! It was pretty exciting. Everyone in the tiny restaurant was cheering (except for the chef and waiter, of course). The street we were on wasn’t very populated at the time, so we made our way over to Bourbon Street and found the entire population of New Orleans. We walked down the street for a while and caught beads that were being thrown from balconies. As we walked down the street, one bar we passed started playing the Cupid Shuffle. (One of those hip hop songs that have a dance that everyone knows.) People started gathering in the street outside of the bar and doing the dance. Our group joined in and a lot of fun. For a while. Until the CRUSHING MOB OF PEOPLE surrounded everyone. You literally could not move without significant effort and rudeness. We somehow managed to fight our way out, and several of us decided to leave. Even though that mob got a little overwhelming, it was still a really fun night. It was like a culmination of all the Saints energy in the whole city.

Monday was of course another day off since we work Tuesday through Saturday. TK, Heather, and Lindsey had found a YMCA about 20 minutes away and already had memberships. Tomm and I went with the three of them to the Y, which is actually really nice. There’s a pretty big gym with a lot of weight machines and treadmills and stuff. The treadmills, bikes, ellipticals, and cross trainers all have TVs with cable on them. You can change your channel to whatever you want and plug in your headphones to listen. It’s actually nicer than the Nautilus in my hometown. On the way back, Heather, Lindsey, and I decided we wanted to check out the French Market, which is like a permanent flea market. It had a LOT of good stuff. I could have spent so much money there, but I limited it to two pairs of earrings. I had been wanting some Fleur de Lis earrings and found some cute ones, and all three of us got a pair from an artist who made them from heating some special kind of brightly colored plastic. I’m pretty sure we’ll be back.

So right now as I write this next section, it’s Friday. I really really can’t remember exactly what happened each day at work. I know I worked with Jess, Rob, and Marquis a lot because we were the people who weren’t really excited about working on the roof (which looks really slanted). We put up all the soffet and facia. I think I already described what those are. I cut all the soffet pieces and in the process realized how much stronger my right arm is than my left. The circular saw, which is what you use to cut soffet, doesn’t feel very heavy in my right hand but it feels super heavy in my left. This was also an annoying process because at the ends of each wall, the soffet has to be cut at a 45-ish degree angle so they will match up. I say 45-ish because they were all different. And most of them made a couple wasted pieces of soffet from where we got measurements wrong. For the facia, I cut it all (like I did that Saturday when Dan was out of town and we worked on another house), but I also had to help put some of it up. If we could have used regular nails, it would have taken no time at all. But alas, that would be too easy. There are some special skinny little aluminum nails that are painted white that you have to use. They’re aluminum. Bendy, flimsy aluminum. You start hammering it in and you think it’s going in straight, but then it bends almost at the end. And once it’s in that far, it’s quite an ordeal to get it out without scratching the facia. Some of them were REALLY frustrating. And when I say some, I mean most. Also, you have to hammer carefully because if you miss the nail and hit the facia itself, you make a dent in the nice flat facia which can never be removed. It’s pretty horrible.

More of note than soffet and facia was Thursday night. TK’s birthday is today (Friday), and to celebrate, he wanted to go to a concert of a band he likes last night at the House of Blues. It was a bluegrass band called Yonder Mountain. (If you watched that slideshow video we made that’s on Facebook, the first song in the video is from Yonder.) All but two people from our team and two people from Dani’s team (the other Sun team here) bought tickets. It was SO fun. The whole big group of us managed to stand way up close to the stage and everyone was dancing. I had never been to a bluegrass show before, and I would definitely go again. The show started at like 9:30, and Christina had told us that she was taking the van back at 12:30 but we could find our own way back later if we wanted. Surprisingly, almost everyone went back at 12:30. TK and I were the only ones from our team who wanted to stay till the end, along with Erin, Marie, and Matt from Dani’s team. It ended up ending about 20 minutes after they left. Ironically, they all missed the song we had all been waiting for. That first song from our slideshow video is called 40 Miles From Denver (the band is from Colorado) and we all really wanted them to play it. We had been yelling out the song name many times, and a couple times the guitar player who was right in front of us even made eye contact. The rest of our group left, they played like one more song, then the show was over. The band came back out for an encore, and the Denver song was the first one they played. TK and I even got a free ride home. There’s a woman named Mary Lane who had been volunteering on our worksite the first couple weeks we were here. She had just finished grad school and was looking for a job, but wanted to do something useful while waiting for one. She knew Dan through a friend, so she volunteered at our house for a while. (She got a job last week though, so she’s not around anymore.) She and TK apparently have like the exact same taste in music and he had told her that we were all going to the Yonder show for his birthday. She loves them also, so she decided to go to the show too. When it was over, she came over to ask how we were getting home and we told her taking a cab. She offered to drive us. Not only did we get a free ride home, we also were able to prevent her from walking across the entire French Quarter alone late at night to where she was parked. It was pretty nice.

Oh, and the title of this post is the chant the Saints fans like to start ALL THE TIME. It is also completely acceptable to just shout “Who dat?” at any random time you want. During the Yonder show, they started talking about how fun it is to play in New Orleans, and the crowd started the chant. The band told us to keep going, and they started playing a beat with the chant. Then the singer started making up words and turned it into a little song with the chant in the background. When they wrapped up the song, they said that it had been recorded. I would love to somehow get hold of that recording.

So that brings us to Friday. It was supposed to thunderstorm, so Dan planned a not-really-outdoor project for us. After Katrina, Habitat started building houses built about three feet off the ground on concrete pillars in case of flooding. Today, we all had to crawl under the house and put insulation under the floor. Putting the insulation up wasn’t that bad. You just kind of squish it up into the spaces under the house. The bad part of it was that it’s made of fiberglass, so we all have obnoxious tiny fiberglass splinters. Worse than the fiberglass splinters was that after the insulation was all up, we had to cover the whole thing with chicken wire. It was pretty horrible. It couldn’t be too tight because then it would squish the insulation and make it useless, but it couldn’t be too loose because then the insulation could fall down. Bending a big roll of chicken wire to go where you want it isn’t as easy as it might seem. We worked in groups of three or four per roll and usually someone would have to hold it while someone else would hammer. The space under the house is covered in some kind of mud/sand/dirt combination which was caked on the wire and on the wood under there. So every time you hammer, dirt would fall on everyone. This means lots of dirt in your eyes, in your hair, on your face, down your shirt, etc. We were working on all this from 8:00 until about 2:00. It started raining in the afternoon, but at about 2:00 some thunder and lightning started. NCCC rules are that we’re not allowed to work out side when there’s lightning. So at least we got to leave early the day the work was so unpleasant. Unfortunately, the chicken wire isn’t all finished yet, so some people are going to have to go back under there.

On Saturday (it’s Sunday now as I write), the lovely 60 or 70 degree weather we had been having dropped to about 42 with strong wind that made it seem much colder. There were a few various projects on the exterior of the house that had to be finished. I was back to cutting more soffit. (I finally saw it written yesterday. It’s soffit, not soffet. Whoops.) One side of the house has a little bump out thing. From the inside, it’s like a little nook with windows where a window seat might go. From the outside, it’s mostly just annoying and makes things take longer. Siding hadn’t been done yet on the bump out, which means that F-Channel, soffit, and facia couldn’t be done. While some people were finishing that siding, I cut soffit for Heather to put up under the porch roof. Yep, there’s soffit under there too. We ran out of that kind of soffit, so we had to wait for Dan to go to the warehouse and get more. Then he had me show Becky and Michala how to do F-Channel and soffit on the bump out while I cut it for them. The work wasn’t bad or anything, it was just so cold and windy.

So that was the week. I don’t know what’s happening this weekend yet. I can’t believe we’ve been here three weeks already. It’s so nice that we’re here for two months instead of just one.