Another Week Down

Although it was a short week, it was tough. On Thursday we got 60 sales people from Dun & Bradstreet who were in town from all over the country for a sales conference. It was a "team building" event for them. They weren't even told that they were working with Habitat until they showed up on the site that morning. And since we don't have enough normal work for 60 volunteers, we had to come up with something new. So they had us dig foundations for 5 houses by hand with shovels. It was crazy. Each foundation was 20 inches wide by 18 inches deep. That's a lot of dirt. And to make things worse, it took about 15 minutes into the day before the skies opened up and we got drenched. Not only were we soaked but, of course, so was the dirt which made it twice as heavy and messy. It proceeded to pour for 5 or 10 minutes pretty much every hour for the rest of the day. The volunteers didn't complain too much though, especially for a bunch of sales people. However, it got to me because about 10 minutes before we wrapped up for the day my back gave out when I jumped into one of the trenches. Luckily we were about done and I was assigned to painting the next day with another Americorps so I could rest my back. On Saturday I had to push a wheel barrel around all day and my back held up so I think I might be in the clear. I'm going to give it the real test today on the golf course. I found a new 9-hole muni course that, like the First Tee course, has been converted from an old 18 hole country club. It is part of a city park that I went walking at last night. From the parking lot it looked a little nicer than the First Tee course.

The parents are going to be down here next weekend and then I'm going to the west side of the state to hang out with them the following weekend so I'm pretty excited about that. And I'm not just saying that because I know they read this.

Have a great week.