Happy V-Day

For those of you who believe in such silly holidays.

I've had an exciting week. Last Thursday night I attended Habijax's monthly homeowner orientation meeting. This is where anyone who is interested in becoming a Habitat homeowner shows up and applies. I was not required to go as part of my work here but decided to go in order to better understand the program. The meeting started at 6 but when I arrived at 5:30 the people were already lined down the street. I passed out applications and pens to applicants as they filtered in. We had 136 applicants that night plus a few straglers all jammed into half of the middle school cafeteria next door to our office. Probably 70% single female, 20% couples, and 10% single men. The presentation basically consisted of our financial planner dude walking everyone through the application line-by-line on Powerpoint and our family services lady describing the program. We had one disabled guy ask if he is allowed to let a lady move into his house if he meets one and he emphasized when he gets his house not if. Then 5 minutes later as they got to the minimum and maximum income limits for homeownership he found out the minimum was $1013 per month (gross) and he said his disability income was only $990 so our dude told him sorry and he got up and left. It was sad to see such a swing of emotion in 5 minutes. We had another lady get up and leave in the middle of the program and refused to give back her application until she ripped it into a thousand pieces. But overall the meeting ran very smooth with people asking good questions. I'm hoping to go to some other homeowner meetings and classes in the next few months.

Work is going well. I haven't been assigned punch in over 2 weeks. We hit a lull in construction due to permit problems with the city so we have been getting new assignments and training. Last week we learned to lay ceramic tile. It is much tougher than it looks. Actually laying the tile is easy, it is the layout and cutting that is difficult. We are working on a house with ceramic connecting the kitchen, utility room, and bathroom. Trying to layout that large a space and making it look good (straight and symmetrical) is very tricky. Our leader told us to just eye it up and make adjustments at the end. Two days later we tore 75% of it up with floor scrappers and started over. It's physically demanding too with all the squating and kneeling. But it is a great thing to learn and has been a nice change of pace. I have also been spending a lot of time in the warehouse building panels, which are the house walls that are shipped out to the site. My hand got bruised from using the nail gun so much. That thing kicks more than a real gun. Today I worked on putting blue board (like Tyvek) on a house with 4 girls from Enterprise Rent a Car. Not a bad Valentine's Day present. One girl was flirting with/hitting on me shamelessly. It was quite flattering. Unfortunately she isn't really what I'm looking for but we still had a good time. Today was also notable because I suffered my worst self-inflicted hammer wound so far. I was nailing a roofing nail through some metal flashing, which can be tough, and slammed my thumb pretty good. Normally when I hit my finger (thumb in this case) it hurts for about 15 seconds and fades. Not this time. It hurt for the rest of the day, including now. I even have a purple bruise under my thumbnail. It didn't prevent from winning a game of racquetball after work though.

I also went to Universal Studios with Dragan over the weekend but I'll write about that tomorrow because I'm tired.

Also, I'm happily surprised to find that an unknown person is reading my blog and actually made a post last time. Boy, that politics stuff really gets people going. Thanks for reading and have a good day/night.

PS - The picture shows what our subdivision McNair Park Villas looked like a month ago. We are building 94 houses there. I will try to post the same vantage point in July for comparison.