ACC Baseball

This is my 3rd day off out of four this weekend. I’m taking Tuesday off because I’m way ahead on completing my 1700 hours before July 29th. So I’m going to play golf tomorrow. I was at the beach today and there were some serious waves. The water temp is already 80 degrees. Just where it has to be for hurricane season to start (Thurs. June 1).

I went to the ACC baseball tourney a couples times this past week. I saw GTech play Miami and Clemson play Wake Forest on Wednesday night. GTech and Clemson won that night. On Saturday morning I headed over to watch Florida State play NC State in the first game. As I was walking up to the ticket window a girl asked if I needed a ticket and she gave me one for free. When I walked inside to find my seat the usher led me to the second row behind the screen right next to the FSU dugout. Not that I’m complaining but FSU is the only school that would have two hot female batgirls sitting right in the dugout during games. No wonder they lost so many games this year. Anyway, my great seat was in the sun and it was 95 degrees out with no breeze at field level. So I only stayed in those seats for a couple innings before taking cover in the shade. FSU beat NC State in game one and they let people re-enter so I headed home for lunch and some A/C. I really wanted to see game 2 which was #1 seed Clemson against GTech. Clemson was up two going into the bottom of the ninth and blew it. Tech ended up winning in the 10th. All the games were really good and the players didn’t complain half as much as the losers on the SVSU team I played on in college. I realized this weekend how much good sports they have here given the lack of pro sports other than the Jags. We had three big college football games, the first round of the basketball tourney, the TPC, and now college baseball. I didn’t expect that when I came here.

I saw Phantom of the Opera last night with Heather (CyberGirl). It was a really good show. I liked it better than Les Mis which I saw last year. I was a little disappointed that the chandelier didn’t fall on anyone in the crowd. If you want the story on me and Heather I’ll make it quick. After we first went out I told her that I just wanted to be friends because I was in negotiation with you know who about going out with her. Well, I asked Heather if she wanted to date-date last night and let’s just say I’ll be flying solo at least through the rest of the summer. It wasn’t an outright rejection because she is seeing some other dude now. At least now I can just focus on finishing my hours and taking my trip in August. I might even start looking into some job opportunities in Chi-town. But maybe not.

I hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday weekend.

Maybe I'll get to the mini-golf next time. Sorry.

Back from the Big D.

I’m back from the Dallas trip. It was a long week but we got a house built. We stayed at a camp where the sign on the way in says “Where people go to meet Jesus.” Well, I didn’t meet him but I did meet a bunch of other interesting people. I stayed in a bunkroom with 22 other dudes. I didn’t sleep worth a shit the first night but I discovered earplugs the next night (and worked my ass off during the day) and slept great the rest of the week. The bunkhouse smelled pretty foul by weeks end. Our days started with a 6:15 bus departure to the build site where we would have breakfast. Building would start at 8, lunch at noon, and dinner at 5:30 and buses departed for camp at 6. There was nothing but a slab on our site on Monday morning and by the end of the day Saturday the exterior (including landscaping) was complete and half the inside was done. We had a group of about 20 working on the house with 2 site leaders. We worked with Americorps groups from Austin, TX and Tuscaloosa, AL. We fell behind the first day but kept up with the other houses the rest of the week. Of the 20 people only about 12 worked construction regularly and 8 were full time office staff. Everyone got along fine for the most part. There were 20 houses built in total for the “Buildathon.” Ten houses were built exclusively by Americorps and ten houses were built by local volunteers. There were 300 or 400 people there everyday. Everyone got free food and amazingly it wasn’t that bad. The homeowner of our house (Shaquita) worked with us a little during the week and seemed very grateful to be getting the house. She gave everyone a hug at the end and collected our contact info. It’s nice to work with homeowners that appreciate the opportunity they are getting. It was a rough week physically with several ant bites, a blood blister on my foot, and whacking my fingers several times with the hammer. But it was worth it. On the final night they took us to the clubby part of downtown Dallas where we had dinner and got free admission into a bar where a bunch of local bands were playing (and they were actually good). Overall it was a good trip. The other Americorps just complained most of the time about everything but that’s not unusual. You would have thought they grew up at a country club to listen to the complaints. Oh well, I guess I’ll chalk it up to youth.


In other news, I would like to point out the Sox winning the series over the Cubs last weekend as usual. At least one Cub had some fight left in him. It would have been a sweep had Cotts not thrown the last game Black Sox style. It is also worth note that the Detroit Tigers currently own the best record in the majors, not too shabby. Let’s hope it holds up. I plan to attend the ACC baseball tourney here in Jacksonville this week. I can’t wait to hear the ping of the bat. I hope to write about the Boys & Girls Club mini-golf course progress in the next post.

No Interest Mortage

I had to lead large groups of homeowners (HOs) this week so I thought I would write about them. You see as the weather gets warmer the productivity of our HOs decreases. This is most likely due to their physical condition. It may also have to do with the alcohol I think I smelled on the breath of one of them this week. Probably 75% of the HOs are overweight with the bulk of those near the obese threshold. We won’t go into the reasons for this as that would involve lots of generalizations and many paragraphs. However, part of the Habitat program is to have the homeowner work on the houses for a minimum of 300 hours. Since most all HOs must have a full-time job, many only come out to earn hours working on houses once per week. You can do the math and see that it could take many weeks at that rate to finish. So they will be working in weather conditions year round. I don’t believe that our administrative staff screens potential HOs for actual ability to do work but instead just makes them sign off that they are aware that they have to work 300 hours. Part of the problem is that if they did conduct such a screen we probably couldn’t get enough HOs to fill our houses. Through the winter you would occasionally have to get on the HOs to stop hanging out on the porch and get back to work but now that the temperature is up it is happening much more frequently. I mean they only really work 6 hours a day and get credit for 8 because we count registration time in the morning and lunch.

So the big financial incentive for the HOs to get into the program is that they get to pay for the house at cost over a 25 year no interest mortgage. The price of the houses aren’t really that much cheaper than you could probably get from a contractor. I think our current houses are going for about $100k. Maybe a fully contracted house would cost $120k. Remember these houses are new but they are still in the hood. So I finally got around to calculating the savings over 25 years for a no interest loan for $100k. The result was about $93k in interest savings. Then I divided that by 300 hours to come up with an hourly wage of $311. That is net wage. If I used 6 hour days obviously the number would be much larger. I’ve decided that the next time I lead a group of mostly HOs I’m going to cite these numbers and let them know that I expect them earn that incredible hourly wage. But the more I think about it, people in society who actually earn that kind of money usually don’t work particularly hard because they just make other people do their work and they play golf with clients. So maybe are our HOs are just acting like the average $400 per hour person.

I am heading to the airport in about an hour to catch a plane to Dallas with all my Americorps co-workers. We will be building houses for the next 6 days with other Americorps members from around the country. I think the building will be fun but I’m not looking forward to bunkrooms with 18 people per room. I didn’t sleep too well when we went to camp at the beginning of the year in Georgia. I will be well over the 80% of hours complete mark after this week. I’m anticipating very little ability to contact people in the outside world so don’t expect any emails or phone calls this week.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mothers out there.

How 'bout some kayaking?

Sorry it took so long but I’m back with a new story for the readers. I went kayaking on Monday with my friend Jack who is a carpenter with Habijax. We rented a two-man kayak from a little place next to Little Talbot Island State Park. The river wound its way out to the ocean. On the way out we were paddling wide the lowering tide but against a fairly strong wind. After about 10 minutes of paddling I knew that this was real exercise and was going to kick my ass. We made it to the sandbar at the ocean in a little under an hour which, according to the lady who rented us the kayak, was pretty good time. We rented the kayak a little after 2 pm and had to have it back by 5 or else we had to pay extra, which Jack really didn’t want to do. So we made the beach around 3 and were pretty tired so we shot the shit and rested out there for a while. I check the time before we pushed off to head back and it was 3:40. This is where it gets good. The lady told us to stay to the right on the way back in and retrace our path. So on the way back we pass a fishing boat and see two openings through the marsh going in our direction so we took the one on the right. We proceeded to see a bunch of fish jumping a good foot out of the water and a bunch of oysters. After about 15 minutes of this I noticed the wind was in our face again and the sun was at our back. I’m sure you know what I’m getting at, yeah the ocean is east of Florida. So I tell Jack, who admits he has no sense of directions, that I think we’re going back toward the ocean and I ask him to recheck the map since he was in back and responsible for the map. We weren’t sure where we were so the map wasn’t much good but I knew we were heading toward the ocean. We decided to press on. About 5 minutes later, surprise surprise, we see a boat that looks a hell of a lot like the one we saw 20 minutes earlier when we left the ocean. We were on the opposite side of the boat so we weren’t sure so we continued to the bend and low and behold there is the beach and ocean. Just then morale hit its low point and kayaking became real work. We were exhausted and had an hour to get the boat back to the dock paddling against the tide. We then study the map, figure out our error (we went all the way around a small island), figure out the right way back, pass the fishermen for the third time (“you guys all right?”, “We are now”), and head for home. There wasn’t much talking for the next hour probably because we couldn’t stop thinking about our burning muscles and trying to breathe normally. We finally arrived back at the dock at about 4:59 pm. To make things worse we had to pull the boat out of the water and carry it back up to the building. Well, needless to say it was a trip I won’t soon forget. I have attached a couple pictures from the trip for you enjoyment.

In other news, the putt-putt course is coming along. We have 2 coats of paint on 4 holes, 1 coat on another 4, and one is unpainted. We are negotiating with some retailers and maybe a manufacturer for a deal on the turf. Work weeks seem to fly by now as the end approaches. I got stung/bit by a fire ant again yesterday and today my hand looks like a marshmallow again. I won’t sicken you with a picture this time. That’s about it from here. Thanks for the posts. I enjoy reading them.