Week Two, Day Two

Monday ...
It didn't just rain last night... it POURED. The rain was so loud throughout the night that we couldn't even hear the trains nearby. We wake up and realize, pretty quickly, that we're probably *not* gonna be doing any outdoor work and de-molding really doesn't work so well in the rain.

I drive us over to Volunteer Village with the hopes that we'll find a job there-- and after some quick discussion among my friends from Oregon, we're assigned to work with Emily (my "boss" from last trip).

She assigns us three houses on Nixon Street and we go to work filling in nail and staple holes around the frames of the windows and doors. There are a LOT of details like this that can seem like you may not be contributing much... but it's still work that needs to be done and that's what we're here for. We follow up the fill work by sanding-- and then re-filling, and then re-sanding.

Throughout the day it's either dry and warm, or raining and warm... but it's far more manageable than last time (and because of the rain, there are no "no-see-ums", which IS happy news).

Towards the end of the day, Emily tells us that we'll probably be working on these houses for the rest of the week on details like this-- which is really great because it allows us to monitor our own progress.

As I'm driving the team back to camp, I can't help but drive by the Reddix house to see how things are going. As I near the corner, I break out into a very wide grin. The foundation is completely poured and the bricks are laid and waiting for inspection. To the rest of this team, I'm sure it looks like a random stack of bricks with some rods here and there... but it sure looks like a GREAT start to me and I know the team from the first week will be happy to see this photo. With a start like this, I’ll bet that Miss Cora will be home pretty early in 2007, which is really tremendous progress, even when you consider that Katrina was an August 2005 hurricane.

We enjoy dinner out tonight since we didn't really get that chance last night for a team dinner and we call it a day around 9:30pm, not knowing that the rolling thunder will keep us awake for most of the night.