Week Three, Day Five

Thursday ...
(I'm writing this at 5:30am on Friday because I didn't have the energy to do it yesterday.)
Danny is gone and Jaime is gonna work with another of our teams to get a feel for the other work going on. As our group walks to the car for the drive over to the Village, Rebecca comes in from her morning jog with a very happy black dog following her. She has no idea where she picked up her running partner, but by the end of the day (and a long story that I'll let her tell), she'll be adopting him and driving home with a pretty grateful new buddy.

We drive to the Village and get our assignments. With the four of us and an assist from Arlen, a volunteer from a different volunteer team, we'll return to 157 Keller and maybe even finish. The morning goes by pretty quick actually - Karen continues in the front bedroom, and Deb is keeping up with getting the materials out of the house and into an outside pile for garbage collection.

With Arlen busy tearing out the back bedroom, Dan and I find lots to occupy ourselves with the kitchen. (I spend a LOT of time in kitchens ... but not doing this sort of work.) We rip out the cabinets, the counter top, get rid of the oven and refrigerator ... we can do most of it with crowbars and hammers but we'll need a power saw for some of the bigger stuff so we move into the bathroom to begin to get through the blue board there. We find a need for a saw there too - so I make a call to Jim with a delivery list and we're good to go in a matter of minutes.

I can't say that I've ever used a power saw in a kitchen or bathroom before ... but I admit that I was pretty stoked to give it a try. However, I'm really klutzy so after a couple of attempts where I made a little progress, I hand it over to Dan and we get to serious work. It would have been easy to have continued to try to work with it myself, but ya' gotta know your limits and I have nothing to prove to myself or anyone. I'd rather go home with all 10 fingers. (Plus I can actually *hear* my mothers voice in my head telling me to “stop being so stubborn and put that ridiculous thing down before you kill yourself”.) Anyway, you probably won’t see it in the photos – but I’m smiling big-time underneath my respirator. (I have named this photo "Moron with a Sawzall".)

At lunch, Deb decides she wants to work on a sheet rock crew for the afternoon so I drive our team back to our house - but first I stop by a bottling plant I found by accident on Tuesday afternoon. It's funny how you can be a fan of a product without ever knowing where it comes from - Barq's Root Beer is from Biloxi, MS.

We make really great progress throughout the afternoon. By the time 4pm rolls around, we don't have much left in us or the house. We need to drain and remove the water heater and clean out the attic and finish the bathroom, but I really think that we'll be able to finish by Noon tomorrow.

We drive back to camp and the team heads out to The Shed BBQ in Ocean Springs for dinner. (Don’t worry – you’re SUPPOSED to sign the ceiling when you’re done – so that photo I took is not of not John L. committing vandalism.)

By the time I drive us back to camp, it's all I can do to walk up the stairs ... and it's only 9pm. Karen has decided she'll work on the framing team that Jaime was on yesterday, so it'll be up to Dan, Arlen and I to wrap up 157 Keller, but I think we can do it.

The 17th will be our last day here. I'll be returning for 4 weeks during my 2007 sabbatical (Jim says he's happy about this - gosh, I hope he's not just being nice!) which I think will be the end of March and most of April so who knows what will be waiting at that point. One thing tho' that I know I'll be able to count on ... I'll be busy.