Week 18

The mathmatics of digging holes...

I laughed. I bled. I concentrated. I was bored. I failed. I succeeded. This week involved a little bit of a lot of things. Now it’s Sunday, and sitting here with my mug of coffee, listening to music as I reflect on the week’s events, I find that it was a pretty productive one. Funny how when there’s a lot of work to do, you don’t always feel like you’re getting much done while you’re doing it, yet upon reflection, you wonder how you accomplished so much.

Indoor framing was the highlight of my week, because I learned a ton of new stuff, and I now feel pretty confident to create a doorway, or a window, or a wall where something else existed before. When it comes to learning this sort of thing, I ask a million questions so that I can feel comfortable to do the task alone if I have to at some point down the road. My supervisor Chris is super patient and answers all my questions and then some. I’m learning so much from him.

Next on my list was putting up vinyl siding. This is kind of funny, because Mom and Dad just had their new house encased in this stuff, and when I was home over Thanksgiving we had a lot of questions about sealing this type of siding. Now I have the answers, but it’s a week too late! Having now cut and applied vinyl siding, I have only one thing to say about it: it’s evil!!! Granted, it probably wouldn’t have been too much trouble were we allowed to use a chop saw to cut the pieces, but for whatever unknown reason, we were given metal snips and told to proceed. My hands are a mess from the cuts on top of cuts that snips on siding produce. Disgustingly, there still remain some bloody thumbprints that bear witness to my work there that day.

My other two hand injuries came about as I prepared old studs for sheetrock, which we’ll be putting up next week. Having gotten a sturdy grip on a tricky shim that was sticking out too far, I yanked with more force than was required and caught the side of my pinky on an old, rusty nail sticking out from the wall. Thankfully, they gave us tetanus shots before we left campus, but it still hurt, and I ended up bleeding on some other stuff. I’m pretty sure that at this point, there’s a trail of my blood all around New Orleans that you could follow to get to each of our work sites. My last injury occurred as I was helping my supervisor put up wood soffit that had been pulled down to install new electrical wires. The last piece was tricky to wedge in place, and not having a hammer on me, I accepted a tomahawk type tool  - not quite a hammer, not quite a hatchet – and began to hit the soffit above my head with the square hammer end, all the time staring at the hatchet aimed at my face. So concerned was I that I might accidentally split my face open (the tool was quite heavy), I neglected to take proper aim at the soffit and ended up smashing my left index finger from nail to closest joint. Blood, bruising, throbbing. Fortunately, none of the injuries of the week were serious, just uncomfortable, so no worries.

I was rewarded on Friday when I got to nail down all of the OSB for the floors in a big house we’re working on. Give me a nail gun and a task that involves almost nonstop shooting, and I’m a happy camper. After I finished, I moved onto cutting cement board for the floors that are going to be tiled, and let’s just say it’s not nearly as enjoyable as shooting nails into things. The cutting itself isn’t bad, it’s the mask you have to wear so you don’t get cancer that’s really terrible. Never before have I had so little circulation in my face. Not the most pleasant sensation, I can tell you. By the way, the house where this work is being done is being funded by Saint’s football players, which is kind of neat.

Saturday was our big POL event for the round. In case you don’t remember, POL stands for Project Outreach Liason, which is my specialty roll on the team. Ashlyn (my partner in POL crime) and I have to plan one community event in each place we serve. Last round we built birdhouses with high school kids. This time we did a crocheting event in the New Orleans Museum of Art Sculpture Garden. We called it ‘Crochet for a Cause’, and the goal was to get people to come crochet hats with us that we could donate to a local homeless shelter. It was unsuccessful in that our team and Jacquie’s two brothers who are in town for a visit were the only ones crocheting, but we did have a lot of people who were walking by ask us about the project and encourage us in what we were doing. The whole point of the event was to bring awareness to the fact that even though the city is being rebuilt, there are more homeless than ever, and they still need help. So by speaking about why we were doing what we were doing, I suppose we could call our event successful even if we didn’t achieve exactly what we meant to.

This morning I’m going over to work at the Sculpture Garden, but first, I have more crocheting to do! Yesterday I made three hats, and I’ve already got another one started. I intend to Crochet for a Cause!!