Week off!... sort-of

Last week ended up going really well, after a rough start on Monday. All of our volunteers were amazing and almost every group exceeded our expectations for the projects they were assigned. Which I'm coming to find out is both a good and bad thing. When a group works quickly, it makes it much more difficult for us to maintain our homes budget- $550 per home per week. I have updated our county's website, so if anyone is interested in reading about our projects you can find them here http://asphome.org/group/johnson-county-tn. We had EG's on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night as well as culture night on Tuesday and our picnic on Thursday. Our culture night was Family Ties, 2 cousins- Jennifer and Roger that sing country, bluegrass, and gospel. They played for about an hour and a half, and I think the volunteers enjoyed the performance as much as I did. Our picnic also went really well; we held it at our center and the families stayed long after the food had been served, which is unusual and indicates the strong bonds the volunteers had created with their families. Our work week went fairly smoothly until Friday, when we learned that was originally supposed to be delivered on Wednesday afternoon wouldn't be arriving at our center until Saturday morning. We had 3 projects that had been waiting on the tin for roofs and underpinning, so we had to scramble to find alternate projects for these groups. Apparently on Thursday the driver had run out of hours, so was legally required to stop driving, and then on Friday morning his truck broke down on Hwy 91 (aka the middle of nowhere). But soon after learning of this misfortune, our DTD (dump truck driver) Megan arrived and we left for runs. I got to spend the first half of the day riding in the dump truck, but after dropping off one load at the transfer station, Jacob and I switched. Torey and I then met at a log cabin in order to complete an initial home visit. We ended our week with the share circle during Friday's EG, and then an ice cream eating contest- which Torey won by a long shot. I learned how to do whip flips, a skill involving whipped cream that I would be happy to show off when I get home in the fall. Our volunteers left early Saturday morning, and we spent the rest of the day catching up on sleep and hanging out with Carter County. With no volunteers, I had thought this week would be super relaxing, but we have still had plenty of work to do. We have been picking up dump from all of our houses, and we had to pull off one of our houses so we completed the work we had signed ourselves yesterday morning. We have also been working on LRPs- Long Range Plans, which involves taking measurements at all of our houses and taking through all potential projects at each home. Then we "pert" which involves prioritizing each project and determining in which order they should be done. Today our PM (program manager aka boss) Kirstin is coming to visit, so we will continue working on our LRPs this morning and then go do something fun this afternoon like exploring a waterfall near Boone or maybe hiking at Grandfather Mountain. But she she be arriving anytime now, so I need to get back to work! :)