What a life!

What a terrific weekend! As much as I love working at the school and seeing the kids, by Friday afternoon I was SO ready to be done with children. Especially after an afternoon with the middle school kids...they are just so out of control! But my weekend made it all worthwhile. Friday after school Team Gold 5 came into San Diego for fun. They have their project about 5 minutes from the Mexican border, so they are pretty close to us. I was super happy that they came to visit because Nick, the boy from Vancouver that I met before we came to Sac and my good friend Stephanie are on that team and I got to see them. All of their team and most of my team went out to dinner downtown and then we just played around the city the rest of the night until they had to head back to Protero, their camp.

Saturday was chilly (like 65-70 degrees), but that did not stop Katie and I from going back to the beach. We hunted for sea shells and then we enjoyed the chilly, chilly sun. We must have looked like silly northern tourists with our swimsuits on while everyone else on the beach was in long pants and jackets. But you know what…I don’t care! I got sunburned and that will just go into a tan, so rock on! After we froze and burned at the same time, we walked around Coronado and did some shopping and ate crepes (Jenna pronunciation “creepies”).

After we had been back at the house for about a half hour, we got a call from Alli, the team leader for Gold 5. Something had gone very wrong with one of the tires on her cargo van and she asked us to come over to where she was and help her out. Luckily, Ben, my teammate who knows junk about cars, was home. So Katie, Ben, Gabe and myself drove out to a Target that is about half-way between the two teams’ sites. While it was under unfortunate circumstances, I did get to go to Gold 5’s site, which is a camping situation in a state park. I got to see Nick and Stephanie again and the beautiful night sky. Where we are, there is too much light pollution to see the stars, but from Protero, I felt like I could see forever into the sky. On our way back to SD, we hit an owl with the van. It was on the side of the road and I thought it would get enough altitude to clear the van when we passed it. Um…nope. We nicked it with the upper corner of the driver side window and it may have bounced off a bit. We are pretty sure that it was ok and there was no blood on the van, but we couldn’t stop to make sure because there were a ton of cars behind us. As Katie said, Harry Potter may not be getting his memos for a while.

Sunday, Kevin and I went back to the Baptist church with Katie along with us. Again, it was just as every movie or tv show portrays African-American Baptist churches. There was singing and dancing and I even heard a “preach on” from behind me. Like they did on Wednesday night, they made the visitors stand up and introduce ourselves and then the entire church proceeded to come by and hug us or shake our hand. The pastor of the church and his wife, the principal of King/Chavez, invited our whole team over for a barbeque next Saturday. This is a super nice thing for them to do and I am looking forward to it because the first time I met the pastor he said that they’d have us over for a BBQ with ribs because “You don’t eat hot dogs at a black man’s barbeque.” Mmmm…ribs!

I got a postcard from Abby today. I love it when she sends me postcards and I love this one the best because it talks about the zombies in Portland that ride the streetcar. Thanks Abby, you totally brightened my day!

Time for bed, so good night friends! Be safe and have fun.