Man, I gotta pack!

I thought that transition weeks were supposed to be relaxing, but this past week in Sacramento has been nothing but meetings and paperwork. I didn't have a chance to update this thingy until now, one day until I take off for my roadtrip to the Gulf. But I'll try to catch you up to speed.

We left San Diego last Friday and it was terribly sad. But then when we reached Sac, all the other teams were there, so I got to see all my Ameri-friends, which was exciting. I really didn't do much last weekend. Unpack, laundry, nap...just "Jenna needs some alone time" time. Throughout the next week I worked on our team's project portfolio, debriefing, briefing and other such transition paperwork nonsense.

Friday most of the teams left for the Gulf by plane, so there are only four teams still in Sac. Friday we did a one-day project with Sac Parks and Recreation weeding and cleaning up some city parks. Yes, I weeded for eight stinkin' hours. And then what did I do on Saturday morning? Turned right around and weeded for the city of Sac for an ISP for four hours. These were the longest 12 hours EVER! Both of the supervisors were nice and we did have lots of breaks. The place we were at Saturday is a big homeless camp and our supervisor took us on a tour of where they hid and also told us that the park was a huge anonymous gay-sex meeting spot. Ah, such things you learn while pulling up star-thisiles.

Tomorrow I take off for Slidell, LA. There will be three teams traveling with us and we should arrive to our destination by Friday. We don't know much else about our project except that we will be gutting houses mostly. I'm pretty excited/anxious/curious about the whole thing. Will I be able to survive the heat and humidity? Will I be able to survive our sponsor's strict code of conduct? (i.e. no foul language, no public displays of affection, doors locked at midnight, etc.) Will I be able to survive my team? I'll be taking my laptop down there and our housing, which is a converted grocery store that houses 200 volunteers, has wireless internet, so I will be able to keep this thing updated for at least the next two months. If you want to send mail, send it to the Sacramento address. I'll let you all know if and when I find out the address you can send stuff to in Louisiana.

I'm just about to post some more pictures from San Diego on both my flickr account and my team's flickr account. Check them out if you get a chance. Take care everyone!