Home!

I'm home and nolonger interesting. Sorry!

Final Days

So, pretty much one more day on the porch. I'm so excited to go home and see everyone! At the same time though, it's going to be reallllly weird leaving everybody here. It's really comfortable being on the porch because everybody else here understands the process of the summer and what we've been going through the past few months. It's going to be hard trying to explain this to people back home, though I know I'm really lucky that my close friends and youth group will want to hear all about it. This afternoon I was in an "Adjusting back to life back home" session and got some really good tips from returning staffers or Center Directors. They said that whether I want to or not, for the rest of my life I'll be doing "Initial Home Visits" (IHV's) on every building I step into. This is pretty much the first home visit we'd go on after reviewing applications, and on them we'd decide if the home is worthy or not to work on. I'm sure it'll be a curse after a while but I think it's pretty cool that I even have the knowledge to even perform one of those ya know? Haha I'm sure I can bug my dad and tell him we should be applying for home repair pretty soon..

Anyways, I'm super excited to go to Lake George with the fam. I'm going through some serious Kelly family withdrawl and can't wait to see them all and just relax for the week (with danielle too!). My sleeping pattern is all fotched so that should be interesting, but it'll be nice to get in some R&R.

Here are some pics from Cumberland Gap-- it's where Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky come together. I stood over the border where they joined! Probably one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

Helping hands

Now that we're helping hands and don't do anything, we've had some free time.. so 2 nights ago Becky and I took a roadtrip to the Cumberland Gap for sunset! It was amaaaazing I can't even put it into words. I was honestly speechless when I walked to the overlook because I've never seen anything quite so beautiful. It really puts in perspective how small we are and how huge everything is around us.. definitely makes me thirsty to travel! I just want to see everywhere because I know there is so much more to offer that I haven't even thought about.

Yesterday morning we drove Kyle to the airport so he could ship off to Mississippi with Americorps for 10 months.. I miss the kid mucho :(

RollOUT

I'm officially out of Buchanan County. Craaaazy huh? Now i'm in Jonesville VA with Kyle and Becky acting as "helping hands"... except today was one of those days. In the middle of our third dump run, I, without thinking, threw a board into the back of the truck bed and it hit the truck's glass window and shattered it. WOOPS! Soooo that's really cool Laura, but at least it's getting fixed tomorrow and nobody's mad about it.

Just in case you weren't convinced that I was an idiot, I hit Becky about an hour later in the head with a chunk of a 2x4 and now her head is numb and swelling. Ohhh Laura, sometimes I wonder if your brain works AT ALL.

Besides that, today's been great- we got back by 1 and showered and have just been catching up on some last minute stuff. Today is Jonesville's picnic so we'll be going to that later and enjoying some new scenery which I'm pretty excited about. Otherwise... we're just going to be cleaning around here for this staff and helping them out for the next few days, but since there are only 16 VOLUNTEERS AND 10 STAFFERS HERE (how they managed this I'm not quite sure), there shouldn't be much to do. Yaaaaaay

Great day.

Closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

Sunday night, and only 2 more days to go in Buchanan County. We're beginning to wrap up all of the close-out work, which pretty much consists of me taking all of the final pictures of homes and putting all of the families' information in an internet databse. I've been doing lots of computer work and stuff like that, but today we took apart a lot of our office and sleeping quarters.. it's so weird! The school pretty much looks like a school again and I don't like it one bit. I am excited though because I found out where I'll be once I leave here-- me, Becky and Kyle are going to Jonesville in Lee County (where training was!), and Tayli and Spencer are going to Johnson County. I'm suuuuper pumped because a.) there are only two work crews in Lee this week so that means that being a "helping hand" is going to be really easy, and b.) because i love the staff there and I usually go there for my days off anyways and c.) I won't have to move all of my stuff more than once from another county. Yay!

Today we had a great staff bonding day, we visited a bunch of families and said goodbye :-( It was really hard to say goodbye to one homeowner who we nicknamed Dolla. He's the sweetest old man, and even though he talks in circles and has the memory of a fruit fly, he's definitely the homeowner who I've gotten closest with. For whatever reason I always get closest with elderly homeowners because I love listening to their life stories! They're so wise and have a really dry sense of humor which I absolutely eat up. He reminds me a lot of my Papa.. though my grandpa was a tad sharper in the mind before he passed.

The pic of all of us is from our COMPLETED ROOM ADDITION PROJECT!! It's b-e-a-utiful!

Anywayssss after we said bye to families we stopped on top of the Poplar mountain nearby and just hung out-- it was so nice being able to enjoy being outside without having a time limit on it! We didn't have to worry about volunteers coming or going to GL meetings.. best Sunday yet by far. Saw a movie at the theatres tonight which was nice to get out, and now we're about to put in Anchorman and hit the sack. I'm a tad homesick, but I'm going to be really upset when we pull out of Russell Prater Elementary for good.