keep on keepin on

I know I know, I haven't done a blog entry all week. Sorry guys, I've been working at least 56 hours a week and this week I'm clockin' 60. The project we are on has been crazy and time consuming, it also feels like we never get anything done. By the time we actually start something meaningful, something that reminds me why I signed up and gave 10 months of my life away, (painting a clinic for low-income children, remodeling a school room, painting 40 doors for another school, planting trees in a park, etc.) we end up either not finishing it and leaving half the work undone, or not even starting at all. Most of our time is spent handing out a survey, with open-ended questions which, as any psychology/sociology major knows, are particuarly useless when gathering mass data. We walk door to door to these buisnesses and first round, made sure they were there, second round looked for new ones, third round asked for phone numbers, fourth round called to make sure phone number and address were correct, fifth round hand out a survey? I don't know about you, but I'd be sick of these "americorps kids" coming into my buisness, taking up my time, and never buying anything. Through this project we have shown the community of Adams Morgan that we never finish anything we start, and we go about gathering information in the most annoying, time consuming, way imaginable, and then apparently all our work is for nothing because the survey isn't condusive to statistical analysis and even when I ask the owner for the phone number and address, etc. I have to double check by calling them. All I can say is AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Anyway, I think that helps explain the teams unrest.

At a meeting last night, Christina burst into tears and uncontrollable insane laughter stating "I left starving people in New Orleans to hand out a survey? A SURVEY?!!!!!!" At this point we all went a little crazy too laughing and realizing the ridiculousness of this project. I felt like you could have put us into a scene in One Flew Over The Cukoos Nest and we would not have been at all out of place. To top it all off, 3 week-old baby Jed has viral pneumonia and is in the hospital hooked up to IV's and an oxygen machine, so be thinking about him and my sister.

On a good note it snowed here and it was beautiful. We also got to go into work late one day! Our next project is disaster relief again, but I don't know where. After that we are going to Cleveland to build houses for Habitat. I"m really excited. Hope all is well