5 Favorites: Charities

For today's 5 Favorites, I'm going to do my favorite charities. Perfect for the 'almsgiving' part of Lent, right? Feel free to donate to them!!

1.

Habitat For Humanity

I actually worked for a Habitat for Humanity affiliate when I was in AmeriCorps (like the PeaceCorps, but in the U.S.). What a lot of people think is that Habitat gives away houses. But those people would be wrong. Habitat partner families actually buy their house with a no-interest mortgage. They also must put in 300 hours of sweat equity helping build the houses. No-interest loans are completely biblical, and Habitat supplements all their costs of building and overhead by donations. Working for Habitat for Humanity was fun, challenging, and heartwarming, as we tried to provide decent, safe, affordable houses to those in need.

2.

Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society

I also worked volunteered for this organization. The mission of NMCRS is to provide financial assistance and education to members of the United States Navy and Marine Corps, their eligible family members, widows, and survivors. (Um, I just typed that out from memory, and I haven't set foot in the door in over a year.) The main goal is to help each person who comes in to get support for their immediate needs, but the long-term mission is to help Sailors and Marines become financially self-sufficient. They are another no-interest loan provider, and they really do help people get their finances in order when they come in for assistance.

I did admin work there and taught a Budget for Baby class (in reality, it was a basic budgeting class that should be taught in every high school, but with a baby-on-the-way-twist). It is almost 90% volunteer-run, so they treated us great, paid for our mileage and even paid for childcare so I could keep doing it after I had Cora. I loved this organization and wish I still lived in a military town so I could continue volunteering. If you're looking for a military organization to donate to, I can't recommend this one enough! This is also the oldest charity on my list, at 110 years old!!

3.

Heifer International

This one has definitely taken the "teach a man to fish" concept and ran with it. When you donate to Heifer, you help buy livestock for third-world families, which can help them in so many ways. Their mission is to work with communities to end world hunger and poverty and to care for the Earth. Plus, it's totally fun to say you bought a cow for someone, right?

4.

charity: water

"charity: water is a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing countries. We use 100% of public donations to directly fund sustainable water solutions in areas of greatest need."

100%, y'all. That's pretty dang impressive. I also really liked the video on their website that explains how clean water can open up educational opportunities to many children.

5.
Catholic Relief Services

"Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. The agency alleviates suffering and provides assistance to people in need in 91 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality."

You may know them for their yearly Rice Bowl campaign?? I found they have a Rice Bowl app, too, which is pretty cool!

For more favorites, check out Moxie Wife.

I've figured it out

This is a big honkin' deal.  Bigger than Elvis.  Or sliced bread.  I've figured out what type of career I would like to do!!

Like a lot of people I know, I definitely had a quarter life crisis.  Unlike a lot of people, I refused to pay for grad school until I was absolutely sure.  Now my GRE scores are well-expired, and I'm not sure if grad school is ever in the cards.

Back in 2010, when B was deployed, I blogged about trying to figure out my calling and how I went to a Career Planning workshop at Fleet & Family Support to help me out.  Well, almost two years later, I think  I have it.

I want to be a Family Life Educator.  There it is.  I've written it down.  I feel like I should ring a bell or call my mom or something.

I re-read that old blog post tonight, and the only thing that is missing is "the great outdoors."  But I think I can fill that void in other ways, without having my career hinge upon it.

Okay, I actually already sorta am a Family Life Educator.  I have been (volunteer) teaching Budget for Baby class to expectant military couples for almost a year now.  It had been growing on me, obviously.  Sometimes my classes stink and the participants sit there like bumps on a log and just listen to me bumble on about the parts of a budget.  But I taught a class today and seriously hit it out of the park.  I was able to somehow transform it from almost non-participatory to a pretty lively and informative class!  I don't even know how I really did it, but it was kinda magical.  Thinking it might have been all in my head, I read the anonymous evaluations that the participants filled out, and I got perfect marks from every. single. one.

I think this is actually a great field to combine my educational background.  My degree in Child & Family Development can help me teach more of these budget types of classes, and I would also like to get into teaching some parenting skills or other family topics.  My advertising background will definitely come in handy because I will probably be the one who has to market these classes.

As for the next step, I'm not sure.  I know I want to be primarily stay-at-home for a while, so this will be sorta put on the back burner until I'm ready.  I then will need to get some certification and find someone to pay me (the hard part).  However, I am already volunteering my way into it more fully, as I am now taking on more than just teaching the Budget for Baby class.  They made me the chair of the operation, so I'm making some marketing materials and making this class the best it can be!

Have you figured out your calling?  How long did it take you to really know?  (I'm just about 10 years out of high school, in case you're wondering!)

pregnancy vs. a music festival

This past weekend, B and I got the opportunity to attend DeLuna Fest for "free." I use that term loosely because we had to volunteer to sit behind a table for four hours on Saturday to get our tickets.  And we had to pay $20 for parking on Friday night when we went to see our bands (and the $1 toll both days).  At least we found free parking on Saturday.

DeLuna Fest is a 3-day music festival here on Pensacola Beach, and it's only in its second year.  I was originally interested in it because of some of the headlining bands, namely Weezer and Cake.  Linkin Park was also slate to perform, but they dropped out all of 2 weeks beforehand.  Lame.  The tickets were super-expensive, so I'm glad we were able to volunteer our way into it.

The two bands I mostly wanted to see both performed on Friday night, so we headed out to the beach.  The last time I went to a big musical festival with multiple stages was when I was in high school and went to Music Midtown in Atlanta (does that still exist?) and saw Hole, 98°, newly-famous Kid Rock (gag), and a pre-famous Jessica Simpson all in one weekend.  B had never been to anything like this, so I'm glad he got the experience.  The cool thing about DeLuna Fest is that the two main stages were right on the beach, in the sand. This was awesome later when I just needed to sit my pregnant butt down.

We got there on Friday night, just in time to see the last song from a duo called Matt and Kim.  (I'd heard of them before, but don't know their music.)  We realized then that we didn't have a program--actually, I'm not even sure if there WERE programs available--had no idea what stage we were at, and I couldn't remember which band I wanted was coming on first.  We also don't have smart phones, which is probably why there were no programs readily available.  Somehow we ended up running into an acquaintance (we know all of like 10 people in this town, so that was a slight miracle), and she looked it up on her phone.  It was sort of wrong, but I asked some other guy and Cake was indeed playing on the stage we were at in just under an hour.  So we sat around and waited.

Some people around us "lit up" in true music-festival-sense (if you know what I mean).  I knew the smell right away and was trying to get away from it, if anything, to protect my baby.  Somehow B cannot smell this stuff.  I told him to take a big whiff and remember that smell for later (especially when our kids are teens), and he kept saying that he didn't smell anything.  What.  The.  Heck.  The things I learn about my husband . . . guess I'll be the narc of the house.

Another thing that kept bothering me, especially once Cake started playing, was people walking by us and bumping into me.  (This is the opposite of what I thought would happen--I thought we were all going to get pushed forward and smooshed up once the band came on the stage.  Apparently, there is no pleasing me.) I've always been protective of my space, but now it's even more so.  We were pretty close up, and I just don't see why people find the need to mill around to get over there or leave only minutes into a set.  I was trying to perfect a certain stance with my hands on my hips and elbows out so that people wouldn't think I make a good passageway; it was semi-effective.  There were also beach balls and playground balls being bounced around through a lot of it, and one of the more rubbery playground balls totally smacked me in the bump during the first song.  B did a great job of protecting his pregnant wife from falling crowd-surfers though.

via Wikipedia

As for the music, Cake was really good.  Apparently they have some new stuff out, so I didn't recognize that (or even like it too much), but they mostly stuck to their crowd-pleasing classics.  Here's where DeLuna Fest needed to fix their logistics.  Cake ended at 9 and Weezer started promptly at 9.  A large handful of people left Cake early to haul it down to the other end of the beach to see all of Weezer's set, and the rest of us waited until the end, then trucked it down there.  I was in sneakers because I needed the support and hauling butt through sand was not easy.  Also, my knees had apparently locked during the hour watching Cake and it was so hard to move my pregnant behind anyway.  B refused to take me piggy-back.  Almost everyone at Cake went to Weezer, so it was just a cluster&*^$! of people trying to get down the beach as quickly as possible.

I made it through about 3 songs at Weezer before I plopped my butt down in the sand and just listened.  Weezer has a ton of good music that everyone knows, but for whatever dumb reason, they were playing a bunch of not-so-good stuff for most of it.  This included a cover of "Pumped Up Kicks," which is currently on the radio.  It wasn't even a very good cover, in my opinion.  I told B to take another whiff of the air when they started playing "Hash Pipe," and he still couldn't smell it.  Sigh.

The next day we saw a band that we'd never heard of (more on them later this week), and then The Shins later that night.  We made it an hour through that set then left because we were both really exhausted.  We also realized that we're getting old, especially being around all those beach-bum-hippies.  B's back was starting to hurt, and of course I had the normal pregnancy woes.  I've pretty much decided that my rock concert days are behind me as I didn't really enjoy the concerts as much as I once would have.  That's probably the last "standing up" concert I'll go to for a long while.  The next concert I see I will be sitting in a comfy chair/church pew with a bunch of gray-haired ladies around me.  And the only standing I'll be doing is for the Hallelujah chorus.

As for the volunteering we did, we were right next to the USO tent and they gave us Girl Scout cookies.  Can't argue with that!

 

pregnancy vs. Habitat for Humanity

Okay, I know I said I wasn't going to do weekly updates on the pregnancy, but I sorta like the idea of doing a pregnancy vs. whatever obstacle presents itself series.  (Probably not weekly, but whenever.)  Maybe I'll even keep a running tab of what's winning (pregnancy or . . . me--I didn't think it was going to be a duel, but we'll roll with it).  Hope you like it!

This past Saturday, I did a Habitat build.  I used to work for Habitat for Humanity, during my AmeriCorps days.  Here's a picture of me looking like a tough-girl construction worker:

Yes, that's a level in my left hand.  So tough!

(Okay, if you really knew me, you'd know that 80% of my year I was holding a paintbrush instead of a hammer.)  I also must add that I did my AmeriCorps year in north Florida.  So yeah, I guess I know a thing or two about doing this in the heat.

We were invited to join the Catholic Young Adult group here in Pensacola for a Habitat build.  I guess the only day available was the 30th of July?  I originally didn't think I would be up for it, but I decided this past week that I could probably do it if I just took a lot of breaks and left if need be.

B came with me, and we framed a house!  Good grief, it was HOT.  And humid.  Probably 97° with 85% humidity.  My body is definitely not as conditioned as it was four years ago.  Sometimes my strategy was just to drive in three nails, then take a break.  But I wasn't the only one doing so.  Even the crew leaders said the heat on Saturday was the most miserable they had felt this year.  I probably drank at least a gallon of water while out there.  Then I had to use the porta-potty.  Yuck.

Overall, I felt pretty good about my day at Habitat!  Then I woke up the next morning to discover that my thighs were sore and I had a breakout covering my entire upper back.  (Yeah, eww.)  But those things have happened to me before when I did stuff like this sporadically.  I'm going to call this a win.

I also took some belly pics!  Sort of a base line, but I've definitely gained a gut and a few pounds.  I already miss my body.  Hate me all you want, but I had a pretty awesome hourglass figure.

This was taken last August, but I looked the same back in May of this year

I'll be doing all my belly pics in the same tank top.  I got this during the Old Navy $2 tank sale around week 7 or so.  I purposely bought a size up from my usual with hopes that the extra length could help me out later on.

Barefoot and preggers at 14 weeks, 6 days.

I now see why most women don't take belly pics until they actually "pop."  This totally looks like the beer gut/Freshman 15 that I never gained in college.

B and I will be heading out on another airplane ride this week, so that we can actually enjoy Indiana in the summertime.  I've only ever been when it's cold!  Hopefully, now that I'm in my second trimester, this plane ride won't be as awful as the last one.  That will be fodder for next week, of course.

baskets and balloons

I volunteer for the most random and interesting things sometimes!  I blame my years in Girl Scouts.  A bit after we moved here to Pensacola, I volunteered to help with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (read about it here if you haven't yet).  This past weekend, I volunteered with . . .

. . . the Gulf Coast Hot Air Balloon Festival!

I was digging around online for prices on taking an actual balloon flight (um, super expensive!) and came across a festival that they do every year in Foley, Alabama.  Foley is actually pretty close to us since we live near the state line.  The festival's website had a callout for "balloon crew" volunteers, and I figured it was the closest I would get to riding in a balloon, so why not?

I signed up to do both Friday and Saturday evenings.  I was paired with the pilot for the RE/MAX balloon.  This guy is a full-time balloonist, and he basically just does PR with it for the company.  How cool is that?  So on that first night, he told me that half the pilots fly (before sunset) and the other half "glow."  We were set to glow on Friday and fly on Saturday.

I was so impressed that the whole balloon contraption fit in his van.  All in all, these are actually very simple machines.

The basket is pushed up against that back window.

Also, on that first night, I was the only one to show up for his crew.  Our pilot said that two people could set it up, but since we were out at the festival, among many other balloons, we just borrowed some people from the neighboring crew (which had like 15 people).  A high school-aged girl came over to help, and it was very obvious she knew what she was doing.  She actually is the daughter of a balloon pilot, and her grandfather had owned a balloon also.  Her stories about growing up in a ballooning family were pretty interesting (and funny, too).  She goes around to various festivals and events with her mom all summer, helping out.  That certainly beat out any summer jobs I ever had.

Setting up the balloon really wasn't that hard.  Basically, you just lay the basket on its side, attach the deflated balloon to it, and then fill it with cool air.  Once it's gotten really big on its side, the pilot turned on the burner and got some hot air into it to make it rise.  The basket was attached by a rope to the back of the van so the balloon couldn't go too far.

The entire balloon was contained in this rather small bag.

The balloon being stretched out, attached to the basket.

My task through all of this was to hold some ropes at the mouth so the cold air could blow into it.  The fan looked small, but was very powerful and very loud.  B came with me to help on the second night, so here he is on the opposite side of the mouth while it was being filled with air.

Speaking of that second night, our pilot was supposed to fly and take up a few passengers from the local RE/MAX office and then we were supposed to "chase" him in the van to his landing point.  We drove around a bit trying to find a good place for takeoff, but then the wind picked up too much.  Apparently, they can't fly if the wind is more than 10 knots--which is basically just a bit more than a gentle breeze.  Oh, and they can't fly after sunset since they can't be seen (no lights) and can't see power lines.  Hot air balloons don't have any precise steering, so it's all about catching updrafts and having a good starting place.  Also, to operate one,  you have to have a pilot's license, and yes, balloons are regulated by the FAA.

Adding the hot air to get it off the ground

 If I volunteer with this again next year, I'd probably choose the morning sessions (competition flights--for accuracy, not speed), since the wind is usually very gentle then and all the pilots get to fly.  Downside: have to be there at 5:30am.  So I chose the "glow" this year, and got to do it twice.

One balloon did make it in the air that second night, but he was definitely pushing it on the "sunset" thing.

On the first night I was there, once we got our balloon set up, the pilot invited me to get in the basket with him to give it more weight on the ground.  The basket was pretty small, and was crowded with three 15-gallon propane tanks, so you could only fit three people at most.  We had our other two crew members holding it on the sides.  After a bit, I told him if he let it go a few feet in the air, I could cross it off my bucket list.  He obliged.  Which means . . .

✔ 7. Ride in a hot air balloon

Check!  Okay, so it wasn't what I was expecting, but I can say that I went on a "tethered ride" and got about 6 feet in the air!  We went slightly over the heads of the crew members on the outside of the basket.  It was a pretty cool minute of my life, and now I really do want to go on a full-out balloon ride in the sky.

The second night, the wind was pretty rough, and our basket was definitely tipping back and forth with us in it.  Here's a video I took on my camera while inside the basket on the ground.




Yeah, we started tipping as I said the word "balloon."  Oh, and pardon my obnoxious laugh.

B and me in the basket with the pilot lighting it up behind us

It was really beautiful to see all the balloons lit up.  I actually never got to see ours lit up since I spent almost my whole time in the basket, but it probably looks like their logo.  One thing I learned is that almost all balloons have trading cards, so if you're ever at a festival with tethered balloons, go up to the pilots and ask for a card!

Have you ever been up in a hot air balloon?  Do you think my "tethered ride" should count?

EM:HE tips and myths busted

Tonight is a big night!  The episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition filmed here in Pensacola that I helped with is airing!  Check it out on ABC at 8/7c.  In the meantime, I present you with some myth-busting about the show, followed by some tips for volunteering.

Myths disspelled:

• The on-screen personalities spend a lot of time actually building stuff for the house: FALSE.  Everything they did was planned and scripted.  They grabbed some of us blue-shirt volunteers as extras, and told us what we should be doing (sweeping, pretending to measure something, NOT looking at the camera, etc.)  I'm no stranger to being an extra (see my blog post from a few months ago), so this really didn't phase me.  But we were in big crowds for it, so that was new for me.  I did learn the term "cinema veritae" as a few people were asking about the whole "don't look at the camera" deal.

• The scenes are shot in order:  FALSE.  We shot what the production crew calls the "Braveheart March" (lots of volunteers running in to start working on the house) on Day 3.  The house already had windows, drywall, and a roof at this point.  We did the March up the street.

• Ty is talking to the family directly via live-feed satellite when using the Ty Cam:  FALSE.  We did a few scenes of Ty talking into the Ty Cam with us in the background, and while it is a working videocamera and I'm pretty sure it was on for some of it, he definitely was not via satellite with the family at Disney World simultaneously.  Ty is close to a one-take wonder, but not quite.  All of the on-screen personalities were pretty good at ab-libbing though.

• They only film one location at a time, and Ty and the crew are around it the whole time:  Probably FALSE.  I'm pretty sure Ty flew to another location on either Day 3 or 4, to be back in time for the reveal on Day 7.  Also, in some of the pictures I took of him with the megaphone, I could hear him yelling into the camera addressing a different family than ours.

• The family really doesn't know they were chosen until Ty shows up to surprise them:  SORTA TRUE.  I believe the family knows that they're "finalists" for the show.  Nobody in town knew which family or the location of the build until it was officially released, but rumors certainly abounded!

Wanna get in on the action?  Here are some Tips for volunteering:

•  Pay attention to the news and the ads on broadcast TV in your area.  If the construction company has even a slight clue what they're doing, they should be putting the word out and running ads a month or two before the scheduled build date.  Once you have the company's name, take to the internet and see if they have any volunteer info up.  

• Try the middle-of-the-night or super early morning shifts.  This really is a "round the clock" build, so spare hands are needed any time of day or night.

• Don't expect that all (or any) of your volunteer hours will be spent actually working on the house.  There are so many other ways they need help, and the house is pretty much built by professionals (subcontractors, professional roofers, electricians, brick layers, etc.)  The most I really did on site was pick up trash and move some bricks.  Otherwise, I was just in the way.  Expect a lot of standing around and waiting.

• Bring a camera, put it in your pocket.  Take pictures, and try to find a celeb without being to intrusive.  But if the television cameras are rolling, keep it in your pocket.

• Don't be afraid to be a walk-up volunteer.

• If you are a skilled construction worker, let them know and get on a crew.  Most were sent by their company, but random drywallers did show up to do that part.

Enjoy the episode and look for me!  I'll be wearing a blue shirt and Santa hat, just like everybody else :)

day three with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

This is the third in a series about my days spent with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition back in October.  This post can stand alone, but the other ones are pretty cool.  Here are the preceding parts: day one and day two.

As I said on my previous day, it was for Day 3 I decided to pick a different shift.  My goal was to have a lot less standing around and a lot more doing.  I mean, that's why I was volunteering, right?  So I got a very SMALL taste of what my husband's submarine life was like.  And by that I mean that I had a 6-hour shift and then 12 hours 'off' and then a 6-hour shift again.  On Day 2 I finished at 6pm and woke up at 5am to get there at 6am the next morning.  Obviously doing this for ONE day was a lot better than doing it for 180 DAYS.  At least I didn't have to sleep under my coffee table.  Yeah, I don't think I'm cut out to be a submariner.

Anyway, once I arrived it was still dark out.  And there was nobody manning that sign-in table.  No numbers waiting to be called, no formalities.  My altered shirt that worked so great in the Florida noontime the previous day wasn't quite cutting it for me this particular morning.  I was cold!  So I grabbed the smallest shirt on the table (size XXL, I believe?) and threw it on over my other one.  Much better, except now I was wearing a Muumuu.

Since there was no one telling me I couldn't go down there, I went straight for the house.  There were some other friendly volunteer faces that I recognized, standing around waiting for something to do.  The skilled labor was busily working in and on the house.  We soon got asked to move some bricks and devised an easy system for doing so, finishing in no time.  After that, we were all called over by some bigwig or another and told we were taking a "field trip."  We were gonna go help renovate a gym!  Hooray!  And the gym was only a few miles up the road, so that was a nice bonus.

The basic premise of why we were renovating a gym is that the guy the house was being built for was being given a job at this gym.  You'll have to watch the episode to get all the ins and outs of why -- I do know that they were moving him to Pensacola from a farther-away town because the city donated the land.  Anyway, all that to say we got to go move a bunch of beams, roll up some floors, and jump in the foam pit!

If I ever did that during my gymnastics heyday, you can rest assured it wasn't intentional.

Gymnastics was my activity of choice during my elementary school days, so this gym brought back loads of memories.  It took every ounce of willpower not to jump up on the bars and start swinging to see if I still "had it" (my guess is not).  I also learned just how complex a gym floor is!  We took up the top three layers, down to the wood.  There were springs underneath that and who knows what else.  The gym owner was there along with a few employees, and we got to talking and I learned that a gym floor costs over $10,000!  (A mental note has now been made to not whine about the cost of a future child's gymnastics lessons.)

The wood part of the floor, which is underneath a bunch of foam and at least one layer of carpet

We did everything the gym owners wanted us to do, and we were done by 9am.  (Yes, our crew was alive, alert, awake, enthusiastic, to say the least!)  Around then, a guy from the show crew told us that the film crew would be coming at 10, so we just had to sit around and wait (ugh!).  The worst part of the waiting is that I was HUNGRY.  I'd eaten some cereal at 5am, but that wasn't cutting it at 9.  The show guy had said that the crew would bring food, so I was crossing my fingers.   What was really awful was that I KNEW there were doughnuts at the other site because there were always extra ones around that I saw during the afternoon shifts.  I had bummed a ride to the gym.  If I hadn't done that, I would've hopped in my car during our wait, drove back to the site, and snagged a few boxes.  I'm sure they wouldn't have been missed.

Besides my hunger-induced crankiness, the rest of the day was gold.  We sat around and watched a morning talk show while waiting for the crew, and one of the young guys laid in the foam pit.  When the crew showed, we carried some tables for them, setting up the place to eat lunch.  But, um, NO FOOD.  Not even one measly doughnut.  Gahhh.  I soon saw on-screen talent Johnny Littlefield, so I pretty much knew we were about to get put to work with no food in sight.

We were given Santa hats for our construction helmets once again (although during our actual work in the gym, we definitely did not wear the hats!).  We also got out the gym's assortment of Christmas decor and were told to "stampede" into the gym carrying our decorations.  We had to do it about three times, and it was actually pretty fun!

Me with my holiday gear.  Not sure if the hat stayed up during the stampede!

We then did a couple more shots helping out around the gym - unloading wood, cleaning mats, carrying stuff, etc.  They did actually need more help, but by that point it was past noon and my stomach had some fightin' words for me.  I had planned on a six-hour shift anyway, so I called it quittin' time.  A lot of people stayed, and they hopefully got fed a nice meal.  Before I officially walked out, I made sure to get this:

Johnny Littlefield and me!

I never got to see the fully renovated gym, so I'll be watching this Sunday night (Dec. 12) to see it!  Oh, and to look for myself, OF COURSE.  I'll be blogging some myths busted and tips and tricks for volunteering later this week to lead up the episode's premiere.  And next week after it has aired, I'll hopefully be able to post some screen shots of my pretty little face on national television!

day one with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

I had the great fortune last week to volunteer on the site for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.  You know the one, the ABC Sunday night TV show starring every lady's favorite carpenter, Ty Pennington.

I found out they were coming to Pensacola about a month ago, so I did some digging and found out how to volunteer (which, in all honesty, should just be "walk up" but I did actually get to sign up for some shifts through the builder).  I would call Heritage Homes the real champion behind the family.  They really did provide everything from skilled laborers to volunteer coordinators to donating materials and getting the community involved. 

Since Heritage Homes had done an Extreme Makeover home in Mobile a few years ago, I was expecting a really well-oiled machine.  But while they had worked out some kinks I'm sure, there was still a lot of rumors flying, miscommunication among various volunteer coordinators, and volunteers standing around waiting for something to do (namely, ME).

They really do keep the build a secret until the last possible moment.  From what I could tell, the family knows they're "in the running" but they don't know they're the chosen ones until Ty comes a-knockin'.  Which is kind of hard when you're a volunteer because you don't know where you've signed up to go until the day before (or the day of, for some folks).  The builder's Facebook wall was seriously exploding with speculations and rumors of the locale on the day of the announcement.  I was slightly paranoid it would be over an hour's drive for three days of volunteering.  But it turned out closer than I expected, so that was nice.

Here's just a blow-by-blow account of Day 1:

The first day I showed up I had to sign both a liability waiver and an image release form.  We waited around in the check-in tent for a bit, and then they finally called about six names.  Once my name was called, I was handed a way-too-big blue t-shirt and a white hard hat.  Then we were led down a path toward the house.  I'm no stranger to a construction site; I spent my year in AmeriCorps working with Habitat for Humanity on a site every day.

It was technically still Day 1 of the build, and the foundation had been laid at 4am that day (with apparently a special quick-drying kind of concrete).  When I saw it at noon the whole house was already framed with treated OSB on the exterior walls and trusses being taken up to the roof.  [There was no demolition for this episode.]  Even though during my AmeriCorps stint I had actually built a house in a week at a build-a-thon in Gulfport to help after Katrina/Rita leveled the place, this kind of pace blew my mind.  In the 5 days I spent in Gulfport, we only finished the exterior, siding roof, nothing on the inside but the studs for the walls.  So I have to hand it to the pros here--this is amazingly quick!

This was actually taken the next day, but you get the point

Once we were brought down to the site, we were told to go to yet another white tent and stay there until someone gave us something to do.  After about 10 minutes, a woman working on the site came over looking for water.  We had none.  Just some tables and some chairs.  Eventually, a guy came by asking for "one or two mechanically-minded people who can read directions."  Another gal named Eva and I jumped at the chance to actually do something.  He took us back to a shed not too far from our tent, and asked us to set up some industrial lights.  We opened up the boxes and soon realized we actually needed some tools (namely, a wrench and possibly a screwdriver).  So the guy went on and found someone's toolbag.  We got our wrenches, but a Phillips-head screwdriver was nowhere to be found.  We improvised with a pretty tiny flathead, and we had those lights together within the half-hour.  They looked like this:

Not the hardest thing I've ever put together

When we emerged triumphant from the shed, the rest of the people in our tent were gone, and we saw them on site pulling nails out of 2-by-4's (so the pieces could be re-used).  They were kinda crowded over there, so my new buddy and I decided to stay away and were soon handed a bucket and told to just go around the house and pick up trash. That took no more than 20 minutes, and then we decided to walk around the whole scene and take it all in.  We found the VIP tent (which we were not invited to) and a bunch of stuff going on at a formerly-abandoned warehouse across the street (the house being built was on a corner across from a sewage lift station in one direction and this warehouse in the other - no wonder the county donated the land!).  We stumbled into a makeshift cafeteria, where we saw lots of people eating lunch, including the guy who had asked us to build the lights.  He told us he had forgotten about us back there.  How nice.

We got to eat some lunch there (thank God, because I had forgotten and was starting to get hungry) and grab some ice cream.  All the food was donated, so thank you to the local businesses!  We left the cafeteria, and saw some volunteers we recognized from earlier.  They were standing on the other side of the warehouse in front of the other entrance.  The big Extreme Makeover bus was pulling around the site into the area.  It was a pretty cool sight.  People were starting to come off of it, and of course we just stood there looking for the TV stars.  We saw Michael and Tracy walk by, and Michael smiling the whole time (yes he smiled at ME!).  By standing there, we eventually all got to help set up their green room in the warehouse.  It was all junk food, I kid you not.

the infamous BUS!

We eventually saw Ty get out of a pickup truck, and I tried to take some crappy pictures on my phone while making a mental note to bring make sure my real camera was in my pants pocket the next day.

We did a lot of odd jobs for the rest of the time - including decorating the design tent for Christmas!  Yes, it was October but you gotta film this stuff early!  I somehow ended up in the house very briefly while Michael was doing a spiel.  They told me to pretend like I was measuring, but the measuring tape in the room didn't even have TAPE in it.  So I held up a board and pretended to be busy.  And then a bunch of us carried wood from one side of the house to the other and then BACK a few times as filming continued.  When this episode airs in December, I'll make sure to let you know if I see myself!

Also taken the following day - it's Michael's profile and the back of Tracy

Mind you, this was all Day 1.  The next two days were actually MUCH better from a "this is what I did today" perspective--and hopefully not nearly as LENGTHY, so tune in later for my account of the Bravehart March and other fun stuff!