Monday, July 24, 2006
Wow. It's been forever since I updated, but I figured I'd better...so marc will put me back on his links :P
So...since June 9th...I've:
-graduated (boring, no elaboration necessary there)
-gone to the beach with Rachel. We continued our tradition; every year, I go with her family and one of Rachel's brother's friends to Bald Head Island. We drove around on the golf carts, did some shopping, played with a ton of hermit crabs, and somehow got less tropical storm damage than back in Cary, where streets had to close to due to flooding. We just got some wind and rain on the island, nothing major at all. Weird.
-gone to orientation at UNCW. It was actually pretty fun. I roomed with a nice girl who grew up in a beach town abuot 6 hours from Wilmington, and we hung out with a girl from the room next to us also because her roomate ignored her the whole time. I'm not terribly fond of my schedule though...here it is:
Monday: 8-8:50am General Psychology, 1-1:50pm Calc
Tuesday: 9:30-10:45am German, 1-1:50pm Calc, 4-5:15pm Freshmen Seminar
Wednesday: 8-8:50am General Psychology, 1-1:50pm Calc, 6-8:45pm Survey of Economics (the only thing left that fit my schedule, gave me enough hours, and counted towards basic studies credits. bleh)
Thursday: 9:30-10:45am German, 1-1:50pm Calc, 4-5:15pm Freshmen Seminar
Friday: 8-8:50am Gerneral Psychology, 1-1:50pm Calc
It's not really bad I guess...I just don't like that I have so much time between all of my classes...like 4 hours between them. And I don't like having Calc every day, a night class that I really don't want to take anyway becaues there are more fun courses I could take instead if they worked with my schedule and/or weren't full, and I have no electives. I think I'll enjoy Freshmen Seminar though-it's only a 2 hour credit, but it only goes for the first 10 weeks of the semester, so after that I'll be out each day by 1:50 except for Wednesday. It includes some form of service project too, because I signed up for it that way, so that's pretty cool. Last year's group built a Habitat house, which I would really really enjoy. I like that I'm out early on Mondays and Fridays though, and I'm glad that, even though it's every day, at least I don't have an early Calc class, because my brain doesn't work that well early in the morning.
Somewhat unrelated, but I also found out that there's a place on campus that serves sushi...and that makes me happy.
back to the list...
-done AOSP (Apex Outreach Service Project). I had a pretty good group this year, and our job was to paint the exterior of a house. It was pretty easy, and we would've been done much earlier if it didn't keep raining early in the week. We also took one afternoon off to help another group. They were working on a roof, and apparently the damage was much worse than they realized-the ceilings collapsed. Three of them. So that became a very big job to do in one week-not only repair the three ceilings, but clean up all of the damage, bring in new furniture, and fix the roof. So we helped with that-I mostly cleaned and hauled shingles, and did a little bit of paint scraping on the exterior where it was peeling so that it could be repainted. As much as I know that group felt bad about the ceilings collapsing, I think it was a blessing that it happened when it did...just imagine if the lady had been inside when they fell, or if it collapsed after AOSP had finished-she wouldn't have been able to get anyone else to do the repairs for free. On Friday, I kind of abandoned my team, because we had finished our job on Thursday, and another team needed help. They had a girl on their team that was on my team last year...some of you may have heard me refering to her as the "my fifty dollar bag from belgium is going to get dirty!" girl. Well, this year, she was with one of her friends, so not only did they not do anything and be loud and anoying, they actually messed up the other people's work. So I offered to go with their team, and the leader, Dana, who I love, accepted. She even got the other girls moved to other teams for the day. Melissa was on that team, so we had a good time hanging out, but we worked hard too. We were flooring-they'd already gotten most of it done during the week, but we had two rooms that needed linolium put down, the base board thingies nailed in and painted, and the place cleaned up a lot because the owner had enphasema (yes I'm too lazy to look up the spelling of that) and couldn't be around dust. We had to work late; we didn't get back until about 6:15 (we're supposed to be back around 4), but we got it done. Oh and I had this big thing about being able to predict what dinner was a couple of times during the week, which was hillarious, and it happened again a few times on ASP too.
-went to my aunt's house in Atlanta. We did lots of crafty fun stuff, from crocheting to her teaching me how to make a rag quilt. I got to see some other relatives while I was down there, so that was fun. I also had an exciting adventure when I had a sinus infection down there-I thought I was just dizzy from the sinus infection, but I went to urgent care to get antibiotics, and I ended up also being really really dehydrated, which was probably because I got stuck in an airport for 7 hours the day before and didn't think to drink during that time. They put me on an IV in the office, and my vein collapsed the first time because they had constricted so much from dehydration, but they finally got it to work in my other arm. That was an interesting experiance lol.
-gone on ASP (Appalachia Service Project). It was amazing, as always, but every year it's amazing in a different way. I was on an awesome team: Lee (our youth pastor), Jay Faulhaber (an awesome guy who can make everything into a joke and is obsessed with crossword puzzles), Katie, Elizabeth, both of which I'm good friends with, and we started the week with Ben from Aulander, but he left to help out another team that was doing so heavy lifting. Our job was to finish the room additions for a trailer. The family has six boys, but one lives with his grandmother. The other five live in one small room, so some of them have to sleep on the couch each night. ASP added two rooms, so that now two boys live in each of the new rooms, and JJ, the 14 year old son, has his own room, which is being turned into a nursery for him to share with his two month old daughter. The kids are a combination of kids from two families from previous marriages, and a few of them have depression issues from their father's death, though they get along well with their stepfather. Also, two of them have heart problems, including a young boy whose heart rate remains stable no matter what-if he runs, sleeps, stresses, etc. Instead of changing his heart rate, his blood pressure goes up and down, so he has to be really careful. He was a lot of fun though-he teased us about doing things wrongly just to confuse us and make us laugh. Our team was in charge of finishing the outside of the room additions, while another team finished drywall, puttying, and painting inside. We mostly worked on underpinning, which is the stuff that goes from the bottom of a trailer down into the ground. We built wooden frames for it, used rebar (basically half inch thick bars of metal) to attach the frames to the ground, and then nailed in the underpinning-until the last day when we were tired of hammering and decided to use screws because they're easier and faster and actually more effective, and we just used ones one of the leaders brought so that we didn't make ASP have to pay for them. Oh, and we had to lay a vapor sheild down. Basically we were supposed to put a layer of thick black plastic on the ground under the room additions. I went under because the other's didn't really want to...and I wasn't smart and didn't think ahead of time that since we spend the first day or two shoveling out rocks and throwing them out of our way, so had the groups before us, so there were a ton of rocks under the house, both those naturally in that area and those we threw under there. So I crawled around on my already swollen knees and got nice and bruised up. T'was very exciting. I went on a roof one day too-the groups who started didn't plan well and made the angle of the roof of the additions a different angle than the main part of the trailer, so they didn't line up, and rain could easily flow in, so we sealed it off with wood and Great Stuff (yes that's really the name of it; it's a type of expanding foam). We also fixed a few areas around the windows where there was no siding and thus the insulation was completely exposed...I have no idea how it got that way because it looked pretty clean cut. Anyway, I guess insulation makes a nice little nest for insects, because I was nailing in some siding, standing with my back to a ladder that I was on, when a wasp started flying around...and then a few more came around and Lee told me to get down...I was only on the 3rd or 4th step of the ladder, but in my haste to get down and away from the wasps, I slipped and ended up with my right leg where I wanted it, on the outside of the ladder, but my left leg inside, and I tripped and got a lovely gigantic bruise on my left leg. However, I did not get stung lol. Jay sprayed Raid everywhere and Lee finished that window lol. The picnic night wasn't so fun this year-they decided we would get to make benches and picnic tables...meaning a lot of the food was gone before we could get to it, everyone was brain dead from coming straight from another job site, we didn't have instructions, any extra bolts, and the wood was precut incorrectly...so we all got really frustrated and snapped at eachother and wouldn't listen to eachother and kept messing up. That was just the picnic tables lol. The benches didn't work because they were modeled after a metal version and guess what? Metal and wood don't work the same way lol, so there wasn't nearly enough support, and they had to be rebuilt the next day. Anyway...I know it doesn't sound like it based on the last parts of this, but I really did have an amazingly wonderful time, in social aspects as well as the work. I'm relieved to be back to speaking and being spoken to in an almost normal way with some people. It's not all better yet but it's come a long way. On this trip, I thought about how much ASP has been a growing process for me. My first year, I went because my friends went and I didn't want to be left out. I planned to go back last year because I had a good time, but I expected it to be my last time because I wanted to go to summer school this summer. Then, at the end of AOSP last summer, I realized I wasn't willing to be finished with service projects yet, so I gave up on summer school and decided to go one last year. And not this year, I'm again unable to let go. I'm seriously considering being on staff the summer after next-I doubt I can next summer (though I might still be able to go as a kid if there are enough spaces like there were this year) because I'll just be getting my license and there's a good possibility that I'll be having surgery on my right knee then.
Which brings me to my next topic...I'm having surgery on my left knee on Wednesday. Physical therapy didn't do much and both knees are developing arthritus, so they're going to remove part of the muscle to un-tilt my kneecaps and maybe do something else that they're not sure until they get in there. It's orthoscopic and should only last about 45 minutes, so it's not major, but it'll swell for like 2 months, which kinda sucks. I'll be able to start putting a tiny bit of weight on it possibly same day as the surgery, and I should be off crutches in around a week. A different doctor is doing the surgery than the one I've been seeing because he's out of town this week and I want to get it over with asap so I'll have the maximum amount of recovery time before school starts as possible. Everyone's been telling me all week that I'm going to go in to see him for the first time tomorrow, he'll take one look at the bruises on and around my knees, give me a weird look, and say, "well no wonder your knees hurt!" lol.
That ought to be enough of an update to tide you all over for a while lol...gnight.
So...since June 9th...I've:
-graduated (boring, no elaboration necessary there)
-gone to the beach with Rachel. We continued our tradition; every year, I go with her family and one of Rachel's brother's friends to Bald Head Island. We drove around on the golf carts, did some shopping, played with a ton of hermit crabs, and somehow got less tropical storm damage than back in Cary, where streets had to close to due to flooding. We just got some wind and rain on the island, nothing major at all. Weird.
-gone to orientation at UNCW. It was actually pretty fun. I roomed with a nice girl who grew up in a beach town abuot 6 hours from Wilmington, and we hung out with a girl from the room next to us also because her roomate ignored her the whole time. I'm not terribly fond of my schedule though...here it is:
Monday: 8-8:50am General Psychology, 1-1:50pm Calc
Tuesday: 9:30-10:45am German, 1-1:50pm Calc, 4-5:15pm Freshmen Seminar
Wednesday: 8-8:50am General Psychology, 1-1:50pm Calc, 6-8:45pm Survey of Economics (the only thing left that fit my schedule, gave me enough hours, and counted towards basic studies credits. bleh)
Thursday: 9:30-10:45am German, 1-1:50pm Calc, 4-5:15pm Freshmen Seminar
Friday: 8-8:50am Gerneral Psychology, 1-1:50pm Calc
It's not really bad I guess...I just don't like that I have so much time between all of my classes...like 4 hours between them. And I don't like having Calc every day, a night class that I really don't want to take anyway becaues there are more fun courses I could take instead if they worked with my schedule and/or weren't full, and I have no electives. I think I'll enjoy Freshmen Seminar though-it's only a 2 hour credit, but it only goes for the first 10 weeks of the semester, so after that I'll be out each day by 1:50 except for Wednesday. It includes some form of service project too, because I signed up for it that way, so that's pretty cool. Last year's group built a Habitat house, which I would really really enjoy. I like that I'm out early on Mondays and Fridays though, and I'm glad that, even though it's every day, at least I don't have an early Calc class, because my brain doesn't work that well early in the morning.
Somewhat unrelated, but I also found out that there's a place on campus that serves sushi...and that makes me happy.
back to the list...
-done AOSP (Apex Outreach Service Project). I had a pretty good group this year, and our job was to paint the exterior of a house. It was pretty easy, and we would've been done much earlier if it didn't keep raining early in the week. We also took one afternoon off to help another group. They were working on a roof, and apparently the damage was much worse than they realized-the ceilings collapsed. Three of them. So that became a very big job to do in one week-not only repair the three ceilings, but clean up all of the damage, bring in new furniture, and fix the roof. So we helped with that-I mostly cleaned and hauled shingles, and did a little bit of paint scraping on the exterior where it was peeling so that it could be repainted. As much as I know that group felt bad about the ceilings collapsing, I think it was a blessing that it happened when it did...just imagine if the lady had been inside when they fell, or if it collapsed after AOSP had finished-she wouldn't have been able to get anyone else to do the repairs for free. On Friday, I kind of abandoned my team, because we had finished our job on Thursday, and another team needed help. They had a girl on their team that was on my team last year...some of you may have heard me refering to her as the "my fifty dollar bag from belgium is going to get dirty!" girl. Well, this year, she was with one of her friends, so not only did they not do anything and be loud and anoying, they actually messed up the other people's work. So I offered to go with their team, and the leader, Dana, who I love, accepted. She even got the other girls moved to other teams for the day. Melissa was on that team, so we had a good time hanging out, but we worked hard too. We were flooring-they'd already gotten most of it done during the week, but we had two rooms that needed linolium put down, the base board thingies nailed in and painted, and the place cleaned up a lot because the owner had enphasema (yes I'm too lazy to look up the spelling of that) and couldn't be around dust. We had to work late; we didn't get back until about 6:15 (we're supposed to be back around 4), but we got it done. Oh and I had this big thing about being able to predict what dinner was a couple of times during the week, which was hillarious, and it happened again a few times on ASP too.
-went to my aunt's house in Atlanta. We did lots of crafty fun stuff, from crocheting to her teaching me how to make a rag quilt. I got to see some other relatives while I was down there, so that was fun. I also had an exciting adventure when I had a sinus infection down there-I thought I was just dizzy from the sinus infection, but I went to urgent care to get antibiotics, and I ended up also being really really dehydrated, which was probably because I got stuck in an airport for 7 hours the day before and didn't think to drink during that time. They put me on an IV in the office, and my vein collapsed the first time because they had constricted so much from dehydration, but they finally got it to work in my other arm. That was an interesting experiance lol.
-gone on ASP (Appalachia Service Project). It was amazing, as always, but every year it's amazing in a different way. I was on an awesome team: Lee (our youth pastor), Jay Faulhaber (an awesome guy who can make everything into a joke and is obsessed with crossword puzzles), Katie, Elizabeth, both of which I'm good friends with, and we started the week with Ben from Aulander, but he left to help out another team that was doing so heavy lifting. Our job was to finish the room additions for a trailer. The family has six boys, but one lives with his grandmother. The other five live in one small room, so some of them have to sleep on the couch each night. ASP added two rooms, so that now two boys live in each of the new rooms, and JJ, the 14 year old son, has his own room, which is being turned into a nursery for him to share with his two month old daughter. The kids are a combination of kids from two families from previous marriages, and a few of them have depression issues from their father's death, though they get along well with their stepfather. Also, two of them have heart problems, including a young boy whose heart rate remains stable no matter what-if he runs, sleeps, stresses, etc. Instead of changing his heart rate, his blood pressure goes up and down, so he has to be really careful. He was a lot of fun though-he teased us about doing things wrongly just to confuse us and make us laugh. Our team was in charge of finishing the outside of the room additions, while another team finished drywall, puttying, and painting inside. We mostly worked on underpinning, which is the stuff that goes from the bottom of a trailer down into the ground. We built wooden frames for it, used rebar (basically half inch thick bars of metal) to attach the frames to the ground, and then nailed in the underpinning-until the last day when we were tired of hammering and decided to use screws because they're easier and faster and actually more effective, and we just used ones one of the leaders brought so that we didn't make ASP have to pay for them. Oh, and we had to lay a vapor sheild down. Basically we were supposed to put a layer of thick black plastic on the ground under the room additions. I went under because the other's didn't really want to...and I wasn't smart and didn't think ahead of time that since we spend the first day or two shoveling out rocks and throwing them out of our way, so had the groups before us, so there were a ton of rocks under the house, both those naturally in that area and those we threw under there. So I crawled around on my already swollen knees and got nice and bruised up. T'was very exciting. I went on a roof one day too-the groups who started didn't plan well and made the angle of the roof of the additions a different angle than the main part of the trailer, so they didn't line up, and rain could easily flow in, so we sealed it off with wood and Great Stuff (yes that's really the name of it; it's a type of expanding foam). We also fixed a few areas around the windows where there was no siding and thus the insulation was completely exposed...I have no idea how it got that way because it looked pretty clean cut. Anyway, I guess insulation makes a nice little nest for insects, because I was nailing in some siding, standing with my back to a ladder that I was on, when a wasp started flying around...and then a few more came around and Lee told me to get down...I was only on the 3rd or 4th step of the ladder, but in my haste to get down and away from the wasps, I slipped and ended up with my right leg where I wanted it, on the outside of the ladder, but my left leg inside, and I tripped and got a lovely gigantic bruise on my left leg. However, I did not get stung lol. Jay sprayed Raid everywhere and Lee finished that window lol. The picnic night wasn't so fun this year-they decided we would get to make benches and picnic tables...meaning a lot of the food was gone before we could get to it, everyone was brain dead from coming straight from another job site, we didn't have instructions, any extra bolts, and the wood was precut incorrectly...so we all got really frustrated and snapped at eachother and wouldn't listen to eachother and kept messing up. That was just the picnic tables lol. The benches didn't work because they were modeled after a metal version and guess what? Metal and wood don't work the same way lol, so there wasn't nearly enough support, and they had to be rebuilt the next day. Anyway...I know it doesn't sound like it based on the last parts of this, but I really did have an amazingly wonderful time, in social aspects as well as the work. I'm relieved to be back to speaking and being spoken to in an almost normal way with some people. It's not all better yet but it's come a long way. On this trip, I thought about how much ASP has been a growing process for me. My first year, I went because my friends went and I didn't want to be left out. I planned to go back last year because I had a good time, but I expected it to be my last time because I wanted to go to summer school this summer. Then, at the end of AOSP last summer, I realized I wasn't willing to be finished with service projects yet, so I gave up on summer school and decided to go one last year. And not this year, I'm again unable to let go. I'm seriously considering being on staff the summer after next-I doubt I can next summer (though I might still be able to go as a kid if there are enough spaces like there were this year) because I'll just be getting my license and there's a good possibility that I'll be having surgery on my right knee then.
Which brings me to my next topic...I'm having surgery on my left knee on Wednesday. Physical therapy didn't do much and both knees are developing arthritus, so they're going to remove part of the muscle to un-tilt my kneecaps and maybe do something else that they're not sure until they get in there. It's orthoscopic and should only last about 45 minutes, so it's not major, but it'll swell for like 2 months, which kinda sucks. I'll be able to start putting a tiny bit of weight on it possibly same day as the surgery, and I should be off crutches in around a week. A different doctor is doing the surgery than the one I've been seeing because he's out of town this week and I want to get it over with asap so I'll have the maximum amount of recovery time before school starts as possible. Everyone's been telling me all week that I'm going to go in to see him for the first time tomorrow, he'll take one look at the bruises on and around my knees, give me a weird look, and say, "well no wonder your knees hurt!" lol.
That ought to be enough of an update to tide you all over for a while lol...gnight.
