Wrapping it up in Austin

We ended our work at the JFO in Austin. I don't think any of us were sad to see that office for the last time. Our supervisors gave us the entire weekend off, Saturday AND Sunday, which was amazing. On Saturday we played another Denver team in frisbee and won. Afterwards we went to the Cathedral of Junk in Austin, which is this huge structure a guy has made in his back yard out of random junk he collects. I will put a link up to pictures once I upload them. It was pretty incredible.
On Sunday the team went to San Antonion to see what we could see there. It is a pretty interesting (and very touristy) city. We saw the Alamo and walked along the man-made river where there are a lot of shops and restaurants. Sunday night we went out to the Spider House (where we go a couple times a week) and hung out with friends, including one of my friends from high school, Amihan, who is home in Austin on her Christmas break.
On Monday we had to go into work to pack up our desks and get out processed. Our supervisors gave us Christmas goody bags and were sad to see us go. Monday afternoon a few of us went downtown to explore and eat at this delicious restaurant called the Kerby Lane Cafe. Afterwards I came back and slept for an hour or two and then our entire team went out to dinner. At the end of every project we get money to go out to dinner as a team, so we got a free and delicious meal. We did Secret Santa gifts when we got back to the hotel. I had Dani and got her a little texas cook book and a texas cookie cutter, both of which I purchased at the Alamo gift shop. Joe had me and gave me an assortment of fruits and vegetables which I think he got at Walmart. It was pretty cute. After that we went back to Spider House with some friends who came up from Galveston on their way back to Denver.
Today (Tuesday) we volunteered with Habitat for Humanity doing demolition. We spent most of the day ripping sheet rock off the walls and ceiling and tearing out insulation. We found a couple geckos that were hibernating in the walls and were pretty sleepy looking. I put one of them in my sweatshirt pocket to warm him up because I felt bad for taking away his hibernating place. Once he was warm he got pretty active and started crawling around. My friend asked to hold him so I picked him up by his tail to give him to her. Apparently geckos have the ability to detach themselves from their tails, which is what this gecko did. I had both it's moving tail and moving body stuck to my pants which totally freaked me out. It was a pretty traumatizing experience.

Tonight it's packing up and tomorrow we drive to Amarillo and then to Denver on Thursday. I can't believe this first round is actually over. We found out that our next project will be local. Only two teams from Americorps stay local. We will most likely be in either Denver or Boulder, but we could be anywhere in Colorado. I will write more when I find out what our actual project is.

surprise!

This past weekend a team from Galveston came up to visit us. One of my favorite friends in Americorps, Adrienne, is on that team, as well as a lot of other fun people. They stayed in our room Friday and Saturday nights, which made a total of about 8 people sleeping in the hotel room, which was snug. It was really amazing to see familiar faces, especially such fun ones. We took them out Friday night and on Saturday we all walked around down town and went to a cool cafe and the Austin Museum of Art. It was a really amazing surprise.
On Sunday four members of my team woke up at 7 to go volunteer in the woods for the day. The other 5 members of the team dropped out last minute, so it was a small (but mighty) part of Fire 6 that showed up to meet a man named George and help him clear trails. We spent 8 to 9 hours sawing down branches and clearing brush, which was exhausting but a refreshing change from office work. During the first hour though, I got a call from my dad saying that my great uncle Holmes died, which was unexpected by me. He was a really great guy and I can't thank him enough for providing me with my high school education which completely changed my life. Each project that we do has a final portfolio, including a dedication to someone, and my team is going to dedicate this project to my uncle.
Monday our team drove down to Galveston and saw some of the destruction affecting the people we are calling every day. It didn't feel that bad to be after having worked in New Orleans after Katrina....It seemed like a lot less houses were damaged. There were a lot of really bad looking buildings and houses though that were hit really hard. We left Austin around 7, got there at 11, then left Galveston around 4 and got back to Austin around 9. It was a long day, but it was cool to see what it was like down there as well as seeing more friends who are stationed down there.
Tuesday I had the day off and just relaxed, and then Wednesday until today I've been working. Work has pretty much been the same. We're working on getting the queue down, but the last 200 cases or so are all really difficult ones. The queue has been the same for the past week or so because we keep getting about 50 out a day, but then that same number is also coming in every day, so that is frustrating.

I am going to put links to some pictures I've taken over the past couple weeks here below.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026912&l=1537b&id=10300564

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026935&l=438df&id=10300564

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026957&l=59354&id=10300564

Thanksgiving in Texas in a hotel

So work has pretty much been the same...making phone calls and talking to people in really sad situations. One exciting thing though is that when we started work there were about 10,000 people in the queue in the computer who needed to be contacted and helped. When I left the day before Thanksgiving there were only about 600. So it feels like we've made a lot of progress.

For Thanksgiving the office gave us half of Wednesday through Sunday off. On Monday we're going to Galveston as a team to see the destruction first hand, and then another teammate and I have Tuesday off, so I have almost a full week off of work. Yesterday on Thanksgiving morning my team volunteered at "Operation Turkey" which is a group that delivers food and clothing to the local homeless. I mostly organized clothes and carried boxes to cars to be brought out to different people.

Afterwards my friend Ruthie and I went for a drive to get out of the hotel and we found this little park and went for a walk and talked about how we missed our families and being home for Thanksgiving. When we came back the girls in my room made mashed potatoes which was interesting with no peelers and only tiny pots. We ended up making four little pots and peeling all the potatoes with knives. It worked out though and the potatoes were delicious. We had Thanksgiving dinner in our team leader's room. Each room brought a dish. We had stuffing, chicken, mashed potatoes, yams and guacamole. I was more sad than I expected to be not being with family, but it was a cute attempt at Thanksgiving dinner in Texas in a hotel.

Workin for the man

So work has been exhausting with the long hours and emotionally trying phone calls. We have to tally every call we make as a call and then tally the number of people in each household, where we place them, etc. Today I added up my tallies from the past 5 days and I realized that in those 5 days I made 102 calls, affected 103 people in 43 families. I helped 2 families find apartments and signed 15 people up for mobile homes. That made me feel a little better about what I am doing.

I also had this crazy thing happen today where someone who was answering phones transferred a call to me that she said was mine. The woman on the phone was asking for Sarah, but after much confusion on my part, I realized it was another Sarah's case who was out of the office today. By the time I realized this though, it was too far into the conversation for me to admit to the woman that it wasn't my case and I had never heard of her before. Basically her issue was that the mobile unit she was getting was being sent to the wrong address. She said she was so frustrated because she was so close to getting a unit and this thing tripped up the whole process. I said I would work on it. She called me back a few times during the day with new information and I had to call her back a couple times. On the last call I had with her she stopped me as we were saying goodbye and said that she wanted to tell me that she really appreciated what I was doing for her. She said I was the first person she had talked to who had actually helped her and she really commended the work I was doing. That one little comment made the whole day of craziness worth it.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30884286&l=f19de&id=10300564

Here is a link to the pictures I have taken so far, including the drive down to Austin. Work is same old same old, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, no windows, calling people who are living in their cars and who say they just have nowhere to go. I will write more when something exciting happens!

Getting Started

Today was my first official day of on my own calling people. I got a call list at 8am with about 22 people on it. With each person, I have to look them up in two seperate data bases and get some background information on them like whether they are eligible for rental assistance and whether they are part of the HUD (housing and urban development?) program. Then I call them on one of two or three available numbers. If they are there I talk to them and see what their current housing situation is...whether they are still living in their damaged home, or if they are living in a trailer, an apartment, or with family or friends. If they need somewhere to live, I pull up a list of rentals in their area and give them telephone numbers of landlords to call to try and rent. If they are in Galveston or Houston though, there aren't any available because everything is gone or being used, so then I have to ask them if they are interested in living in a mobile unit.

I talked to one woman today who said if she kept talking to me she was going to start crying. She sounded so exasperated with the whole experience, which I can understand. I called another man who I never got a hold of. The notes on hims said that he was older and who had been living in his car. He was losing his sight and could not write things down, so when the person before me tried to give him some resources he could not write them down. It is really hard to be on the other end of the phone with these people, because it feels so impersonal and disconnected.

If the person is not there, I have to keep calling them back throughout the day. You have to call each person three time a day if they do not answer. After you get finished with each client, you have to code them according to what their situation is, and that goes into the two databases. At 3pm every day we have to report our numbers to our supervisors and they tally them up and compare them with other teams, etc. That is what we do every day for 10 hours, with two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch break. The time actually goes by pretty fast when you're calling people all day, but the days are still long, and there is still minimal sunshine in my life. Everyone on my team is in each other's nerves, so that is going to be tough. We are all waking up tomorrow to do PT at 6am, which should also brighten everyone's spirits : )

Everything is bigger in Texas

I haven't written anything in so long. It's been a crazy week or so and the internet at the hotel we are staying at is not very good. I am also trying to get some pictures up on Facebook, and if I do I will post the links for those.

So we made it to Texas. We left last Monday and drove to Amarillo, TX in a 15 passenger van, stopping every two hours to switch drivers. We slept in Amarillo and were on the road again at 7:30 the next morning to drive to Austin. Through our whole drive in Texas, the landscape was pretty bleak. I did see a lot of cotton growing though, which I had never seen. I'd say that was the landscape highlight. One of the low points was driving through cattle farms where I thought the smell of poop would never leave the van. We got to Austin around 6:30 pm and sat around in the parking lot for about an hour while we figured out our room situation.

There are 2 men, 7 women, and one team leader on my team. The team leader gets his own room, the guys share a room, and the 7 girls are split up 3 and 4 to a room. My room has 4. Each room has one bed and one pull out couch. There are no dressers, and the closet is about 4 feet wide with no door. So, it is pretty tight, but we are making due. We also have a total of $4.50 a day per person for food, so we've been very creative in our eating. We also have to be creative because we have no oven and only two burners per room. Tonight was my night to cook and I made tuna melts and tomato soup, which I think turned out pretty well.

We didn't start our official job until the end of the week, so on Thursday we spent the day volunteering. In the morning we did Meals on Wheels and drove around delivering lunches to people, which I really loved doing. Then in the afternoon we went to a food bank that moved to a new location and spent about 5 hours painting their new place. We have to have 80 hours of independent service to finish Americorps, and we got 10 hours that day.

We are working in Austin at the Joint Field Office (JFO) which is basically the headquarters for disaster relief in the Texas gulf. Most of the teams from Denver got sent down to Galveston, but we are staying in Austin with 3 other teams. We work Monday through Saturday from 8am to 6pm in an old JC Penny's with no windows. Our job is to call those who have been displaced by the hurricanes to see what their current housing situation is and what their plan is for the next couple of months. If they do not have one, we provide them with "rental resources". Saturday was our first day and we mostly got training on the computer programs and shadowed workers. We also got our official FEMA ID badges...which we were advised not to wear outside of the building because so many people dislike FEMA.
Today we got our laptops and set up our desks, which are long tables inside of cubicles in what used to be the juniors department of JC Penny's. The best part of the day was going to the supply station and getting to pick whatever we wanted for our desks. It was like going to Staples and having everything be free. For the rest of the day though, we mostly sat around and waited for IT to set up our passwords, etc. We shadowed for about half an hour before we were called to a meeting for the entire department. During the meeting, 4 cranky women who run the department complained about all the things everyone is doing wrong and threatened everyone with various things if they didn't do their jobs right. It was a pretty terrible ending to a pretty long and terrible day. It is going to be a really hard 6 weeks manning a phone in a sunlight-less room.

On the bright side, the few times I have been to Austin have been really cool. On our day off (Sunday) a bunch of my teammates and I went downtown and explored around the UT area. Austin really comes alive at night. There are a lot of local vendors out and the bar crowd is huge. I guess the warm weather keeps people coming out, and they stay out late, so there's a really good energy all the time. It's a fun city and I hope to get to hang out there as much as possible to balance out these mind numbing work days.

Spike Prep

This is a picture of some of my teammates and me on Halloween when we all had lunch together in our costumes among the sea of Americorps people all dressed the same. My team leader, Mike, is the one with the footie pajamas


Our projects where we are away from Denver are called "spike projects". This week we mostly prepared for them. We assigned roles on the team, so each person has one or two jobs. Mine are PT (physical training) coordinator and Yearbook representative. I am doing both of those jobs with another member of the team. We are going out on disaster relief, so we are only allowed to bring one bag with us, which they provide, so we have been trying to cram all of our stuff into another suitcase, since we are only allowed to store one when we are gone. We have daily room inspections to make sure we are packing, cleaning, etc.
Today we had our project briefing, where each member of the team stands up in front of the director and unit leader and talks about their role on the team and what they will be doing in that role while on spike. During this meeting we found out that our team would be traveling to Galveston, TX to live in a tent city and do work down there. We were excited to finally know where we would be going, after weeks of not knowing. A few hours later though, during my room inspection, my team leader said that plans had changed and that now we are living in Austin for the entire time, and most likely living in a hotel. I am excited, because I like Austin, and I think it will be a good opportunity to get to know the city better. We leave Monday, drive to Amarillo and spend the night, then drive to Austin on Tuesday.
Today (Friday) I volunteered at the Children's Museum. We have to complete 80 hours of independent service project (ISP) while completing our 1700 hours of service during the 10 months of Americorps. The Children's Museum was my first 5 hours. They had a big trick or treat event where kids came and played games and trick or treated in different rooms inside and outside of the museum. It was really cute. My friend Ruthie and I were assigned to games first, and then to mask making. The kids were really adorable and excited about everything, which was awesome.
Tomorrow is our induction ceremony where we are officially inducted into the program. I think tomorrow night I am going to camp in Boulder and then we leave Monday!

Air Force Day

On Monday the entire NCCC campus went to an Air Force base in Colorado Springs to do obstacle course team building stuff. We started out on the obstacle course, which was much harder than I expected. I don't know why I expected it to be easy, since it is part of training for Air Force members. We had to roll over logs and jump walls and lift ourselves up and over and under things. We all have very sore muscles today, but it was fun.
The second half of the day we did problem solving where we were put in simulation pods and given tasks to complete. There would be places we couldn't touch and certain tools we had to use to get our team over a 12 foot wall, for example. It was pretty hard, but our team seemed good at coming up with solutions, which usually involved starting with the smallest member of our team crawling up the back of the biggest member of our team (our team leader) and then going from there.
We came back home sore and tired, but I think we were pretty satisfied with what we did. Here are some pictures from the past two posts...

Rocky Mountain National Park and Roller skating

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026036&l=1674c&id=10300564

Boulder and the Obstacle Course

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026039&l=67cee&id=10300564

the weekend

On Friday my unit went to Rocky Mountain National Park for a hike. It was really beautiful and there was snow as we got higher up into the mountains. My friend and I hiked up to "Cub Lake" and that was really pretty. After we hiked for a couple hours, we headed back to campus to find out our permanent teams, which was supposed to be at 4pm. We didn't get back til 6 though because of the traffic. Once we got there we were each given a piece of a puzzle and we had to find other people whose puzzle went with ours.
Once we got the puzzle together it gave us a license plate number and we found the van that corresponded with it. Our van driver, whose name was Elizabeth, was wearing a really creepy mask and we thought she was our team leader, but she wouldn't talk to us. Once we were all in the van she drove up campus around in circles until she switched with another van driver, who was Andi. So then we thought Andi was our team leader, but she dropped us off and left us with a note that we had to decode with letters corresponding to numbers. The clue said "roses are red, violets are blue, you should go to the third floor of walsh [our dorm]"
After we got to the third floor there was a note telling us to go to the bottom floor where we found Mike, our actual team leader. We met as a team and had dinner, where Mike told us we are going somewhere in Texas for our first project, and then we called it a night. On Saturday we went roller skating as a team, where I won a dance contest that I didn't even know I was in. They asked anyone who wanted to do the "cha cha slide" to line up on the line, and I went out with 5 of my teammates and about 15 little kids. I danced the whole thing ridiculously and then at the end they said they would announce the winner. I had no idea it was a competition, and was surprised when the woman skated up to me and handed me a "winner" ticket that I could trade in at the counter for a flashy ball prize. What a day.
On Sunday I went to Boulder with 3 friends and walked around Pearl Street before meeting up with my cousin Oliver. We all went to an Oxygen bar where two of my friends got oxygen, which was interesting to watch. Then we went up to the mountains for a hike and climed up some really high rocks and sat at the top. Afterwards we all got frozen yogurt. It was a really great weekend...pictures to come!

week update

So I realized I have not been very good at keeping up with this. There is not much to report though, because we have mostly been sitting in classrooms all day doing training for various things like van safety and cpr training. I am now officially certified to perform cpr and other emergency maneuvers. The woman who ran the cpr training was...difficult. She felt the need to add to her 7 hours of lecturing with personal anecdotes like the time her stepmother tried to drive her father who was having a heart attack to the hospital instead of calling and amubulance. She added that her father died and her stepmother got what she deserved. Whoa.
I had to go to urgent care on Wednesday because I was having chest pain for a couple days that was getting worse. I tried to see the doctor here but she said she couldn't evaluate chest pain, so I had to go to urgent care. They told me I had inflamed cartilage in my ribs or Costochondritis. I took ibuprofin for a couple days and it went away.
During the week we also did tool training and various team building activities. On Saturday we left campus at 6:15 to go to city park and build trails, which is what we trained for on Monday of last week. We got there and waited to get our team of 10 people to go start working, but they underestimated the number of people they were getting, so my partner and I never ended up getting a team. A bunch of the corps members who didn't get teams ended up working together. It was pretty cool to see all these huge piles of gravel turn into a trail in just a few hours. Afterwards there was some live music and really good mediterranean food. The mayor even came out and talked to all of us. It was about 85 degrees and sunny, which made it a nice (but pretty hot) day.
Sunday was gorgeous weather again and I spent the day laying outside and reading. My friend Jess Wurtz from Bryn Mawr who lives near Colorado Springs came to visit in the evening and we went to a bar to watch the Redsox game.
The week was kind of rough in terms of so much classroom time, and a few people are really getting on my nerves, but I also feel like I have made better friends this week. A bunch of us went bowling one night, and i went out to eat with some other people, so that has been nice getting to know people better.

Playground Project

A girl in my group took this picture of me during our playground project.



Today (Tuesday), my team did a project in Denver. We were assigned to a playground that needed to be filled in with wood chips. The best way to envision it is an in ground pool with a playground in the middle of it, two feet deep. Those two feet needed to be filled to the top. We ended up using 1700 cubic yards of wood chips (two tractor trailers' worth). The project manager didn't think we could get it all done today, but we finished in about 4.5 hours (with a lunch break in there). It felt good to actually get out and do something after spending so much time in the classroom in training. Tonight at 5 our team is playing another team in kickball and I am really looking forward to that.

Yesterday we went to a park in the morning to get trained for a project we are leading on Saturday. We are split up into pairs and are leading groups of 8 to 10 in building trails at one of the city parks. It should be pretty fun. Starbucks and Panera Bread are catering it, which I am also excited about.

Here is a link to my playground pictures if you want to see more.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2025711&l=243ef&id=10300564

Rainy Weekend

On Saturday we went with the entire Fire Unit to Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater to go hiking. It was beautiful and they have an amazing theater where a lot of really cool people have played. The theater is totally carved out of the rock around it. While we were there, there was some kind of fitness group running up and down the steps. I walked all the way up them once and was exhausted. each step is about 2 feet high. Some people from our group ran all the way down them, running all the way down one step and then down to the next level to run all the way down the next. In total, this was 3.1 miles of running. Intense. The hike was beautiful. I will attach the link to my pictures on facebook at the bottom of this post. Afterwards our group went to Denver and walked around and saw things and ate and drank things. I found a really cool bookstore (I love bookstores) and bought a few things. On Saturday night my roommate and I went to a Mexican restaurant/bar and watched the Redsox play and then went to bed.
Sunday was a our big awaited day off and a chance to sleep in, but I of course (with my excellent internal clock) was up at 7. Brunch on Sundays doesn't start until 11:30, and every day the past week I have eaten both breakfast and lunch by 11:30, so I was very hungry. After brunch my roommate and I went back into the city and walked around and some stores. We walked to the Civic Center where there is an enormous blue bear statue peaking into the building. This is also in my pictures. The entire weekend it has been really rainy and cold, so that is a downer. Especially because we were told that Colorado has the most sunny days of any state. Not anymore.

link to the pictures: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2025682&l=7c547&id=10300564

i dont know how to make it show up as a link, so you might have to copy and paste it into a browser window

the mountains

The mountains here are really beautiful, and the entire western skyline is consumed by them. Our cafeteria has huge windows all along the west side, so you can see the mountains when you eat, which are especially beautiful at breakfast which is around sunrise.
Last night I went for a run for the first time, to test out how my lungs were taking the altitude. They aren't taking it. It was pretty painful, but I got through it. Then after dinner there was a big soccer game with a lot of corps members and team leaders, which was really fun. I went to bed last night at the latest time so far...about 10:30pm.
This morning we had boot issue and I got a HUGE pair of steel toed black boots...an item I never thought I would own. They're pretty heavy and big and I am not personally looking forward to wearing them although a lot of people on my team were very excited. After boot issue we went to Aurora for physicals where I found out that I am negative for both pregnancy and drugs and that I can see and hear and don't have TB. Now we have a break until one when we have another training session. Today the weather is nice, it's about 65 degrees, but there is supposed to be a cold front coming in this weekend and it might snow. My roommate who is from Georgia and has only seen snow twice in her life (once when she was 3) looking forward to it. I am not : )

Americorps Uniform

So we got our uniforms and I have attached a picture of me in mine. They are...not the most flattering things, but it's nice to not have to wonder about what you will wear every day. We got two pairs of khaki colored pants, and one pair of black pants (which I am wearing in the picture). We also got two pairs of khaki shorts, two long sleeve gray t shirts, 3 short sleeve, a short and long sleeve polo type shirt, a belt, a sweatshirt, a vest, a winter coat, a bag, and we will be getting steel toed boots and winter hats soon. Oh! We also got khaki colored fishing style hats...which I am pretty sure I'll never wear. And an Americorps bandana. Awesome.

Last night a lot of corps members watched the debates in the lounge and then I went to bed pretty soon after that. These 6:00 days are killing me. This morning we had a meeting from 8am to 11:30am about the rules in the handbook, which was pretty boring and made my butt fall asleep. This afternoon we're getting a tour of the campus and possibly going to Walmart/Target as a team to get stuff we need for our rooms, etc.

Americorps NCCC Denver Days One and Two

Monday 10/6

Today started at 5:15 am Eastern time when I got up to leave the house by 6:15 and be at the airport by 6:45. I caught a 7:55 flight out of Boston and arrived in Denver at 10:30 am Mountain time. When I got to the airport I was greeted by NCCC team leaders and taken to a waiting area full of people and bags before we got on a bus about an hour later to take us to campus. Americorps is housed on the campus of Teikyo Loretta Heights University in Denver. It’s a pretty campus and you can see the Rockies clearly, as well as the sun setting over the Rockies, which I really like. Forgive me for this writing, because I am sure some of it will not make sense due to my brain shutting down hours ago.
When we got to campus, we were given our room assignments. My roommate is from Georgia, and we are getting along well so far, bonding over our miserable room. The room is about 12 feet by 10 feet. The two beds are each under a shelf and have to be pulled out to sleep on. Each bed takes up a wall. The third wall is taken up by our desks and the 4th by the door, the two closets and the sink. There are no dressers, so all of my clothes are in my desk drawers (there are two). After filling out some paper work and finding the main office, we ate some old pizza and did “in-processing” which consisted of more paperwork and getting our ID pictures taken. After that we were free from about 2 to 5:30. My roommate and I unpacked and took naps.
At 5:30 we met our team for the week. My roommate and I are both in the “Fire Unit” which is how they break up the 250 class members. Fire, Earth, Sun, and Water (Captain Planet, he’s a hero). Within each unit, there are teams of about 10 people, so we are “Fire 3”. During our 4 week orientation, we will switch teams every week. Once we had all our team members and team leader, we got in a van and headed to subway for dinner. At 7 there was a Fire Unit meeting where we met all the team leaders for the unit and played fun bonding games. Then we were freeee. There are 3 working showers on my hall of 80+ people, so that is going to be interesting. I am headed to bed for 6:30 breakfast and another full day tomorrow. I really miss my friends and family back on the East Coast and I am thinking of you guys all the time.

Tuesday 10/7

Today we were up at 6:30 for breakfast, after a cold night in the dorms. I went to be between 9 and 10 though, so I got a good amount of sleep. After breakfast we had a community meeting where we were formally introduced to all the staff and team leaders from other units. At 10, we had a meeting to set up our direct deposit for paychecks, and then we were free until 11:30 when we had lunch. I have to say I had very low expectations for the food, but so far it has been really good. Today for lunch I had chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, broccoli and raw spinach...some of my favorite foods. At 1, we have our uniform issue which means that after that we are only wearing our uniforms from here on out, which I am a little sad about. It's weird right now because some units have gotten their uniforms and some haven't, so as my roommate pointed out we are sort of like the sneetches. Some with stars on thars...and some not. I am not sure what is up for the rest of the day, but at 6:45 there is a meeting for people who want to play ultimate frisbee, so I am excited for that.