Full week at CHRPA

I have succeeded in completely a full week at CHRPA, and by full week I mean four days haha! I was excited to see how it would feel getting through a full week because my last week I only had to work two days. My first day went well, fixing coolers and building a stand for a cooler as well. Then Tuesday became quite a challenging day as me and Dan, an ex-VSer, got assigned to putting on a 42 foot metal roof on a mobile home. CHRPA usually doesn't do a whole lot of new roofing and 42 feet was a large venture. The roll of metal was 42 feet by 15 feet and it weighed at least 500 pounds so it was quite interesting getting it up onto the roof itself. The task was challenging but also exciting and one that keeps you busy so the hours went by quickly. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, a thunder and lightning storm rolled in so we had to get off the roof, ending a bit earlier and before we were able to complete the job. The next day Dan and Amy went back to the site to finish up, while I went with another Dan to learn how to plumb gas lines. In those two days we re-plumbed a guy's entire house since there were so many leaks inside we ended up putting in all brand new pipes. We were hoping that all we would have to do is change out one or two pipes inside and only have to plumb the outside lines to the meter but it turned out to be a bigger job than first expected. It was fun for me though because it gave me more time to learn about plumbing, cutting pipe, regulations on gas lines, sealing connections and I also wasn't the one in the attic crawl space in 100 degree weather trying to put 50 foot pipes together haha. As always, I enjoyed ice cream at the end of the day and it felt so good for it to be the weekend already on Thursday night.

During the week not a lot happens in the evenings. Everyone is usually pretty worn out from their day and we all get up early so bed time seems to be around 10 or 10:30. I'm usually the last one up and I'm still in bed before 11 most nights. We had our first week of chores and house meals so that was fun to start getting into the routine of house matters. I had to sweep, mop and vacuum which is by far the worst chore but since I have Friday off, it didn't seem so bad. My night for cooking a meal is Tuesday and I decided to make stacked veggie quesodillas which my mom has so lovingly made for dinner multiple times so I knew how to make it and it was an easy first dinner. I'm not sure if I have mentioned this before but one of my housemates, Audra, is a vegetarian who also doesn't eat a lot of dairy, and meat is also really expensive to so practice living simply and frugally we don't eat meat much. In reality, we don't buy meat ever, but meat is still somewhat common in my diet because when we go over to a place for dinner they usually cook meat and sometimes we get the left overs too. So far it has been fun and interesting living without meat as a main source of calories and food and I'm interested to see how it continues to feel throughout the year. The only thing I'm worried about is if and when I get more active if I can sustain my large bodies need to energy without eating meat. I can't wait to find out.

Last night we had a little get together with four Jesuit volunteers who are all new to Tucson. It's actually the first year the Jesuit volunteer organization has had a Tucson unit so it was fun for Amy and Audra to have more people to invite into the "Volunteer circle" as last year they got together with the Presbyterian unit once and a while. It seems like there will be a large group this year as we will have us five, the four Jesuits, five Presbyterians, and one other group called ACer's which I don't know what it stands for. We have fun acronyms: MVSer's, JVC'ers, YAVer's and ACer's. Don't ask me what they all stand for.

Yesterday me and Amy, with our day off, went to a couple cool places that are a integral part of VS life. First, we went to the food bank community store or something, I don't know the exact name but because Audra works there, we get to shop there and get any food they have out free. It's pretty awesome and most of the time they have good stuff that helps us cook daily. It's not a huge selection so you can never guarantee you'll get something you need but it's a great place to stock our shelves. It's pretty awesome that it's free too and so because we have that which not a lot of other VS houses have, we make it a point to not spend all our food budget so it can go back to MVS and put into other houses funds since places like New York City have a bit of a tougher time getting affordable food. The second place we went was to BICAS, which is Bicycle Inter-Community Art and Salvage. It's this really awesome community bike store that's in the basement of a art studio downtown and it's full of bikes, parts, people and bike art. Amy volunteers there on Sunday during specific open house hours for women and transgenders. I'm definitely going to start going there, probably on Friday, and volunteering while also learning about bikes since that was a main goal of mine for this year. I talked to someone who said just come on down, say you're here to volunteer and do work-trade and I'll learn by watching while also learning on the fly. It seems a little daunting right now to just dive in since I don't have a ton of confidence in my bike mechanic skills but I also really look forward to that form of learning since it's the best and fastest way for me to learn. I can't wait to go in next week and see what it's like.

This weekend is packed full of activities so before I know it's going to be Monday but that's ok because time flies when you're having fun. Today we are having a work day as a house and doing some yard work, and other non-chore related clean up jobs that need to get done to make our house a bit nicer. Then we are going to Dan's house, another Dan an ex-Vser who is throwing a little party for starting school. Then tomorrow it's ultimate frisbee at 8, breakfast and then going back up into the Catalina's for a hike for Kristina's, an ex-Vser who still works at CHRPA, birthday. I'm excited for all the festivities and also look forward to next weekend which is Labor Day, which means no work on Monday which means a four day weekend for us CHRPA folks which means we might go backpacking! We talked about it at work on Thursday and I hope people were serious because I really want to go. We'll just have to wait and see.

Cheers, Daniel

(P.S. thanks for the card Leon, Wanda and Jalisa I got it yesterday and it made me miss you guys and Oregon.)