Still around?

Yup. Busy. Yup. Synopsis:

FRIDAY:

Stayed home from work. Took drugs for my neck. Slept. I believe Beast was home for part of the day. Don't remember.

SATURDAY:

Our annual spring mission trip to the Big City to the West. Beast rewired a basement room with three or four others. I grouted about 3/4 of a bathroom and laid tile in a short, 8-food hallway. We actually only cemented half the hall. I worked with five or six others who were putting in a closet and drywalling a porch and (different) closet. All of us were in a halfway house where Beast has worked before (men just out of prison) in a neighborhood "in transition." Not sure which way the transition is going. There is a crack distribution house at the end of the block one way, hookers a couple of houses away, and families in three houses across the street. Links to previous mission trips.

By the time we left--10 hours after arriving--my knees and back were shot, and Beast's nose was cut by flying metal. He nearly injured his eye. And they have interesting toys in the office where he was working; interesting in a "Christian" office but necessary for their counseling of sex workers. Sparky has no idea what we were giggling at, and I told Beast he can explain.

My neck/shoulder obviously had improved, but I basically replaced that agony with the pain left from kneeling on ceramic tile for 8 hours. I will not be converting to Catholicism or any other religion requiring kneeling.

SUNDAY:

I went in to work at 11 to try to get a little caught up on last week's pile o' shit. It was my Sunday to work anyway, so that covered 1-4 on a beautiful day where we who were forced to be inside kept saying, "Why are all these people HERE??"

I came home, helped (a little) with kitchen cleanup. Beast has finished painting, so we can move all the stuff on the island back to where it belongs. I made the last DbD meal, and then spent the evening looking for typos in our library catalog and checking for Dewey Errors. I know what this means. If you don't, trust me when I say it's a clear sign that I'm beyond anal.

TODAY:

Another eye appointment; I passed. Grocery shopping. Then a stop at DbD to make 9 meals. It took me bloody forever (although I guess the new employee said to the supervisor, "She moves FAST!"), and by the time I got in the car with everything I wasn't sure I'd be able to get out of the car when I got home! My feet are killing me, still from crawling around hard floors on Saturday.

Once Sparky gets home, he and I will head to the shoe store to buy him some sandals...ones that aren't plastic this year! We'll probably also pick up some shorts for him. And I'll look at curtains for the kitchen and dining room windows. Maybe an office chair for me: the hydraulics on mine blew out last week. Thanks a bunch, Sparky. ahem

Tonight, I'm really hoping I can get the kitchen floor wet-mopped--there's still an awful lot of drywall dust on the floor--and talk to Amy about this class we're teaching in two days!

Howsomever, right now, while Sparky is still at school for another hour, I'm going to go lie down and try to loosen up my back a bit.

---

Urban Word:

acoustic shave: the act of shaving with razor; not an electric shave

The thought of anything but an acoustic shave on my pits is painful in the extreme! How does Norelco make ANY money?

Good deed

They can be fun AND educational. If you go play with words at Free Rice, you are donating food for every right answer to the UN World Food Program. It took me less than 10 minutes to donate 300 grains of rice. I think that's probably lunch for someone...hell, that's probably the entire day's food for someone!

Anyway. Go. Learn. Do something for someone else. I'm off to do just that right now.

(found by the hat)

Summation (Part 2)

In response to a really stoo-pud (IMNSHO) ignorant and self-centered comment on someone else's blog, I wrote this comment. It's a decent summation of where I was, both physically and metaphorically, during last week's trip:

I live in an area that is, on the surface at least, predominantly white, middle-class semi-rural/pseudo bedroom-community-suburb.

25% of the students in my son's school are Hispanic. They are nearly invisible in the community EXCEPT in the Police Blotter, the headlines, and "gangs." [White kids travel in "groups;" Hispanic kids travel in "gangs."] A lot of them come to my library to study, use the computers...and yeah, goof off. Sure, there are a lot of morons. There are a lot of non-Hispanic morons, too.

OK, so I'm a little fragmented tonight because I just spent a week serving on mission trip with 60 teenagers, teaching them not to become morons. I hope. Part of our group ate in two different urban soup kitchens, once for dinner Wednesday, once for lunch on Thursday. I learned two words in Ojibway and found out some fascinating info about ... stuff from a well-spoken woman with a great deal of pride in her heritage. We also met a man who called the lot of us out, asking if we were "yuppies" on vacation, sight-seeing among the homeless as a lark. He had every right, and in spite of that harsh-sounding introduction, he affirmed what the teens were doing, going to far as to tell one that he could tell she "got it" because he could see it in her eyes.

I met a woman whose adult son was beaten up last January with a sewer pipe and after spending 8 hours crawling home, has bankrupted his family with the medical bills: she was at the soup kitchen waiting for a "handout" for the necessities for this month. She could not have been more upbeat in spite of this. So was another woman who was waiting for the first time ever in a soup kitchen...at age 50. Mortified? Yes, but very cheerful in spite of that. I saw grandmas with their grandchildren, telling them to "eat up those vegetables!" I saw a blind man carrying all his earthly belongings in a backpack.

Part of our mission was with children. We met a crew of 9 children in one family; there is another on the way. We're pretty sure one of the kids in that family is diabetic, untreated. They were, actually, the best-behaved, most well-spoken children of the week. We met ten-year-olds who can do outstanding gymnastics (no expensive equipment required to jump around, you know), one of whom is completely deaf in one ear--they all have smiles that could rock your life and scars on their bodies and minds that could break your heart. I met a woman who has single-handedly raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the poor in her town, and washes the feet of vagrants on a daily basis. [I'd add that she is currently raising money for a children's home/orphanage that will be arranged in households rather than 'wards' and will also have its own school, park, rec center, etc. Let me know if you're interested and I'll tell you where you can find out more.]

One of the other groups talked to a woman who was homeless because when she got leukemia she lost her job because she couldn't work, which meant she lost her insurance, and within months, after selling her possessions piecemeal to pay for rent was evicted and moved into the Salvation Army shelter. [whew--Can you say vicious circle?] She was--at the time of her diagnosis--a practicing pharmacist and just about to go to Julliard on a full scholarship.

Any guesses how many of these people were black/white/Hispanic? Does it matter? They are all people. Would you want to sit in an emergency room with your feverish-for-the-fifth-straight-day child and be ignored for hours, whether or not you have insurance or speak English? Would it make it more fun to know the whole waiting room was looking down its collective nose at you because you don't belong? What, exactly, would you do for a seriously ill family member, whatever your economic status??

Part of the deal with being poor in this country is having to face people who, consciously or not, think poverty is a character flaw.

Poverty is a circumstance, NOT part of your personality. Most of the people who are poor in this country remain poor because of the stigma of poverty. It's HARD being poor in ways that people who have never been destitute can never understand. I certainly can't, not fully. For that failing I am profoundly grateful and also profoundly aware that there, but for the grace of God, go I.

Yes, I was a little incensed, and a pretty tired, too.