Onions

We had our first service project on Thursday as a team. We went to a food bank in Denver and sorted onions. No, seriously. It was our team plus another one. Okay, now try to stay with me for this next part ... We had five pallets. On each pallet were five stacks. In each stack were five sacks. Each sack consisted of fifty pounds of onions. Our job was to sort all of the onions into four onions per bag. We then re-sacked them with thirty bags per sack. We got there at 10 am, took half an hour for lunch around noon, and then resumed sorting and bagging until 4 pm. It sounds boring, but there was a rhythm to the process. And we spent a lot of the time talking and joking, so it was actually a lot of fun. I thought so. I would do it again; I'm sure it would get mundane after the first few days, but I venture to say that I'd prefer it to a desk job.

That night, I went out with some girls from the Water unit for an ISP. We went to a Metro State basketball game and handed out key chains for the Susan G. Komen foundation. It was simple, but also fun. The key chains were cool. So I've got my first few hours of ISP. I was supposed to have another one last night. Our group (an amalgamation of different units) were supposed to do something similar last night at a University of Denver gymnastics meet. But when we arrived, we found that the person who had all of the materials (pamphlets, key chains), still wasn't there and the other organizers didn't have her phone number. We got there around 5:30 and at about 6 pm, they told us we could head home. So I called the TL who was supposed to pick us up around 8. She came by and took a bunch of the group back to campus to try and make it to the cafeteria and get dinners for everyone before it closed at 7 pm. Unfortunately, they made a wrong turn on the way back. The rest of us were picked up a few minutes later by a TL from the Water unit. He stopped at a taqueria so we could grab dinner. I opted to just eat a sandwich I had back at the dorms; we had already gone out to lunch for Thai that day, so I wasn't really in the mood to buy more food. It was all quite an adventure. I'm most disappointed about not getting to do the ISP, I don't really care about missing dinner.

I'm going to be honest: right now, I'm surprised I'm being at all coherent. I arrived at Mile High around 9:45 and started the process of renewing my Norton (virus protection) subscription. It is still going on. At first, I couldn't even figure out what to do and tech support was being impatient. Normally, I can just click "renew" in the software. That didn't seem to be working (it couldn't find an internet connection ... what??), so I had to go to the website and purchase a download from there. The process was going along and I think I was almost done when my computer just shut down. It turned off, just like that. So that made me feel really anxious. I attempted to restart the process or resume it, but I'm not sure I've even done that. To make matters worse, I haven't really eaten anything all day as I left before breakfast. I was hoping to make it back to campus in time for lunch, but it's 1:15 now so I don't think that will be happening. I'll have to aim for making dinner instead. I'm eating a muffin now because I feel kind of lightheaded. I was attributing it to being so anxious about the whole Norton thing, but I know it's actually because I haven't put anything in my system besides a mocha. Every now and then I'll notice that my hands are shaking. This is just really stressful, and it's all so dumb. I don't want to be without virus protection because I know I'll be using unsecured connections frequently. I think what's really getting to me is the fact that I don't know what's going on and that makes me feel out of control. I can't just go to my dad and say, "Take a look at this." What's really messed up is that this whole process is bothering me so much, but I'm not phased by the prospect of Wildfire.

Okay, I think I'm going to head back to campus. I don't think I'm getting anywhere with the Norton thing. I'm going to call them and get some guidance from tech support. Hopefully, that will help.