I save tadpoles.

Goodness, I have some catching up to do. Let's see ...

Well, the Air Force Academy left on Sunday morning, I believe. No ASBs arrived that night, so we're pretty sure that was the last group for the rest of the time that we're staying in Port Arthur. Things have been a little more lax as a result, heh. Lights don't go out right at 11 pm, things are a little less organized than normal (re: messy), and some of Wolf 4 are now sleeping in our room because it's air conditioned (or, the air condition is working).

Things on the work site have been going well. Wolf 4 has been at a different site all week. We all miss working with them, but at the same time we now have more work to do because it's just our team of just ten people. This past week, we finished up the houses in Sabine Pass. Their dedication ceremonies for the homeowners are today. I was going to go but I need to do grocery shopping.

My 23rd birthday was on Tuesday. I got to wear our site supervisor's Panama hat for the day (every day, someone different gets to wear the hat). At lunch, I got a surprise: a slice of carrot cake from the convenience store down the street. So good! After work, everyone got cleaned up and we went out to dinner as my gift. We went to a Mexican restaurant near the Y. It was so good! Almost everything was fried, but damn. I didn't realize how much I missed Mexican food. It was a staple of my diet for three years because I worked at Tortillas. I had it at least twice a week because of my shift schedule. But yeah, it was delish. And my team got the servers to sing Happy Birthday, even though I specifically told Ervin that I hate it when people do that to me. Oh well, it was still a lot of fun. When we got back to the Y, we were hanging out for a while. I was going to call it a night but then a big group went bowling, so I joined in. It really was the greatest birthday. I ordinarily don't celebrate my birthday or make a very big deal about it. But it was a lot of fun to just spend time with my team.

We went to a new work site on Wednesday; it's actually in Port Arthur, so it's a quick drive and I get to sleep in an extra 15 minutes in the morning. As I said, it's nice to have fewer people because there is more to do. But with this new work site, everything actually has to be redone. Nikki and I pulled up a bunch of baseboard trim because they weren't lined up. Our site supervisor, Rory, has a few people working with him specifically on rehanging the kitchen cabinets, because they were done wrong too. It's a little frustrating, because it makes more work for us when we could be using our time to make more progress. Instead, we have to fix contractors' mistakes all along the way. Sometimes I wish Habitat would just have us do all of the work instead of contracting out for some of it -- at least we would make sure it's done well. You just get the impression sometimes that they don't care about the quality of their work because it's a Habitat house.

Ervin's birthday was yesterday, so we had a cook out for him. Yum yum.

Yesterday, a bunch of us did some ISP work at a Buddhist temple here in Port Arthur. It was the best ISP ever! It was really the most fun I've ever had and so rewarding. We spent the day dismantling a big lily/lotus pond that they had in one of their gardens. We had to drain the pond, remove all of the invasive weeds, and resubmerge the lilies and lotus pots into other tubs of water. We also had a tadpole/frog rescue operation going on the entire time since so many of them live in the ponds. That was especially fun. Between playing with tools, getting muddy and catching tadpoles, AmeriCorps has pretty much restored my childhood. I'm seven years old again. Hee. But yeah. It really was the most amazing experience, even just being there. We're gonna go back on the Saturdays that remain before we go back to Denver.

I feel like there's more I have to say but I can't think of anything. I'm going to do kitchen inventory before I go grocery shopping, so I'll run over the past week in my head to figure out if I forgot anything.