Turkey day

I hope everyone had a fantastic turkey day, it has been quite hectic since I have returned from my turkey day break, I literally got back and packed up my entire room and packed for Bay St. Louis, MS. We are currently on our adventure down there, this is my first time haveing interent, we are in San Antonia and have one more stop in Houston before we arrive at our final destination. There will be a blog entry all about the travels down some time later, but for now I will simply report on thanksgiving.

For those of you who do not know I went to Mr. Dave Hall's apartment in LA for Thanksgiving. We made quite the amazing feast with more food than anyone could every expect. Everything was delicious and we had great bottles of wine to compliment the food which was nice, seeing as on base we are not allowed to drink alcohol with our meals. We went to Rodeo drive, hiked to the Hollywood sign, went to downtown Hollywood and saw the hand prints (which were not exciting at all), we saw a nice view of the city all lit up and had some fun at one of dave's favorite bars. We ended our thanksgivings in Santa Barbara. It was gorgeous! It's water and mountains everywhere...i absolutely loved it and never wanted to leave. It was a great way to end Turkey day. So in a nut shell that was my thanksgiving break...simply fabulous thanks to the amazing host Dave Hall and beautiful sites.

Now I have to see what San Antonio has to offer us! Have a fantastic evening people.

photos posted

enjoy!











That is me dirty, at Camp Mendocino


Follow link to pictures!

http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=455231195833645007/l=332666505/g=106539251/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

Answer to your questions

are there rebels in the group?
yes i guess, not too bad...no one on my team has gotten in trouble. It depends how you define rebels, I think all of us are a little rebellious...we are going against the typical norm of what society deems we should be doing right now...

are people obeying the rules?
not really...kind of. people are conoodiling and drinking underage. but this is a public blog...so that is as far as this goes.

how do you wake up at 5 AM?
with the alarm on my cell phone.

Do you have a 6 pack?
I'm working on a mini-keg.

Mendocino - Red Wood Forest and life

Hello people,

I apologize for being so lazy and not writing for awhile. I honestly do not have much of an excuse, although life has been a little busy, I have been doing a lot of laying around. So basically, I just suck at life.

Last Tuesday - Thursday we went on a little trip to Camp Mendocino a camp for the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco. The trip was basically a "mini spike." It was practice for living in sub standard places and living with your team. Although many people seemed to enjoy this trip, to me it was just like being at a cold, wet, camp with very little to do. As usual we had quite a bit of downtime with very little to do. However, when we were working, we had a great time. We spent our one main work day doing a ropes course with the team and then clearing brush from a foresty area to prevent forest fires. If I had a picture of what I looked like by the end I would post it, because I was dirty from head to toe...disgusting, covered in dirt and really sweaty. It was a really good day, we got a lot accomplished. The ropes course was also amazing, we were really able to connect more as a team and were able to work on some of our team weaknesses. Perhaps the best day was watching my teammates overcome their fears on the high ropes course.

So that's basically Mendocino in a nut shell. I will gladly answer more questions about it if you'd like...but really there wasn't that much more there. Oh, the redwood trees...freakin awesome! They were huge and so different than any trees I have ever seen before. I will be in LA tomorrow, so I will work on putting all my pictures online for all to see!


So besides that, there hasn't been that much going on. I am getting really excited about it! We leave in 6 days for the gulf, stopping in CA, NM, San Antonio,TX, and Baton Rouge, LA! We had another baseline today...where were saw where we were at in terms of physical fitness, I improved my running time by about 1 1/2 minutes! woo. umm...tomorrow we get inducted and then its thanksgiving break! I'm very excited to see LA!


sorry this is so all over the place, I'm in between meetings and have quite a bit to do...must begin packing! hooray.

Service Project Numero Dos

Hello all! I have some good news, I have found a quick internet connection which means more pictures on the blog and I will be uploading my photos to my snapfish account and will have give you all that link. Don’t get yourselves all excited…it may take a few days…I am lazy and a busy girl.

Yesterday we had our second service project. We spent 8 hours at the boys and girls club. I cannot even begin to explain to you all how shocked I was with this place. It was a 5 star boys and girls club. It is huge, a nice building, big cafeteria, good gym, large game room, library, teen room, computer room, art room, and rooms for each age group. It also has its own soccer field…but no playground L. I’m sure you can all guess that that bothered me a bit…but oh well, they have so much more than any boys and girls club I have ever seen.

We spent the first half of our day doing maintenancey stuff around for them, however, I don’t think they knew how awesome the Blue Anacondas (formerly known as Blue 3) are. We finished up that stuff fairly quickly and had some downtime before the kiddies arrived. So, we ate our lunch and then played games! When the kids arrived we did power hour with them (homework time) and then played with them. It was a tiring day for sure, but also very fun. As many of you know, working at the boys and girls club is always a good time. The kids love having you around and don’t want you to leave.

The highlight of my day: I learned how to play bumper pool, a 7 year old was my fantastic teacher and kicked my butt just about every time (I won once).
Since that is all I have to say I thought I would throw another little part in to this entry. I’m sure many of you are interested in what a normal day in the life of Emily is right now.
We are still in training and will be until we get inducted on Nov. 20 or 21. So our day goes like this:
5:30 AM PT
6:30 – 7:45 AM Breakfast
8:00-8:30 AM Check-in (we go with another group and have announcements basically)
8:30-12:00PM Trainings (trainings are stuff like tools, redcross, healthy lifestyles, conflict resolution, projects, etc.).
12:00-1:00 PM LUNCH! J
1:00-4:30/5 PM more trainings
Then we are free for the rest of the night…we take turns w/ 3 other teams making dinner…which is around 6 or 6:30. Thursday is our night this week, we are making chicken, veggie, pesto tortellini.

Also the trainings are not exactly that entertaining so we tend to write stories, draw pictures, and play hangman. Goodtimes.

For those of you who are just dying to know something that I have yet to write about, let me know. I will write about it next time.
Woooo goodbye

Service Project and Sonoma/ Napa Valley

So for the most part the week was uneventful. Same old stuff. PT each morning at 5:30 then classes till 4:30. It works out to be a pretty long day. Normally it is then naptime afterwards and then dinner around 6 and cards or TV afterwards. However, on Friday afternoon we were finally told our first project! We had to wait all day long to find out where we were going and what we were doing…deal with PT, sit through a 4 hour class on emotional intelligence, then run around downtown Sacramento doing a scavenger hunt…but when we were finished at 4:30 we were told we are spending the next 2 months in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi!!! Thank god I learned how to spell that in 5th grade.

Ok so here is what I know about my project so far. We are doing interior house work, cabinets, plumbing, molding, etc. Very exciting. We will be living in bunk houses with wireless internet, 12 common bathrooms and showers. All of our meals are provided for us, and we are right on the water. Water means I get to go sea kayaking! Which is something I’ve really wanted to do for awhile now…so that’s really exciting for me. Bay St. Louis is apparently a very small town, about 2,000 people. It is an artsy town with a lot of coffee shops and galleries. The people there are very welcoming and are likely to invite us into their homes for dinners and what not…we are an hour from New Orleans, less than 25 miles from Biloxi, MI, and about an hour to Mobile, Al! The other exciting thing is that we get weekends off! We are working a normal work week, which leaves a lot of time for exploration! That is about all I know about the project and area so far…

Ok and now for the weekend adventures…Friday night 4 of my friends and I made plans to spend the night outside of Napa Valley and spend Saturday exploring it. So, we took a cab to the airport where our rental car is. Being the dummies/ cheap poor children that we are we decided to go without the care insurance on the car…two of our drivers have insurance so no big deal. We walked out to our car and had a lovely white Pontiac Grand Prix. It was actually quite roomy and we had a nice 1 hr drive to Napa Valley. Now on our way to the hotel we were discussing what they hotel would be like…it’s called the Deluxe Inn and it was very inexpensive. So we are following the directions and all of sudden one of the guys starts shrieking…there is our hotel the Deluxe Inn, it is basically on top of a highway in what is similar to a Spanish Harlem. Basically we were checking into a murder hotel. We checked in, went and got our booze, and then went to the room…there were stains on the walls in the hallway and the doors were a mess. However, the room was large and had a porch, pretty nice...no alarm clock, no bible, and no hotel information, but beds and a lot of space…we were good. We played card games all night and had a fantastic time. I even sang rent…whohoo. We woke up the next morning to find nasty, brown stains all over the box spring, lovely. Now began our visit to Sonoma.
We visited three winery’s/vineyards. Two were in Sonoma and were very enjoyable. We asked a lot of questions about wine and learned quite a bit. There were Alpaca’s at the first place we went to and the second place we had a special tour in the barrel room…we also received our tasting for free. We found a fantastic deli for lunch and then wandered around in the little town of Sonoma. There were celebrations for the Day of the Dead along with galleries, wine stores, book stores, and much more. We finished our day at a Napa winery where we had a bubbly brut rose wine, looking out over the vines and ponds. It was really beautiful and extremely relaxing to get off campus and really just take our time enjoying another time.

That’s the end. I came home and was supposed to go out to the bar and fell asleep instead.