it's like Christmas is over

This past weekend was Beautiful Day weekend. It kinda ran me over like a train. A nice loving compassion volunteer-driven train, but still it came all of a sudden. And then it was over and I was like "what?...oh yeah, that was it."

So much went on that I can't tell everything that happened, but I'll try to tell what I know before the end of this episode of Charlie and Lola that Kid C is watching while I blog.

Kevin and I tag teamed for our small group's project: Daily Fuel (I didn't name it, it's a cheezy term).
The goal is to be nice to those day laborers that hang out at Home Depot or OSH and wait for work.
Kevin helped pack the bag lunches on Friday night and I got up early and helped deliver them, along with coffee and donuts.
I could tell that the guy who was in charge was overwhelmed by the project, but he did a great job and I think we were pretty successful. I wish I had remembered the Spanish word for "evangelical" (because they asked if we were from a Catholic church) but otherwise my Spanish was pretty effective. My high school spanish teacher Ms. Grana should be proud.


If I were them, I'd be like, "um, what?" But they were pretty good sports about it. Even when I made them take two donuts. :)


I told them "look happy!"
You can see the bottled waters for the lunches and the little Starbucks packs for the coffee.

Then I went back to get the family and we went over to an elementary school to see how "my" murals were going.

The school uses 3 big shipping containers, kinda like freight train cars, for storage of who knows what...thousands of pencils? Banned books? Anyway, they were ugly and needed some sprucing.

I came up with one set of designs, which involved large plains of white, and the prinicpal said white plains invite taggers. So I changed it to the current design. And I thought it came out pretty good.


Yours truly. In her Haiti hat.





We penciled out the design last Wednesday, after nightfall and it was a fiasco. We had a gas powered generator running the laptop and the video projector. It was so cold that the metal had condensation on it, so the markers would stop working after a few minutes. But it worked out as you can see.
Two teams of volunteers came and filled in the shapes with the colors I prescribed. I had one volunteer who asked if she could paint the pinecone brown instead. I had to say "no." And an engineer and his daughter that just couldn't get past the fact that the dog was green.

Go team.

I'm out of time, but here's a photo of the EMT Thank You Coolers, that I designed. Aren't they cute?



And I was the marketing "mastermind" behind these "water conservation kits" that was out "green" project. They were distributed to neighborhood homes.