Wow, I think this has been the quickest week yet. I managed to get a good amount of work done each day, mainly working on the Santo project that we had a rough deadline for Friday to compile everything we have on it and submit it to Habitat for Humanity. For three days I had some rather boring, repetitious CAD work, where I drew dimension lines for every house on every block for the entire project. So, I just put on some tunes and went for it. Although it was a bit boring at times, it was also fun to just listen to good music and fly through the project. I also had to format pages for each block, so all in all there were 55 pages to plot, print and have ready for submission by Friday. I got it done, no problem. Outside of the CAD work, I got to do a few elevations and sections in photoshop, make them look nice and pretty, basically showing the houses, trees, vegetation, and people. That was fun, getting more commands down and learning to render better.
Thursday was Roudjina's birthday, the three year old Haitian girl that lives here with her mom, who does the cooking and cleaning here. Nancy collected some money from all of us and got her a pink Cinderella dress, which took her over 15 minutes to open, soaking up the attention. Quite a cute kid...
Friday we had our monthly 'meet and greet' at the office, where we host local people around the area that can present info on either their company or projects. It's hard to believe the first one I attended was just on my second full day here and I was still so fresh. That was over five weeks ago and now that I have gotten to know everyone and feel them all out, it was way more easy going and I felt so much more comfortable. There were beers and hor'dourves served and the presentation dealt with the expenses of building materials before and after the quake, which in many cases of doubled or tripled for no reason outside of because they can. It is really sad, there should be more support in rebuilding as opposed to ripping people off. After the meeting, we got home and I just went to sleep. Was tired from a long but nice week.
As far as working week went, no site visits or leaving the area to comment about Monday through Friday, but yesterday the entire staff went to the Ellie Dubois school site in downtown Port-au-Prince to do some outdoor work, which was so much fun. One of the buildings on the site was demolished a couple weeks ago, and knowing that the new construction has not been completed and school is set to begin tomorrow, we needed to come up with the place for the kids to have class until then. So, we got access to a large tent and we spent the morning into the afternoon assembling it as a group. The tent is about 12' wide by 100' long, but it has been stored in a really humid area so there are patches of mold that needed to be bleached and attended to before pitching it up. I was in charge of chiseling out spots in a concrete slab for rebar picks to hold down the tent, and without wearing my gloves, I blistered up my hands pretty nicely. Nice to just be outside doing some manual labor getting nice and dirty, sweating up a storm. It's just we get so used to being inside and working primarily on the computer, the change of pace is so necessary.
After we finished the tent, we went back to the office and everyone headed down to Muncheez, a cool little pizza/burger joint about a block away. Eric, the team leader here, bought us all dinner (which was initially thought to be lunch), which was really nice of him. We had a few drinks and pizzas, then headed home. One of the girls here, Rickie, had a birthday party later, so after getting home and taking much needed showers and changing do less soaked clothes, we went to that. A friend of hers hosted at her house and pretty much all of us went to socialize for the evening over drinks and snacks. Really nice time. Got home pretty late and slept in this morning, which was great!
I got up and did some much needed laundry (every single shirt I brought with me needed to be washed). After getting that done, I decided to go on a small hike up the hill from the house since I heard there was a pretty cool view from the upper area of the road. After a few minutes, the road narrows to just a walking path and you are then in the countryside, quite a change of pace. Chance (the house dog) decided she wanted to come with me and she kept me company the whole way, really cute. Makes me miss Charger and his companionship.
By the time I got back to the house, I was soaked again and needed another shower, and I then settled in on the couch for the rest of the day (where I am still currently planted 10 hours later!). I found a great website that lets me stream all the football games, so I came up with a cool system of hooking up my computer to the projector and some ipod speakers, and voila! Surround sound football. The internet today was about as flawless as can be, and I find it appalling how this whole wireless internet thing works, quite amazing...
Chargers won, which is nice. Starting 3-1 is a comfort, instead of getting such a slow start as they historically do. Be good if we can knock off Denver next week and be 4-1 going into the bye week. Then I will be home to see them play the Jets on Nicole and my anniversary. Wow, one year...that sure came quick.
Love you all, hope everyone has a nice start to October. Take care.
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