I’m back! And man is it nice.

turned out to be a pretty long and interesting week. not sure how my thoughts will decode into words depending on my mood. There were definitely positive things but it wasn’t easy or glamorous most of the time.

so we leave last week on Thursday morning – three 15 passenger vans strong – for Celina Oklahoma. Took us something like 12 hours to get there but we kept busy. In fact, I might say it was a party all the way there. We were always playing games or wrestling or something or other. We played this one game where someone started this simple clap pattern and everyone just built on it with claps or beats. It actually turned out sooo good. So we get to the church we’re staying for the night and there is this sweet youth room with music videos playing, two pool tables, foosball, music equipment, and way too much candy and pop. We stayed up late, walked around town, played some poker – it was all round a good night. We leave the following morning at 6 am or something and finally arrive in Beaumont Texas at about 11 or 12.

just in case any of you are lost, we went down to texas to help clean up the disaster from hurricane Ike instead of going on our scheduled week long camp trip to Moab Utah. So basically the 35 of us got assigned to 3 or 4 separate teams each day, then got assigned to a house, then went and cleaned out the house as well as gutting it down to its joints. Cabinets, appliances, toilets, carpets, drywall, everything. Our first house was actually great. We didn’t know it at the time but in hindsight, it was our easiest one. We saw a bunch of gecko’s, tree frogs, cockroaches, and a couple snakes as we were doin demolition. I’m not gunna go into more detail about the houses specifically but I will say that I smelt things I had never smelt before and touched things that were unspeakably disgusting. Imagine several feet of water sitting for weeks and weeks (5 weeks since the hurricane) and just doin havoc to all their stuff. It was humid, maybe worse than we get at home, so we were literally sopping wet all the time and the smells, again (even with masks on) were enough to make me light headed sometimes. I think a lot of us expected worse though. We saw pictures and probably imagined homes that were in splinters or crumbled over and super dramatic stuff like that but really what it looked like was simply every single home was standing but had a 5-10 foot pile of garbage in front of their house. Literally everything had to be thrown out. So it was interesting to understand the perspective finally that for us it almost seemed a little anticlimactic at first cause all the houses were still there, and basically It was just a terrible flood, but when you think about it they all have to completely start over. Its hard to imagine that at all. And its sobering too to understand how materialistic and selfish I am. I get reminded of that daily but I mean, this was bad.

so we stayed at another church while in texas the whole time. They treated us well. We slept on cots (which weren’t so pleasant) but at least we had hot showers. Went to their service on Sunday – ew. We also went a couple times out to this authentic Mexican restaurant that was within walking distance. I’ll get pics up of a bunch of this stuff up sooner or later. another crazy thing about this trip was that whenever we weren’t at church (like were on the jobsite) we always had to eat what were called MRE’s, unless we got lucky and the Red Cross truck came around with warm meals. So basically an MRE stands for Meals Ready to Eat. Its literally what the army eats. So say you get beef stew it’ll come with a pack of beef stew, some crackers n cheese sauce, a cookie, raisons, and maybe one other gross thing. Then you put the hot part of the meal in a special pouch with salt water and it cooks – pretty wild. They are all gross. They don’t taste like much its more just substance. And they have like 1500 caleries, 180 carbs, and whatever else excessive amounts of energy that is impossible to use up. That whole thing was an interesting experience in itself.

also, on Sunday we had the day off after church so Pete organized a little canoe trip. It was in a river that wasn’t too big, and it had pretty sweet sand beaches along side it some places that we stopped and played on for breaks. The one main stop we had we played a bunch of football and Frisbee at first but the things got more aggressive. Me and Jamie (the guy I gave the concussion too and who used to be like a national champ wrestler) went up against a bunch of people in chicken fights…we went undefeated. Must be all the workin out I’ve been doin. After that we played a HUGE game of british bulldog. Also incredible. I finished second or better (of about 20) all three games. There were some minor injuries rest assured. K, so we keep canoeing and my canoe partner happens to be Stephan. If you don’t remember he’s my favorite. Check facebook for a reference. Sooo we decided to be pirates for the day right? Great idea! We put bandana’s on our mouths and made a lot of growling noises and then proceeded to steal the life jackets from every canoe that we could. One canoe got sassy with us and stole a couple from OUR huge pile. So Stephan hops from ours onto theirs but as its beginning to capsize he jumps back to ours and we flip too. After we finally recovered one of the leaders told us that if we get stopped or caught without lifejackets in every canoe it’s a 500 hundred dollar fine soooooo basically we played delivery boys the rest of the time catching up and giving people back their life jackets. It was a sweet day.

I’ll skip the rest of the week up until yesterday when we were about to leave. Nate, one of the dudes here was out at 6am helping load up the trailer and apparently got maimed by some fire ants…interesting and unfortunate. Well, turns out it was far more unfortunate because he found out he was allergic to them. He started rashing and swelling up all over his body so they eventually sent him to the hospital. The other two vans left back to that church in Oklahoma but our van of about 10 dudes stayed back until 3 o clock to wait for nate. Since it was a bit of a weird situation and we wouldn’t have arrived in Oklahoma until 5 in the morning we decided to crash at Eric’s house (another student) who lives in texas. This entire thing turned out to be a MASSIVE blessing in disguise. We had a BBQ, went swimming and hot tubbing, played a lot of video games, played some poker, and camped out on computers until 4 in the morning when we departed. So we had a friggin great night to wind down, and then we slept from like 5 til 2 in the afternoon. And now I feel fantastic and we’re back home in Colorado. We took a shorter way home and got home before the other group, hehe.

so that leads us up until right now! We’ve been doin some intense ab sessions and they keep getting more intense. We’re lookin into weights and splittin some protein products even. Tres bien. Now, we have the weekend off and most of Monday.

please lions please. this is the weekend.