Nebraska Nebraska.

We have been plugging away working with habitat. Working in the warehouses on Tuesday and Wednesdays, sing yard work for another supervisor and working at the houses the rest of the week. We are getting really close to finishing our part with these two houses and will soon be working on more houses building for the framing frenzy coming up. 

We had some excitement at one of the warehouses one day. We started working moving things around and our supervisor went upstairs with a couple teammates. They come down and he tells us I evacuate immediately because he think there are squatters there because they found some homemade booby traps.  The cops come and search the whole building. One cop even brought in his assault rifle... After several hours, they didn't find anyone and let us back in to work again. 

This weekend we get a long weekend so lex and I are enjoying ourselves by relaxing. But unfortunately I got poison ivy all over my face and it has spread all over my body so relaxing is kinda difficult. We spent yesterday morning in the ER getting some steroids. :/ Hopefully it will clear up soon and I can enjoy the rest of our weekend. 

Some fun at an art studio. 

Omaha Nebraska

So we have been in Omaha Nebraska for a week now and I am loving working for habitat for humanity. Our first work day consisted of a scavenger hunt all around omaha for us to get familiar with the city but in reality it just got me really confused. :) Habitat is such a great organization and I love seeing the work that we are completing. We are working on two houses right next to each other. We started with just the basement foundation/walls and in just a couple days have put up all the floor trusses and are working on the walls in the basement.  This takes a little longer because we have to make the walls ourselves. For the main level, habitat has this awesome program where they get pre made walls shipped there so by the time we are all ready to put up the walls, all we have to do is follow the chart and nail the walls into the right spot. I helped with this on another house and we got all the walls up within a couple hours. It was pretty awesome! 

Some other work we have done since we got here is demolished 120 desks with only our feet and hammers. It's a pretty awesome feeling when you can kick a desk apart with your feet. Also made me wonder how sturdy things really are if I can demolish it. :/ We have also unloaded several dump trailers and organized the whole warehouse. Pretty amazing. 

I am loving being engaged. It's amazing how fast news travels and how fast people find out the news but it just gets me more and more exciting! I'm just ready to go home and start planning official things for the wedding. It's really hard to plan something so big when I am so far away... Couple more months! 

We have been busy doing ISPs every day off we have. It's really exhausting how much we work and I look forward to just a chill day with nothing to do. 

It's off to bed for me, working with a bunch of volunteers tomorrow. Hopefully the whole house walls will be put up!!

Lex in Nebraska and me in Iowa!

On our scavenger hunt. 

Long time due.

Ok so I first apologize for not updating this in forever. Time just gets away from me here and it's crazy busy sometimes. 

This project has been a short one consisting of only 3 weeks at Taltree arboretum and gardens in valparaiso, IN. Our work has consisted if trail maintence, building of a stage, working with a kids camp, spreading a lot of wood chips, and removing invasive species/weeding. A lot of their idea of removing invasive species is, in my opinion just weeding. One of the many fun parts of this project is getting to drive around the golf carts and gators they have for us to drive to our work sites. We have been sleeping in tents the past 3 weeks and I have been loving it every minute! This place is beautiful and is the best project we have had so far. We don't want to leave. 

On our next round we will be heading to Omaha, Nebraska to be working with Habitat for Humanity. This will be the biggest city we will have worked in so hopefully we will be able to find a lot to do. We will be living in a 4 bedroom house and will be able to cook for ourselves. 

This round we have been really close to Chicago and Lex and I took a personal day on Tuesday to tour Chicago. We went and saw the bean, the Shedd Aquarium, and a Cubs game. During the 5th inning of the game, I was told by Lex to watch the score board. On the board were the words, Alyse, will you marry me! :) Sooooo now I'm engaged!!!! :) And now the planning begins! 

Vacation!!

This past week when we came back from Iowa we made a couple pit stops.  We stopped to see the worlds largest buffalo. Americorps people must love seeing the worlds largest things because it seems I be a popular thing in most groups. There was a little town where the biggest buffalo was so we spent some time there exploring. We also stopped to seethe wood chipper from the movie Fargo in Fargo, North Dakota. We stopped in Minneapolis for the night and then headed back to Iowa. 

After we got back to Iowa, we had a couple days of trainings and then it was vacation time!! Lex and I went to his parents house in NorthCarolina for the week. We spent out time hanging out with his whole entire family. Extended and all. It was such a good break from the day to day working and living with the same people. In North Carolina, we went white water rafting, camping for one night in the rain, walked around his town quite a bit and hung out with his family the rest of the time. 

Now it's back to Iowa. We have training for a week and then we will be heading to Valparasio Indiana doing more invasive species removal. We will be working at the Tall Tree Arboretum for about 3 weeks. I'm kinda bummed that its only going to be 3 weeks. We are really close to Chicago and really close to Lake Michigan as well. I'll see if the feeling is the same after I do all the work! :) 

At the worlds largest buffalo! 

Playing around. Lex was having some trouble. 

Last week in minot.

To wrap up our last week, we finished the OSB on the one house and wrapped the house as well. It was such an accomplishment for us. I really enjoy seeing our work progress! We also worked on a couple other houses cleaning up debris and prepping for other groups of volunteers to do some demo and prep for sanitizing. Im so happy we didn't have to sanitize for our last week. Yesterday we went out to the recovery warehouse where oak 3, another Americorps team has been working. We went for a cookout but got ropes into helping them work. We ending up wrapping up siding and the making 2 deliveries. We split the teams up to so the deliveries and I went with the drywall. We delivered probably 50 sheets of 12 foot drywall to one house. It was ridiculous! 

Our last weekend was spent by doing a community day with the organization stars of hope. We blew up i dot know how many balloons to be released as resemblance of when the flood occurred two years ago. We also painted 1500 stars that will be sent east for hurricane sandy relief. The stars just give the community some hope to move on. 

We are currently on the road to head back to Iowa. We are stopping in Minneapolis for the night. Friday we have our debrief of this project and then Saturday I am off to North Carolina for vacation!! Ahhhhhh! So excited for a break! I'll post pictures of my adventures! :)

The latest team photo. 

Some of my teammates holding some balloons to be passed out. 

We found work!

This week was a pretty slow one. We finally found work for us to be done and have been working on one house this entire week. We have been taking down the exterior board, buffalo board/builtrite, and have been replacing it with OSB/plywood. This has taken us the whole week and we are still not done. The weather has given us challenges again. We had to stop working for a half a day because it was thundering and lighting. Our site supervisor didn't think it was a good idea to be working on extension ladders in a storm. 

It sounds like this week, to wrap up our stay here, we will be finishing the OSB on the house and then back to preping and sanitizing a few other houses. Not sure how far we will get but at least we will have steady work for us to complete. 

Yesterday, Saturday, some of us from both teams took a trip to the international peace gardens. It borders the US and Canada so we were in Canada for a couple hours! :) the peace garden reminded me of Fredrick Meyer gardens but a little smaller. Unfortunately they just planted the flowers so there wasnt much color around. 

Today we are doing an ISP in preparation for our community day coming up. We will be working with stars of hope (there is a website for more info). For the ISP we will be pairing stars and putting them up around town. This organization was created for towns that have experienced natural disaster. They put the stars around to remind everyone that they are together and are all in need. 

The US/ Canada border. (Above)

A credit card pay phone. 

A piece of the World Trade Center. 

Cacti

These weren't at the peace gardens but we saw them on our way there. Above is a turtle made out of 2,000 tire rims and below is the very much debated geographic center of North America. 

Slowing down

This past week has definitely been a challenging one. Break is just around the corner and I think people are getting a little antsy and stir crazy. The village we are at can be extremely boring at times and the work we complete can be just as tiring. 

We finished up the sanitizing list last week with the worst houses. One was an extremely small home with insulation everywhere. Not the long yellow or pink strips but the fluffy little lint balls of insulation. Even though we cleaned the house before getting it wet, little lint balls would fly all over from the power washer and stick to our coats. And the basement of that house was full of a huge dirt mound in order to aborbs some of the water from the flood. By the end of the day we looked like we were tarred and feathered. 

The next house we worked on was a house that had been sprayed several times already but still needed to be sanitized. But we couldn't do our normal routine of using the power washer because it already had all the electrical wiring installed. So we had to spray the house with water using the pump sprayers, hand scrub all the walls and then sanitize with the pump sprayers. This was especially frustrating for me because I was usually one of the only people to be hand scrubbing. I guess not many people can say they have hand scrubbed the framing of a whole house. 

We have bee doing more fun activities around Minot which is such a nice change of pace and is fun to see the town. We went to the train museum, air museum, and the Scandinavian park to watch a movie. This weekend we are going to go to the International Peace Gardens up by Canada. 

We ended the week with a overnight ISP (volunteer opportunity). We went to the Minot University and worked for the Relay for Life event. We basically moved tables and chairs and walked around. Not much to do but it was a nice change of pace from our rough week. 

Currently, my team and I are waiting to be told what work we can do. We are wasting time doing paper work and waiting for people to get trailers for us to load up debris. We work too fast for our sponsor they are running out of work for us to do. Which in the long run is a blessing because that means we are getting people back into their homes and that Hope Village will soon I longer be needed.  Not sure what the rest of our time here will be spent doing but I'm sure it will be a slow last couple of weeks. 

At the air museum. (Above)

At the Scandinavian park. Above and below. 

The dump trailer I organized all by myself. Thanks dad for teaching me to be tedious and to have such good organization! :)