Novels, Honeymoons, and Anniversaries

This statement can be taken in a myriad of ways, and I intend it to be understood in all of them: the honeymoon period of JVC is over.  

I find that I am settled in to my new life, and feel at home in Mercy House and the Wintonia.  My trip to California was mind-boggling in that sense: I was overjoyed to be back home in California, surrounded by my loving family and friends, and yet I was also quite happy to be back "home" when I stepped off the plane in Seattle - or at the very least, back with all of my things, my housemates, and of the day-to-day I have created here.  It is a weird thing.

In the other sense, the honeymoon period is over in that the fresh newness of everything is beginning to wear off. Like any person in a long-term relationship knows, this is the part where the rubber meets the road, and where you discover if you are truly in love, or simply caught up in infatuation.  Every day is a reevaluation and a refocusing - why am I here? what do I want out of this experience? how am I being intentional about ensuring that happens? how am I allowing for space to be surprised? how am I challenging myself? what is life-giving and what is life-draining?  All of these questions continue to simmer through my consciousness.  My retreat last weekend was focused on "Right Relationship", and helped me to answer some of these questions and, like those types of things always do, created new ones.  

All in all, I feel like I'm on a good track.  The thing about picking up everything you know and transplanting yourself to an entirely new state, with a new job, new friends, and new home is that you're forced to examine what really matters.  What makes me happy and brings me joy? What do I need in order to unwind?  How well do I function when I don't actually have any friends around?  How much do I truly care about dirty dishes in the sink? (Answers: Creative communities, my guitar, not so well, and, yeahhhh not much.)  It's this very strange sensation of being placed with all of these new experiences all at once.  Some days I feel like I'm on top of it all, and others I feel like I'm being swallowed by the Seattle rain.  You never know.

In other news, I am again working on a novel for National Novel Writing Month.  I hit 20,000 words last night, which is extremely exciting.  I think this is my best work yet, and I'm pretty excited about it - but if I'm not blogging much, that's why. Most of my energy is spent churning out words so that I'll reach 50,000 by the 30th at midnight - eek! I'm pretty proud of myself though.  This one might have something to it.

Finally, I wanted to share photos from the Wintonia Anniversary Dinner from last Thursday.  It was her 102th birthday since being built - woohoo! The Wintonia building has quite a history, and has spent time as a hotel, a monastery, and now, low-income housing.  There is a traditionally a dinner party thrown by the JV to celebrate - so I had a blast getting everything together! The theme was "Under The Sea".

All aboard! The living room / lobby of the Wintonia.  This is where we handed out resident awards and have appetizers.  The residents helped us by preparing their favorite dish to share with the building.
 I hung up blue and white streamers with green ones for seaweed, and (unseen) printed out a bunch of pictures of excursions and made a photo collage for everyone to look at.
The entrance to the dining room hallway is behind me!

The hallway to the  dining room!
I also painted the boat of the S.S. Wintonia and attached it to a piece of cardboard so that people could take pictures of themselves riding in the boat.  The sail is attached to a broomstick.
People had a great time taking photos of themselves!

The hallway leading into the dining room.  I painted a yellow submarine.  Everyone loves a good Beatles reference :)

A little blurry - the other side of the hallway! The other staff helped me put up fish and cut out bubbles.

The dining room - doesn't it look nice with the green paint?
More streamers, and I found blue posterboard that had been cut into waves for the walls.

The residents sat down at the tables, and the staff served them the food.  It's a nice experience for them to feel like they're in a restaurant!
I made the centerpieces out of mason jars I found in the basement.  I wrapped them in blue tissue paper and ribbon, and put candles in them.  They glowed a really pretty blue!
We also cut out underwater creatures and hung them from the ceilings for an 'underewater' effect.

The dining room looks down on Pike Street - the trees outside are turning colors and look great!
We also got seashells to place along the middle of the tables.  Some residents took some home as souvenirs.

 

All in all - a very fun experience! My years as a hall-decorating Pres girl and a Kappa Kappa Gamma helped me here.  

Love,

K

A Day In The Life: Pumpkin Edition

As everyone knows, I love my job.  It has its ups and downs for sure, but I always know that everyday I walk into work I am going to be greeted by some zany, loveable people who truly enjoy having me there.  I just don't stop smiling!  They've taken to calling me the Colgate Girl.

Today I got into work around 9:15, which was actually pretty early for me.  Most people are still asleep, so this place doesn't really pick up until about 3 in the afternoon! It gives me the chance to work in my office without feeling like I'm missing out on talking to people, though, so I like coming in that early sometimes.  Besides, sometimes a girl has got to get her paperwork done!

Today was also our excursion to the pumpkin patch, which was just a blast! We left here around 11:00 with a full car of people - my coworker came with me, and then we had 5 residents, which was a great number. It was about an hour drive to the pumpkin patch, but it was so beautiful that nobody really seemed to mind.  The Wintonia van has all sorts of quirks, and today it decided that we weren't going to listen to the radio or have working blinkers or windshield-wipers, so I was happy it wasn't raining or dark or anything!  We had some good laughs and conversations in the car ride over, though, so it all turned out alright.

Back country Washington sure is pretty. I can never get used to the wildness of it all, and now, the leaves are changing, so the feeling of stepping into a storybook has doubled.  Charming cottages are tucked away in these back woods between the falling leaves.  It was quite a treat.  The farm we visited was beautiful as well.

Fall City Farms - the owners donated all of the pumpkins, and were just the sweetest older couple!

There were a lot of kids and families! I think it was nice for the residents to be around kids - a lot of them miss their own children, and sometimes they enjoy the youthful laughs.

The couple who owned the farm have had a history of donating pumpkins to the Wintonia, which is incredibly kind.  Since John* (name changed, of course) passed away two weeks ago, people have been pretty sad around these parts.  I've seen a lot of tears.  I think it was good for them to get out of the house and walk around in the fresh air! One of the guys on our trip even grew up on a farm, and he enjoyed hauling around the pumpkin wheelbarrows and telling us all about life on the farm growing up.  I always love when people tell stories about growing up - it is one of my favorite parts of going on trips.  A personal favorite story was his interaction with a particularly ferocious rooster!

One section of the pumpkin patch!

Feeding the cow. He loved the carrots!

We spent a long time picking out the PERFECT pumpkins.  We are going to carve them next Monday when we decorate for Halloween.  We are even going to roast all of the seeds so that we can munch on them in the week before Halloween.  This will go with all of our decorations, including a giant blow-up spider!  We got approximately 4,000 pumpkins, so we will have a lot of seeds.  (Okay, okay, exaggeration, but we got a ton of huge pumpkins! We got a little carried away in our quest for the perfect pumpkin.)

Again, I wish that I could post pictures of my residents, but for confidentiality reasons I can't! I promise this isn't the Kandace-show - one of my residents follows me around with a camera and loves to take pictures! Here's a couple so you can get the vibe.

Perfect pumpkin quest - complete!

So much autumnal joy.

Look! A house of pumpkins!

We played in the fields for a while, and ran around a whole field of sunflowers while chasing birds.  A couple of people picked out some seeds to roast or plant.  I would love to gift the Wintonia with a whole crop of sunflowers! (It is my favorite flower, you know.)  There was even a hay-bale maze.  Of course, it was made for small children to run through, but did that stop us? Oh, no! We ran all throughout the hay-bale maze, laughing at scarecrows and taking silly photos.  This all culminated in a giant hay fight, during which I was covered head-to-toe with straw, hay, mud and everything else! (I am still a bit itchy!) We were laughing so hard though, I didn't even mind being dirty.  

Covered in dirt and mud - thanks for the boots, Laura!

Dirty, tired and hungry, we headed back to the van...but nobody could stop smiling and saying thanks for letting them come.  We loaded up all of pumpkins and turned towards home!  (It is so nice for the residents to even be able to say that little phrase: "heading HOME". After so many years on the streets, they don't take it for granted.)  

The rest of the day consisted of a staff meeting, e-mail answering, sign-making, and bulletin-board updating... just all in a day's work!  Tonight we are having a dessert night at our house with our support people and some former JVs.  Busy, busy!  

Keep smiling all.  The world is a beautiful place!

Love,

K

I Love Bowling!

I went bowling on Tuesday with the Wintonia residents - I wish I could post all the pictures, they are so cute!  Here's one of me looking crazed - one of the residents has a digital camera and follows me around like a personal photographer.  He's quite the character.  He always burns me the pictures on a disk as soon as we get back from an excursion, so I'm acquiring quite the collection!  It's very sweet.

Gotta love me some bowling.

Self-Care & Other Things

Beautiful day at Seattle Center.

So, one of the nicest things about working in social services is the complete understanding of self-care.  This word, and the idea of 'self-care practices', is entirely new to me, but I'm a pretty big fan.  It is the understanding that you cannot help anybody else if you don't take care of yourself first - so it is incredibly important to make sure that you are taking care of YOU.  After one glance at my morose demeanor yesterday afternoon, my supervisor promptly sent me home, informing me to use my favorite self-care practices, and to "just hang out" with my housemates.  (This is the same woman who, on my first day, told me to leave early and take a walk outside because I was probably pretty overwhelmed and should explore the city I moved to.  She's awesome, and quite perceptive.)

She was right - I needed a break and needed to get away from my work for a little while, even if I didn't see that right away.  So, I headed home, climbed in my bed and watched some movies, ate a delicious dinner, and took an early night.  I even slept in this morning, went for a run, took a long hot shower and grabbed a delicious salted caramel mocha frap from Starbucks (the queen bee of Seattle) before heading into work this afternoon around 1.  It was much needed, and I feel like a million bucks.  So, there's that.

I feel like I should give you all some examples of why Seattle (and my JV experience) is awesome, instead of just showing you the hard stuff.  Because, there's a lot of easy, great stuff, too.  Tons of it.  Like walking into the kitchen every evening after work to the smell of something delicious being whipped up in the kitchen.  Or, my residents shouting "hip hip HOORAY" to me as we drove home from a Mariner's game.  Or Jen, Karin and I taking a walk to the 12th street lookout and laughing at random people shouting at us from their windows.  The list goes on and on.

For example, I highly recommend to everyone the art of volunteering.  Not JVC volunteering either (although, of course, I recommend that, too.)  I mean volunteering for any local events in your city that you might be interested in attending.  One weekend, Mercy House decided to volunteer at Oktoberfest in Fremont as beer-pourers.  The upside of this was receiving free entry on a different night, complete with 7 free beer tokens (a $35 value).  Count me in!

Both beer pouring and beer drinking was a memorable experience.  Highlights include: dancing to a singer who may or may not have been the blonde musician in 10 Things I Hate About You, giving out free beers and being serenaded by drunken frat boys, winning awesome hats at the spinning wheel with Matt, an hour-long bus ride home where one of my housemates attempted to order a pizza, then ended it with "never mind, we're too poor for all that." and hung up, and learning the art of pouring a beer without any foam.

Matt and I with our awesome hats we won!

Continuing with the tradition of working minimally for free events, I volunteered to be an usher at ACT, which meant I got to enter into the theater early, hang out with the stage manager, take programs, and then sit and watch the show! It was great, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to see every ACT show for free this year by being an usher.  Why haven't I discovered this before?

Anyway all, I just wanted to let you know that I am alive and kickin', and feeling much better and very present to my job, my housemates, and the other aspects of my life. I'm off to take some residents to Wal-Mart.  Woop woop.

peace,
K

Don't Blink

So, I apologize in advance.  I wanted to write you guys a nice happy entry, with all of the fun free community outings we were going on lately and explaining all of the awesome adventures I've been having.  But then, something happened last night that changed what I'm thinking about and, well.  That's life I suppose.  A turn of the dice.

Last night, I had to go into work because we had a group of high school students from Seattle Prep volunteering for Urban Plunge. I was really, really excited about them -- I miss working with kids and teens, and I was happy to be given the opportunity to lead them.  They were serving dinner and talking to the residents - it's part of a bigger program at their high school. I didn't even mind coming into work on a Sunday night - I was going to be a part of these kids' experience with homelessness and the other half.  I felt like I could be influential.  Maybe they'd remember me, or something.

The kids themselves were adorable.  Their eyes were as a big as saucers as they walked into the Wintonia, and I could tell how nervous they were as they began serving the meal.  One of the boys had braces, and looked like a giant puppy, all arms and hands and legs.  They did well, though, and talked with people and shared their food with them.  All in all it looked like it was going to be great night.

As they were getting their food and I was supervising the dining room and food line, a man (we'll call him John, even though that's not his name) suddenly went stiff and couldn't speak.  I recognized immediately that he was having a seizure.  He's an older man, probably in his late 50s.  Everything seemed to freeze. I broke into a run, sprinting down the hallway to the front desk and shouted at the front desk staff that John was having a seizure.  He hesitated, and then sprinted away from me into the kitchen.  "Call 911!" he yelled over his shoulder.

I grabbed the phone and punched in the numbers.  (I am continually surprised at how calm I am during a crisis.  I've had a few medical and other emergencies in my time, and I am always struck with how calm and in control I am while in the moment.)  The medics are used to coming to this building, and sometimes take their time because they are called on so often.  This time, they hurried.  This man's life was on the line, and I made sure that they knew it.

I went back into the dining room, and a terrible scene was in front of me.  John was laying on the floor, white as a sheet, turned on his side.  He was no longer seizing, but had bit his tongue and so was bleeding quite profusely.  I think he might have hit his arm when he fell, too.  A crowd was around him -- though, the residents had a strange reaction.  Some of them were quite worried, and gathered around him, and yelling at him to hang on.  Others sat in the back of the room and ate their dinner quietly.  When I questioned them to see how they were doing, they shrugged.  "That's the way this life is," people seemed to feel.  With as much pain and death that they have seen in their lives, they were unfazed by the situation in front of them, and it seemed to cement their resigned feelings.  It was eye-opening, in that way.

Meanwhile, the sophomore high school students were watching the whole scene play out.  I tried my best to keep them distracted.  I paused dinner, and sent them out into the dining room to talk with residents so that they would be able to have personal contact with the people they were serving. To be honest - I didn't really know what to do.  John stopped breathing multiple times before the medics arrived, but he still had a pulse.  But, there's something about the human spirit that knows when another is leaving this world.  He was dying, and it wasn't hard to see.

The medics arrived and did their best to take care of him.  Years of watching Grey's Anatomy still didn't quite prepare me for the real thing.  No cute doctors sipping coffee here.  The sickening reality is this: alcohol will kill your body, and will kill you.  Years of living on the streets, years without doctor's visits, years with the deadly combination of drugs and alcohol, lack of nutrition, etc, etc etc -- those things take years off your life.  A body can't handle it.  And so, it gives up. It moves on.

They took him to the hospital last night, and that was the last I've heard of it until this afternoon.  My first update this morning, my supervisor told me that his family opted to take him off life-support.  Around 1:30, the manager came into the office with my supervisor and I and told us that he had passed on.

As I drove home last night, I stopped at the lookout by my house.  There's a place on 12th Ave that lets you see the entire city.  It was slightly rainy, dark and damp.  The city glowed through the darkness.

I'll admit it - I was pretty upset.  I felt weighed down upon by all of the hurt in the world.  A heaviness had settled somewhere between my ribcage, and all I could do was cry it out or drown.  I cried for everyone - for John, for the high-schoolers.  For my residents, so caught in their addictions they cannot escape.  For their families, who have to deal with it.  For myself, so far away from everyone and everything I know.   I cried for everyone who has ever been broken, and cannot or will not crawl out of the brokenness.  For everyone who has ever felt alone or forgotten in the world. I cried for the invisible: the funny, charismatic, friendly people I work with every day who are stuck in a cycle of poverty and addiction.  I cried because I cannot save everyone.  I cried because, at the end of the day, we have to save ourselves.

Why do bad things happen?  We have been asking this since the beginning of time.  Job fought God on it, all those years ago, struggling with the same question we all do every single day.

I wish I could tell you that I found some dramatic realization answering this question last night, as I prayed through my tears. I wish I could tell you that everything is always going to be okay, and that everything happens for a reason.  I wish I could write something life-changing, that makes everything nonsensical make sense.

Sometimes, things just happen.

And, in the words of Albus Dumbledore:  "We must try not to sink beneath our anguish, Harry, but battle on."

This morning, I walked into work this morning from an e-mail from an acquaintance I had in middle-school.  "Thank you," she writes, "for your kindness."  She wrote that I was the only person that she recalls being nice to her, and she remembers it, all these years later.

Goodness.  Badness.  Why does any of it happen?  Will we know?

I'll leave you with the words of Sam Shepard, who wrote A Lie of the Mind, which I had the privilege to see last week.  It is the final line of the play, after three hours of pain, heartbreak, and despair.  It is the only thing I thought of last night, when my tears slowed and I looked towards the Seattle skyline, lit up against the dark, dark sky.  The mother walks into the blizzard, and looks out into the darkness.

"There's a fire in the snow," she says.  "How could that be?"

Keeping It Real - Part One

I have a feeling that this part of my blog will happen often within this next year.  I'm going to call it "Keeping It Real", because that's what a lot of the experiences in JVC are forcing me to do.  Keeping it real can always be called 'Things I Take For Granted', or 'Things I Never Knew Were Blessings, Anyway".  The majority of the time, these things are things that I stupidly say before realizing that my residents don't have this privilege, or things I do before recognizing that maybe not everyone has had this background.  So, my theme for this week's episode is this:

Teeth.

I had terrible teeth when I was growing up.  When I was a kid, a dentist once asked me, quite bewildered, "How do you CHEW?"  Not one of my teeth lined up.  Some kind folks dubbed me shark-teeth, and reminded me of it daily.  My poor mother wondered how she got such a mutant child.  Needless to say, I had many years of teeth-straightening and braces ahead of me.  I remember well those tear-filled nights where all I wanted to do was rip my teeth out of my head, thank you very much, because having those suckers moved around by rubber-bands and metal wires hurt. (And I have a feeling my mother remembers them, and my many many tears and angry yells, too.)  But when I was in 7th-grade, and I finally looked in the mirror for the first time with my shiny, bright, white, even teeth, I was ecstatic.  I couldn't stop looking at myself.  I finally had what I had always wanted - perfect teeth.  (I still had the round Harry Potter glasses, bushy curly hair and overalls, but, hey, small miracles here.  But back to seriousness.)

Somewhere along the way, I lost that.  That recognition that these teeth are a blessing, something that not everybody has, and that I didn't have for the early years of my life.  I've always been complimented on my smile since then, and it is one of my prides.  I love that I have the teeth that I do, and I love that it seems to make others smile when I do.  My teeth aren't perfect anymore - I forgot to wear my retainer far too many nights for that - and sometimes when I look at my teeth now, I see the crookedness and unevenness there instead of the beauty.

But today, I realized that my residents look at my smile and see what they wish they could have.  Teeth are something that so many of us take for granted.  Many of my residents are missing many of their teeth, and they smile with closed mouths, if they smile at all.  They cannot chew their food properly, and they have problems drinking hot or cold water since it irritates their gums.  Those teeth that they do have they don't care for, since they see it as a wasted battle anyway.  One resident yesterday proudly told me to look at "the old him" for the last time, since it was the day he was going to get his dentures.  To be honest, I didn't notice that much of a difference when he returned, teeth in mouth, but to him, those two front teeth make him respectable, make him personable, make him able to get a job and move on with his life.  A lack of teeth is just one more hurdle that the residents of the Wintonia are facing, and one more thing that "everyone else" has that they don't.  And what a basic, basic need.  Teeth.

I find myself conscious of it, the way that you are conscious of wearing an expensive necklace or designer clothes.  As if I am flaunting my privilege all over the place, and showing off, or something.  There's nothing I can do about this feeling, of course, but it just keeps things in perspective for me.  And while telling me that there are starving children in Africa won't make me less hungry, perhaps this will gently remind me to keep perspective, and keep rolling on.

Keep it real.

-K

Addendum: Days When Things Are Hard

I am continually touched by the people who live here.  Today was one woman's wedding anniversary, but her partner had passed away.  Needless to say, its a difficult day.  Being able to hug her, remind her that she makes a difference in the world, and simply listen to her remembering a loved one reminds me of why I am here.  They call this a ministry of presence for a reason.  Perhaps I am discovering a different type of passion - one that lifts up my soul rather than lights it, one that quietly burns in a darkness instead of igniting the entire night sky.

A Day In The Life

Ahhh, what a nice weekend! I helped miss Laura set up her room in Bellingham - it was nice to see a friendly face!  I'm sure she'll upload some photos of her new place soon.  It was really fun just to get out of Seattle for a weekend and hang out with an old friend.  I think the highlight of my weekend was sawing the leg off of a couch so that it could fit up the stairs. (!!!) Yes, yes, those college years.... have to love it!

I've been having some adventures at work, so I thought I'd share some of what I've been up to around the Wintonia.  One of the biggest perks of my job is that I can pick out all the places in Seattle I want to explore and try to plan events around it.  My current favorite event that I plan is a weekly event called Walking Wednesdays.

A snapshot from a Walking Wednesdays trip to Volunteer Park.

Walking Wednesdays is exactly that: a chance for the residents to get out and about the city and just walk around! We typically have gone to various parks around the city, but as the year progresses I'm sure we will get more and more creative.  One of my residents suggested we go see the Fremont Troll!

Last week we went to Volunteer Park, which was really fun.  There were only four of us total, but we had a great time exploring the trails around the park.  We even found an old water tower to climb up! We also found a huge green house with all types of plants and trees inside of it.

My resident took all of these pictures with her digital camera.  She loves that thing! :)

Close up of some of the flowers.

Even just getting out and about is a gift for some of these folks.  They don't have cars, of course, nor do most of them have money for bus passes.  That means that they are restricted to hanging out in the Wintonia or going only within walking distance.  That's why a lot of people get pretty excited about being able to take a ride somewhere, even if it is just to the park.  I like being able to take people places - I feel like we can talk about things that you can't talk about otherwise.  Have you ever felt the difference in environment when talking to someone?  It's a lot easier to chat with someone about something serious when you're strolling along some flowers than sitting in my office on a folding chair.  The stories people have are amazing.

Today we went to Lake Union Park, which was also beautiful.  (Can you tell how much I love this city? All I can keep saying is how beautiful it is.)

Outside of the Center for Wooden Boats at Lake Union

It was an awesome day.  We left the Wintonia around 11am, and headed to Lake Union.  Lake Union is a really interesting place because its been really gentrified in the past few years. It looks a lot more Santa Clara than Seattle, if you know what I mean.  Seattle is wild, overgrown, untamed.  Santa Clara is perfectly manicured, fought back into submission.  I like Seattle's overflowing energy.

Lake Union is still pretty though, albeit in a different way than the rest of Seattle. The Center For Wooden Boats is right there, and we got a chance to look through all the historical boats.  (Shout-out to Molly and Arianna - no sea-chanties here!)  Again, the change in scenery really opens people up.  I was amazed at the stories that some folks shared about their childhood -- and all of that brought up just by being around a boat or near the water.

Center for Wooden Boats

Center for Wooden Boats

Still from my resident's camera.  She loves it!

After we walked around the docks, we settled onto a little beach / docking area and threw rocks into the water.  It was so relaxing just to hang out with people and skip rocks and talk about childhood. (It was much longer ago for them!) We were laughing pretty hard.  I can't believe that this is my job!  We were right at a place where the water-landing planes would take off and land, too, so we just sat on the edge of the water and watched them for a long while.  Then, guess who showed up!

Ducks!

We had asked the kitchen to give us a pack of bread, so we got to feed the ducks for a long time.  Whoever said that feeding the ducks is only an activity for grandmas and little kids is completely wrong! We had a blast!  I got a bunch of cute pictures of my residents feeding them (one guy even fed them out of his hand! I called him the Duck Drive-Thru) but I can't post any photos identifying the residents online, of course.  I'll make a scrapbook or something at the end of the year though, so if you REALLY want to see, I'll show you some other time :)

It was a pretty great day.  I'm getting busy at work, but its a good kind of busy.  An integrated kind of busy.

Community is fun, too. I'll post all about those adventures another day, but I'll just leave you with this image: last night, all of us somehow managed to gather in the living room, and sang out hearts out to the guitar.  (Favorites were: Firework by Katy Perry, and, our house song, Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show).  It was a nice spontaneous moment.  I'm really proud of myself - I've always wanted to learn the guitar exactly for this reason.  I've always wanted to play guitar and have everyone be able to sing along!  I'm pretty proud of my seven months of work.  (I've been playing guitar that long!! Woohoo!)

Love you all.
-K

Not Having the Internet

Not having the internet is rough sometimes...especially when it comes to the debate whether to take the later bus to write an entry or go home and sleep.  Sleep won this round.

In the meanwhile, here's a picture of a cool band I met on Monday at my impromtu trip to Bumbershoot.

Details to come.


....Love, K.

The Emerald City!

Hi all,

I haven't written in a week - mostly I've just been busy at work and haven't really had a chance to sit down in front of a computer to write this out! Life is good - I've been learning the ropes at work and meeting a LOT of people, which is challenging.  Good thing I'm okay with names!

So, a little recap.  Last Friday we went to this place called Pike Street Fish Fry, and it has free fries on the third Friday of the month.  Yum!  So, I met all of my housemates and the other Seattle house there for LOTS of delicious french fries and cheap beer.  We laughed that we had turned into grown-ups, because we were all sitting around a table, drinking a beer on a Friday night, talking about work.  Afterwards we all went home, grabbed some dinner, and then went over to Cherry Abbey (the other Seattle house) to hang out.  It was a lot of fun, and the perfect Friday night!

On Saturday, my housemate Jen's work was throwing an Open Mic night.  She's the Volunteer Coordinator, so she's essentially in charge of the event! So the eight of us went to that, and had a great time sharing a meal with the clients at Recovery Cafe and listening to their stories through the Open Mic night.  It's an incredibly positive and supportive place, and I was really humbled listening to all of the stories and music that people brought to share.  I sat with a bunch of people I didn't know, and ended up making a couple of friends by the end of the meal together!  And, even better, Recovery Cafe donated all of the extra food to our house! Yum! We feasted for days on that stuff.

Everyone was pretty tired on Sunday, but the weather was beautiful so I didn't want to sit in the house.  I headed out to explore.  I went up Capitol Hill, which is the hipster part of Seattle, and wandered around a bit.  I found Elliot Bay Book Company, which is Seattle's largest independent bookstore and ...wow! What an amazing place!  They even have a Drama Book Club every month, so I just might attend :) They had free WiFi, so I grabbed a lemonade and snuck off into the back corner of the bookstacks to enjoy it.  Afterwards, I went out to one of the nearby parks and sat in the sun reading a book for a few hours.  This is the life, man! I love not having homework!

We haven't quite settled into a pattern of living together yet, but we're starting to.  It's so nice to come home from work and have everyone shout hello to you as you walk in the door! We each sign up for a night of cooking dinner, so its awesome to come home to warm food that you didn't have to cook! Cooking for eight people is its own adventure, but that's a different story.

Alright all! I'll update more tomorrow, I've got to get back to work.  Give me a call or send me a text -- I miss everyone so much!

Love
K

First Day!

Hey everyone! I am making this post from my first day at the Wintonia! Woohoo!  As my mom can attest, I was quite scared to start work today.  It turns out that the reason my supervisor hadn't called me back was because he had moved on to another agency, and I have a new supervisor! Her name is Sarah, and she's pretty much fantastic.

I'll start off talking about yesterday though, first!  The virtual house tour is coming, I promise! Since I don't have internet at home, it makes uploading pictures a little more challenging, so I have to load them onto my computer first and then head somewhere with WiFi.  You'll get the grand tour soon!  Yesterday was our first real day in the house, and I was so so happy with how much my housemates and I cleaned it!  The house was pretty cluttered and dirty from last year's tenants - eight people living in a house together is sure to create a little bit of a mess!  We went to TOWN on cleaning! The nice thing about having eight people together is when they get motivated to do something, they do it! Two people were on bicycle duty (getting the old bicycles ready for riding, getting parts, etc), two people were on kitchen duty, two people rearranged the furniture in the living room, etc.  I was on grocery shopping duty with Jen, which was a fun adventure.  We only have $105 per week to feed eight people, so that's pretty challenging.  We organized it so that we are having dinner together four nights a week, so each person only has to cook one meal, but you always come home to something hot! We paired the good cooks with the bad cooks, so everyone is learning something, too.

Jen and I went down to the Industrial District to the Grocery Outlet store for all of our food.  We had quite a long list, and I was AMAZED at the deals we found! This experience is going to revolutionize the way I look at grocery shopping.  Remind me never to have seven kids I have to feed! We did it though, and even managed to splurge on some delicious organic wheat bread, pretzel chips and turkey lunchmeat for everyone! We spent exactly $105! Whew!  We came home to a beautiful clean and organized house, which was so encouraging.

One of the big reasons we were cleaning was because we were hosting a BBQ for the other Seattle JV house, Cherry Abbey, and some former JVs (FJVs) and other friends.  We have a big grill on our porch, and yummm! We made some awesome burgers.  We had a great time showing off our house, and everyone was impressed with our hard work.  One person even told us that this was the cleanest they had ever seen the Mercy House! We were all pretty proud of that.  After everyone left, we gathered around our living room and applauded ourselves on our hard work and successful party, and then headed straight to bed because we all had our Big First Day.

I was pretty terrified, as I said earlier, mostly because I hadn't talked to my supervisor at all! I didn't even know what time to show up to work! One of my housemates has to drive to work because he does house visits, so he dropped me off around 8:30a.  I was scared, but I took a deep breath and walked right in.  I was immediately welcomed by my new supervisor, and given a whirlwind of information that has lasted until now.  It's been a fabulous first day, and I cannot wait to jump right in.

For the first few weeks, most of my job is simply to get to know people.  We have 92 units, so that's a lot of people I need to know! I need to know everybody's name, and I want everyone to get to know me! One resident was so excited that the new JV (me!) was there - he was waiting all morning, the front desk said, for me to come out so he could take my picture.  I have my own desk, my own work e-mail, and even went to my very first staff meeting today, which was a lovely welcome to the Wintonia.  One of the staff was even doing an outing (she's running a "Life Skills" series right now, and the current one is on fitness) and took me and a few of the residents in the van to the Seattle Arborteum, which was a real treat.  I'm so blessed to be able to be in this position, and simply to be a presence in people's lives.  They all have such stories, you know?  How many times do you ask people to tell them about themselves, especially people who have been through the things that these people have been through.  As for myself? Not often.

Well, I'm the last one at work because I'm using the internet, and I want to go explore the area around my work a bit.  We're in SUCH cool area! I'm going to go walk up to Broadway street and peruse the shops up there.  I've heard that that's the place to be! 

Sorry I'm picture-less.  One day I'm going to just do a massive photo dump.  Maybe tomorrow?

Happy birthday Auntie Nettie! I hope the family is all enjoying themselves - I know you guys are all out to dinner right now.

Peace,

K

Navigation

I'm currently at the public library taking some (much-needed) alone time.  Whew, what a day!  Last night, my housemates and I all made dinner together (homemade pizza and salad from our garden!) and had a pretty fabulous dance party in the living room.  It was amazing :)  I am so excited to make our house a warm and welcoming place to stay.

I realized that not everybody knows what my job exactly entails in Seattle, so I figured I'd do a little updating!  I'm not sure of the particulars yet myself (I start on Wednesday!) but I have the basics:

I'm working at a location called the Wintonia.  Here's what they write about themselves:

The goal of the Wintonia Community Housing Association is to provide permanent, successful solutions to homelessness through the provision of long-term, stable, affordable housing. We also strive to help men and women who may otherwise be vulnerable and victimized on the streets to reassert control over their lives and to live in dignity. The Wintonia provides permanent, low-income housing for 92 formerly homeless individuals, half of whom are disabled by chronic alcoholism. This service enriched housing provides residents with meal services, health care, alcohol case management, and social activities.

 That end bit about social activities? That's me! My official title is a Community Support Facilitator.  I work at the front desk, coordinate volunteers, and, most importantly, plan all of the social events for the Wintonia.  Weekly events like Bingo Night or Karaoke Night - and also, about twice a month, big trips to the ballet, zoo, etc.  However, there's not really much money for all of this, so a lot of my job is also coordinating donations and asking people to help us out.  Here's how you can help! If you have any ideas or connections to locations in Seattle - let me know!

So there you go! That's my job! I start on Wednesday! I'm pretty excited - it's been awesome so far, and I can't wait to start serving.  I'm located right downtown too, which is pretty fabulous.

Alright, until later my friends!

In peace,
K