would you care to build a house on your own

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it would be like to live life totally alone. I guess not totally alone, humans need interaction to survive. But what if you just had those day to day acquaintances, people you never fully got to know, like or dislike, love or hate. At times I think life would be easier that way. You wouldn't have to worry about being enough for someone. smart enough. cute enough. just all together enough. You wouldn't have to worry about disappointing someone. Unintentional broken hearts.
But then I thought that those relationships, even the difficult ones, are the ones that save our lives. I would rather constantly struggle maintaining a relationship than not having one at all. I use to say that Love Is Above All. Somewhere along the line I got scared. Somewhere along the line I decided that being alone was better than being hurt. Certain people have shown me, though, that being alone, pushing people away, shutting people out of your life, will not make you any happier.

monday. tuesday. great day. best day.

foundation.


framed that house in three hours.

grasp the power of motivated people.


wrappin a house... like a boss.

day two end product. amazed? yeah. me too.

'most crawling reptilians, the most earthbound of all creatures, have remained unchanged for millions of years. some, however, grew feathers and wings and turned into birds, thus defying the force of gravity that had held them for so long. they didn’t become better at crawling or walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely.'

I woke up this morning and felt like I am a part of something big. really big.

We started working with Habitat for Humanity yesterday. And while all we did most of our first day was clear trash from work sites and move a butt ton of scaffolding to different build sites, I felt like the work I was doing was really worth while. We got to see a house dedication yesterday evening and it was really heart warming.
During the day, the owner of one of the homes, Ms. Stacey, came frantically in the truck where we were putting the dry wall scraps and other trash and she needed to find the pull chain for the ceiling fan, it had been left in one of the boxes. I searched with her and ended up finding it, and when I found it she was so happy. She gave me a huge hug and just thanked me about 12 times. It was simple. Anyone would have helped her look. But she was so grateful. Ms. Stacey seemed grateful for every single aspect of her life. She looked at her house with pride, she looked at all of the volunteers with love in her eyes.

I can't even express how much I love our house. Its older and it has a history. Grant gave me a sweet Christmas ornament and a Rugrats pillowcase he found in the trash. Seems crazy, but I loved it. The people who use to own this his evacuated during Katrina and just never came back. Habitiat did a lot of work for us with cleaning and fixing a lot of things around the house, but it still feels like it was abandoned. I always felt like buildings, houses especially, reflected the emotions of the people who lived in them. Walls can talk, if you will. And this house felt sad. I love being able to bring it back to life; to add our own River 2 touch to it. Tonight is Halloween and I really hope we get Trick-or-Treaters!

I get to go home for Thanksgiving!!! Orbits keeps sending me my travel itinerary and updates for my flight and I get so excited every time! I cannot wait to see my family and my friends. Goodness.

oh. this is three blocks from my house. no big deal.

my favorite chords

Spike project number one: check.

I'm really happy to be back from our first round project. I will miss the beauty of our surroundings and the amazing staff that we got to work with over the last few months but I am so excited to start our next project! After a week of debrief and clearance meetings we're gonna make our way to the coast! My team is off to Bay St. Louis to work with Habitat for Humanity! At first we were going to live at Camp Coast Care in a trailer with another AmeriCorps team, it seemed ok.. still a step up from some of our previous living conditions. Howeverrrrrr a few days ago we found out we will actually be living in a house! For us to live at Camp Coast Care Habitat had to pay some ridiculous amount of money so instead they got us a house! Its a 5 bedroom 2 bathroom (with at least one half bath) and a huge porch! We're only a few blocks from the downtown area and..drumroll.... the beach!!! I'm so excited. I cannot wait to work with Habitat and learn all these new crazy construction skills!

Strange though, when we got back to Vicksburg on Friday, I felt like I was home. Its odd to me how just 10 weeks ago I was a stranger in this town. I now have so many memories here. The Yazoo River is such a special place to me. It feels like home here. These people are my family. I love it.

learn how to use my hands not just my head.

over a month later! sorry guys.

ok. so our first round project is at this water "park"... its a camp site. not a park. very misleading here in the south. anyway. we've been working at Little Black Creek Water Park for the past 4 weeks. And honestly, that is why I have not been updating. I was a little disappointed with our project selection. Other teams were off to the coast, working with Habitat, building houses and changing lives... and here we are.. working on aesthetics for those who are fortunate enough to go on vacation here. Basically we've been either painting all day everyday or working our butts off in the hot sun clearing away brush from a dam or ripping roots out of the ground on a horse-trail. I worked hard. I pushed myself. I did things I had no idea I was capable of; such as not only having the courage to hold a machete, but actually use it to take out some intense thorn covered vines. However I still felt like what we were doing was kind of a waste of time. And it made my days difficult. It made my real desire to be here dwindle. Our team morale was low. We actually even had a team member return home. Our living conditions have been interesting, too. We are staying in a lodge hall that is about the size of a large classroom. We each have our own cot that is barely big enough for one person. We have about 3 feet of personal space before running into our neighbors cot. We cook there. We hang out there. There is one bathroom for 11 people. No Mirror. The shower is about a half of a mile walk. The closest town (internet access.. food...civilization) is at least a 10 minute drive. Its been rough.
Then, the other day as I was walking to our tool shed to continue painting signs for our horse-trail, I saw an adorable family picnicking on the dam that we had cleared brush from. They had an amazing view of the lake and they looked really, really, happy.
In that moment I felt pride.
I hope that the image of that family sharing a meal on land that was once covered with gross vines covered in thorns stays with me not only for the rest of this project, but for the rest of my life. Its easy to lose sight of what is really important. I forgot to enjoy the life that I am living right now. I don't have to sit at a desk all day. Or do homework. I get to be outside. Using my muscles and strengthening my body. How awesome!
I'm going from dreadfully saying that I live in the woods to excitedly saying I live in the woods!!!! I walk out of the lodge and see hundreds of trees. Since I have to be up at 6am everyday I GET to see the sunrise over the lake every single day!
Some days are a lot harder than others. And some days are the most amazing days of my life. Its a struggle. But its worth it. I hope you can look around and find things in your life that you are proud of. That you are excited about. And if you can't.. when you wake up in the morning and get out of your comfy bed.. think about how I sleep on a hard cot every night and say good morning to the 11 other people, thousands of ants, spiders, cockroaches and crickets that are my roommates and maybe you will feel better.

Lots of love.

let em know

boy, howdy! What an interesting past nine days it has been. Last Tuesday I went down to the river and hung out with two of my favorite people here, just talking and taking in our experience. We ended up jumping into the Yazoo River...which was absolutely disgusting, but a memory I am so thrilled to have. That night was so fun. Many things changed that night... for the utmost better.
The next day was absolutely horrendous though. We had PT in the morning at 5:30 and our day didn't end until a CPR training that lasted until 9pm. Well.. those were the plans for the day, at least. On my way to CPR I got the most ridiculous pains in my lower abdomen. My team leader, Nora, ended up taking me to the hospital where I found out I just had a UTI. I reacted very badly to the pain medicine they gave me and spent the entire next day in bed, hating my life.
The weekend came, though, and life was fantastic again. I hung out with Brit (one of my roomies), Teddy, and my team member Grant (see previous post for brief description). We ended up having a lot of fun down by the River. Grant and I have formed a connection that I cherish so much. He knows exactly how to cheer me up and make me smile, which is something that I have needed a lot of lately. Bonus: he is from Arkansas so he has the southern gentlemen innate quality within him... meaning he is fabulously nice to me, quite the change from those midwestern fellas. I like him... and am very excited to have him in my life. :)
My team had a meeting this afternoon where we worked out a lot of our built up issues. We are trying to communicate better as a team and let out frustrations that we might have with each other. We did this exercise where we wrote down things that were bugging us that each other was doing... it was completely anonymous so we couldn't write our names or the name of the person we were frustrated with with; so when our team leader, Nora, read them aloud I just listened as though all those things pertained to me. It was a compassion builder for me. I knew who most of those things pertained to though, but still listening to them as though someone was saying those things to me made me feel alienated, even though I knew I wasn't the one being called out on annoying behaviors. I made a decision that I'm going to try to be more of an understanding and accepting person. I think that I have a pretty open mind to alternative lifestyles, but I know that I can be very judgmental on people who have annoying quirks or act differently than I do... and that is something that I would really like to work on and change.

in summation, I love my life right now.


"I just think if we keep our hearts together; just think if we build on this trust that we have for one another, baby we can make this last a lifetime"

cause I'm a bear!

oh what up.

Let me start with our service project that we did on Monday! We went to Rolling Fork, Mississippi to clean up the town! This town is one of the most (if not the most) impoverished towns in the deep south. for real. We split up into groups and worked on fixing up the hospital, cleaning up the graveyard, and fixing up the gym in the high school. My group was assigned the hospital and we did a LOT of painting. My friend Britt and I painted this overhead thing outside one of the doorways. It was a pain in the behind for sure. I had to spend a good 45 minutes bending my back in as close of a 90 degree angle that I could get just to paint underneath it. It was one of the best experiences ever. The people in the town were so excited to have us there. The lady, Susan, who worked in the hospital was absolutely amazing. A lot of people got together and baked us a lot of goodies to snack on during the day and even made us goodie bags to take with us that some awesome random (like huge calculators and dry erase boards) stuff in them. It was really awesome. The rest of the week was just more training. Yesterday we learned the basics of taking off and putting a new roof on a house. I loved it. My friend Alliegh and I got to just bang nails back into the roof after the shingles were taken off and we got really into it. Money.

I've gotten to know my team better and I just have to say........ I love them! We get along so well and I can tell it is going to be a very, very fun 10 months. I feel very blessed to get to work with these amazing people. We got the dets for our first round projects! We are going to restore an old campground on a water reservoir. I think it is going to be totally legit. We get to make horseback riding trails and help restore parts of the campground that still have drastic hurricane damage from Katrina. I think its going to be eye opening actually seeing all the damage that is still left from Katrina that a lot of people have forgotten about; but on the flip side its going to be great actually being able to DO something about it.

I'm so excited to get things done!

learning to adapt to change. accept differences. overcome difficulties. and basically just get over it when things bug me. learning to let go. learning to hold on.

today probably isn't the best day to update because i'm kind of grumpy and a tad homesick. but grumpy updates are better than no updatses, yeah?
we got put into our permanent teams yesterday and I'm not too thrilled about it. There is one girl who I've been friends with from day one, kat, who i'm glad is in my group; and then there is grant who is really nice and funny so he'll be a good asset. I don't not like these people, its just right now I don't know them. I knew my old group. We bonded. And it just sucks being ripped away from a group where I fit in so well and had so much fun to a group where I'm unsure and uncomfortable. But thats all part of the experience.
I miss home a lot today. I miss my moms cooking. I miss Hailey and Landon climbing all over me and begging me to help them with puzzles or get them drinks; and I miss gracie yelling at me from somewhere in the house to come look at whatever it was that she would be working on at the time.
I miss my life in edwardsville. Classes are going to start in a few weeks and I still can't believe I won't be there. I miss living with Andrea. I cleaned my room and bathroom today just because cleaning would be the thing that she would have done, and it felt like she was there with me just a little. I miss sitting in starbucks for hours talking about a million different things, chatting with a lot of random people, and getting nothing done we had originally gone to accomplish. I miss Shenanigans nights with all of my friends. I miss just sitting around dancing to the music and trying to name 61 different sports. I miss doing the most random things with Mike. Going to see movies. Picnics in the park. Frosty runs.
I think when you take things for granted you miss them ten times more when they are taken away from you. When you don't realize what you have until its gone, it breaks your heart when you realize you can never get it back; never get the chance to really appreciate it for what it was, what it meant to you.
see, i'm grumpy today.

but i will be alright. things are still ok. my friends here are being supportive and awesome as usual. I do love it here. We get to do our first service project on Monday. We're traveling to a nearby town and doing painting and restoring of some parks and sidewalks. I'm really excited about it!

Ameri-Lovin my Ameri-Family

I'm here! We don't have wireless in the dorms yet so I've been MIA on the internet front. Right now I'm sitting in this fabulous Italian restaurant eating tiramisu and drinking coffee with some of my loves. We are sitting at this ginormous table with our computers. being lame. and being happy. :)
So far this experience has been more than I ever expected it to be. The people I have met have been my saving grace. Without internet access and limited time to use my phone I've felt very disconnected from my life in Illinois which has been hard to deal with. However, the people that I have met (mainly my roommates hailee and britt, and the boy who lives across the hall Brian, and well.... everyone else!) have made me feel so at home.

Ok. SO. It started on Friday when I got to Mississippi on zero sleep for over 24 hours, super scared, and no roommates. I sat in my room. Cried. And then fell asleep watching Friends. After I got some sleep I ventured outside and found some people talking about a Harry Potter closet. I asked them what they meant and they showed me to this closed that looked just like the Cupboard Under the Stairs. it was hilarious. and I fell in love with them. One of the people there was Brian, a boy who lives across from me. He is FABULOUS. We insta-bonded and I was much happier. After eating a gross dinner, we hit up Sonic with his roommate and another friend we had made, Kat, and became a family in one short night.
When we got back my roommates had FINALLY arrived and I was super nervous about meeting them. I just have to say... they are AWESOMEEEEE. We have so much in common and we get along so well. I never could have asked for a better match up. Saturday we had a bunch of schtuff to do. I can't remember what the entire day entailed right now. But I do know it had something to do with getting out temp. groups
I also remember going out on Saturday night. We went to the AmeriStar Casino and Bar on the river and saw this awesome Jazz band play really random pop songs. It was the perfect Mississippi experience. We then traveled to a local bar and met some awesome townies and had a really, really fun time. It was great getting to bond with all of my new friends!
On Sunday we all slept in and then went on a girls (plus andrew) breakfast to Waffel house. then we went to the local pool and just hung out for most of the afternoon. At night we just had a movie night and had a butt-ton of people chill in our room. It was fun. And Fabulous.
I wish I could spend more time right now letting everyone know what is going on. But my time is limited in this Italian cafe. Just know that I am doing well. I miss you all. I love you even more. And I think about you every single day.

with you by my side, I can do anything.

So! Welcome to my blog! I'm pretty pumped about starting this and having a way to keep all ya'll updated on my fun adventures in Mississippi! I'm going to try my darndest to update as much as possible as to provide the best general idea of my life down south. It will be like blogging in HD. You'll feel as though you're part of the action.

In anticipation of leaving for 10 months, I decided it would be a fabulous idea to spend some time with and say farewell to those who have made my life worth living.
The trail started in Idaho with my bff Stacey. Stacey is absolutely fantastic. I love her so much and we had such a fabulous time! I was so excited to finally meet Chloe! She is frakin adorable!
We had such a fun weekend filled with pedicures, fighting Cody on the pure awesomeness of Monicals Pizza, harry potter (with matching tshirts) and a trip to Yellowstone (still rocking our matching tshirts....) Spending time with Stacey made me remember just how strong a connection can be between two people. Stacey and I hadn't seen each other in about a year, and even then we only got to spend half of a day together. And yet, regardless of the amount of time that passes, we still remain best friends. I will always consider her to be my first true best friend. And nothing and no amount of time can change that. And I find a lot of comfort in that.

My next stop was to the absolutely breathtaking state of Oregon. My good friend Stephen moved out there almost 2 months ago and I have always wanted to go to Oregon and was so excited to now have a place to visit! We had a lot of fun, too! We started off by driving to the coast (he had never seen the pacific ocean before! gasp!) and then we drove all the way up to Washington. We spent a lot of time in the car, but it was so worth it. It was so nice being able to catch up with him and also see some beautiful scenery. The rest of the week was spent going on hikes up mountains (no, seriously.. we hiked UP a mountain. it was SO fun.) dominating ulitmate frisbee and football. and getting to meet the people in his life now and experience his daily routines and experiences. It was so great being able to see him thrive in his new home. His courage to start fresh and success in building a new life for himself is so encouraging. I feel very blessed to have him as a friend to lean on for comfort and words of advice. He always seems to have both in abundance. I truly adore that kid and I can't wait to see him again!

We were running extremely late to the airport on Friday (mostly my fault... slacking in helping Stephen clean, too busy talking to his neighbor about dogs, soulmates, and future plans....) and I ended up missing my first flight from Portland and didn't get back to St.Louis until 12:30 in the morning on Saturday. I know I missed some opportunities to say goodbyes to a few people, and that really bums me out, but that is life, I suppose. Saturday night was CryFest 2009. I was fine until one of my favorite people ever, Beth Ann Ballulah, left for the night. After that I'm pretty sure the only time I spent not crying was while I was eating my taco and cinnamon twist pinic style in the parking lot of taco bell with a few of my most favorite people. Saying goodbye to Andrea was heartbreaking, but at the same time, my least worrisome. Our friendship has been through so much and I know that 10 months will, in no way, effect how strong that is... and you know what... I don't hate it. :)

I said my final goodbyes to Evergreen Hall and made it home just in time for my family going away/birthday party. My all time favorite part of the whole night was teaching my oldest niece gracie how to skateboard. She absolutely loves skateboarding! I love seeing her develop her own personality. her like and her dislikes. and the fact that they happen to mirror mine are just a coincidence. I swear.

Basically, I love the people in my life. The past few weeks have made me feel so incredibly lucky to have these people in my life. They make me feel loved. Having friends take the time to say goodbye to me. to cry when they have to leave. to spend the time making cds with songs that remind them of me. to have someone say that they are proud of me and knowing with my whole heart that they really mean it, makes me feel like I can do anything. makes me feel like I can save the world.