Life in the Slow Lane

I’ve definitely slowed down. I don’t even walk fast these days. The camp is totally empty and it’s just me and the TV. But this means I haven’t been distracted and I’ve worked a lot on my book. I think I’m just about finished. Have I said that before? Right now I’m just waiting for Kaylin Bailey to finish her edits and it’s off for the final proofing and then to the typesetter. I know the day after I send it off I will come up with the perfect paragraph.

Right now things at camp are fairly quiet but it won't stay that way long. We're expecting 18 volunteers the week of September 21 but the week following brings between 80-90 volunteers every week after that. That’s a lot of milk and eggs.

We had some rain here from Hurricane Fay but not nearly as much as other places nor as much as the constant updates from the weather service that’s plugged into my blackberry warned me about constantly.

In the meantime, I guard the camp. It’s starting to look a lot safer to me. For starters, I got a good look at the map and it’s not really that close to the dreaded ninth ward. There’s even an “innercoastal waterway” between us on the map. I took a walk through the neighborhood just now and it’s a nice middle class neighborhood that’s mostly come back. I guess on my three-block walk I only saw two FEMA trailers and maybe four or five houses that looked unoccupied. Every other house on my walk was tidy and the grass was freshly mowed. Some houses had flowerbeds and a few looked like they had taken the opportunity to upgrade what they had before in terms of new stucco on the outside. Only one house looked untouched in the last three years. The weeds have sprouted trees in their midst. But there were other houses that I could tell were unoccupied. The dangling electrical wires gave them away if nothing else did. But these houses had yards that were freshly mown. I’m not sure who was mowing them and why the other house hadn’t been mowed.

At the end of my walk I ran across two groups of people canvassing the neighborhood with political pamphlets for a congressional election. I stopped one of the guys and bluntly asked what they call this neighborhood. He said two blocks over is “Sherwood Forest.” Maybe that makes me Maid Marian.

I’ve started working on a second blog. The camp has one of its own. I’ll be posting to this one here but also updating the blog for the camp. Today you will want to see both of them. All the pictures are on that blog. As the volunteer “season” gets underway in a few weeks the camp blog will probably just be camp news with mostly pictures of volunteer teams--and possibly boring to you. But for now my biggest news is to show you where I’m living and give you a taste of what my life is like. So check this blog:

http://olivetreevillage.blogspot.com

I tried some more movies but for some reason this time I couldn’t get them to load into the blog.