• Paige serged 500 baby blankets. What a feeling of accomplishment! These blankets are used in birthing kits (given to midwives in third world countries and contain 1 blanket for cleaning the baby after birth and 1 blanket for wrapping baby, string for the umbilical cord, a razor, and bar of soap) and in layette kits with other assorted baby items. Lois was my partner on this project and she did the cutting of the flannel. She is a retired minister and working with her on these blankets was great fun. Lois lives in southern MN and will be contacting us in April when we do a NOMADS project in northern Iowa. I’m looking forward to seeing her there!
• Bob worked one day in the Depot initially and then went with a smaller group to do work in the community. Week One they built a couple of wheelchair ramps. Week Two Bob worked with a different group that continued to work on a house that was started the first week. This house had very soft floors in a couple of rooms and other assorted issues throughout (according to Bob, there were worse houses in the neighborhood!). Bob came home pretty dirty every night and one night we even threw his shirt away! He enjoyed doing the work and also met a lot of other volunteers.
• We met so many new volunteers! Bonnie is from Litchfield area and wanted to learn to knit socks so we spent time together doing this. She is well on her way to knitting her first sock! There were about 3-4 retired ministers. We were with the Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church group – there was also a group from Maple Grove and a group from Blue Earth, MN. Most from MN but we also had people from Alabama, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Iowa and Pennsylvania.
• In addition to the project work, we had time to do some sight seeing. Touring the Governor’s Mansion, the Swamp Tour, and the Offshore Oil Rig tour were all very interesting. We also hit some good restaurants for seafood. Yesterday we took the recommendation of Freddie from the Depot and got shrimp to bring to Paula’s. We also got some good local sausage and boudin sausage.
• Sager Brown is a multi-building facility. There are buildings that house the volunteers, a cafeteria, a chapel, administration, museum, gift shop, garage for vehicles, the big depot, and the RV campground. Daily we’d get up by 6:30, have breakfast at 7:30, devotions at 8:10, start work at 8:30, break at 11:30 for lunch at noon, back to work at 1 and done for the day at 3:30 or 4:00. Supper was at 5:30. I’m looking forward to sleeping in now!!!
We drove about 100 miles to a state park by New Orleans this afternoon. We fixed supper here (novel concept!) and just honkered down tonight. It’s going to be in the mid-20’s tonight which is very cold for this area. It will be in the low 50’s tomorrow. We’re going to take a ferry to the French Quarter and spend the afternoon over there – maybe the evening too if we hold out. We’ll be staying here until Monday and then heading slowly to AZ.
For Mom – here’s another picture from the swamp tour. We saw lots of turtles but most would hit the water when we’d get close. These let us get pretty close.
For the granddaughters – what is boudin sausage? (very popular here)
And for those with sweet tooths: what is "Tupelo Honey"? (we learned this on the swamp tour)
No comments:
Post a Comment