I have returned! Sort of victoriously!

Above is a fountain that's in the French Quarter. Notice the woman and her little girl playing at the edge-- so cute!

Alright. I am back to regular blogging. There was a little lag there in which I was very tired and started watching Lost online due to Bryna's suggestion (read: mistake).

I literally did nothing last weekend. That is, homework, nothing by myself, or nothing in the sense of lying on Balint's floor with Balint and Petra for four hours in a row. It felt great and it needed to be done.

This week at work has been interesting. My boss is fairly busy, so it's been up to me to be in the field with the volunteers. My day is split in between taking the volunteers to the site, doing physical labor while directing them on how to do their own physical labor, coming back at lunchtime, covertly bathing myself in the bathroom sink, and changing into business attire before returning to my newsletter duties. I feel like a sweatier, less heroic Clark Kent in reverse.

This week's group is a thirty-member Presbyterian youth group from Colorado. Getting to spend every day with them has been awesome. I think it's hard to know the meaning of volunteerism until you see a bunch of high school kids clear six feet of grass from a lawn in half an hour while enduring 100-degree weather. They go into their work with enthusiasm, smiles, and lots of intelligent questions, and it's great to be a part of it.

The newsletter has hit a snag, unfortunately. While one higher-up approved it fully, another has now decided that it needs to be reformatted in order to be mailed out. This makes my job fairly complicated, as neither higher-up has spoken to the other and both are too busy for me to speak to either of them. The story is incomplete for now, so I'll refrain from saying more. All I can know for sure is that there will be a NENA newsletter, and it will be good.

A kitten ran into work today. The Job1 kids were terrified of it; I think they thought it was a rabid stray or something. I picked it up, if only to stop them from yelling, and it immediately relaxed in my arms and started purring. Needless to say, I took an inordinate amount of time "putting it outside." Worth it.