Musings of RndPkt

I'm abandoning any thoughts/attempts at updating my photos. I haven't touched my camera since Saturaday. I'm too busy on-site (some people have taken turns rotating at taking pictures of work-in-progress). Follow www.ourmissiontrip.net for daily updates. Links are at the top.

- Jason

We arrived yesterday around 18:00 local time in Bay St. Louis. The drive down was very interesting. We drove through an incredible amount of driving rain on through Tennessee and Alabama. We rolled into Knoxville, TN around 1:15 on Saturday. Everyone got about 6 hours of sleep and then we hit the road at 9:00 sharp. After 21 hours of total travel time, I was glad to be out of the van. The church is basically a large former boat sales warehouse that has some locker-room shower/sink/toilet areas, a kitchen and some small offices. Other than that, it's a cavernous opening that has dinner tables along the one side and a meeting/worship section on the other. Across a dirt lot are the bunk houses which look like pre-fab houses outside and are unfinished inside. The walls are made of Tyvek insulation wrap. Apparently I provided a lot of amusement overnight because I'm on the top bunk and some was hanging low. I'd roll, smack it with my hand and then make a guttural noise of annoyance - or so people around me claim. I restapled it up after a quick trip to Wal-Mart so hopefully I won't encounter this problem again.

The weekly organizational meeting is tonight at 19:00 which is when we'll find out where we're working during the week. Every group but ours seems to be youth groups, so I don't know what will happen to us. 15 of our group (out of 20) are adults and the 6 men all got rated as at least "moderately skilled" on the assessment forms. So I don't know if we'll end up split across teen groups or if we'll work together. I guess we'll find out in ~ 3 hours.

Some of the group went to take a drive through New Orleans which is about an hour to the west. I chose not to go because I'm tired of being in the van.

We leave for the work site by 7:30 (have to dress, eat, get tools, get work assignment location) and will be onsite until almost 6 and then shower, eat and have our evening meetings and devotional time so I don't know how much I'll update this during the week. Any computer time I spend will likely be helping the maintainer of www.ourmissiontrip.net put the official pictures up. Plus the battery on the beater laptop is non-existent and wifi only works in the main room so posting will likely be sparse.

View the "Official" Trip Pictures. At least four of us here have digital cameras and will be contributing to the content.

View my photos (many dupes from above).

This evening we spent going to Target and Wal-Mart to purchase last-minute trip items. I was unable to find a wide-brimmed hat to my liking. So I'm going to a combined ball cap + bandana approach. How this really works out in the long run remains to be seen. At least the bandana will keep sweat off my face. Tommorrow will begin the 18 hour trek Driving from Wexford, PA to Bay Saint Louis, MS. Eleven people in a church van.... seems very... crowded.

Hopefully I'll post pictures of the trip as the week progresses. The beater laptop is all setup and ready to roll with me. It's missing the O, ; and ' keys. I'm trying to decide if I want to shoehorn some other key on there, glue cardboard there or just let it go. Such difficult decisions. An initial attempt to graft keys from a VERY old Compaq Armada 1100 failed.

This was a pretty fun weekend. Saturday we went on the SeaDoo at West Branch Park. This is our usual boating venue. It was pretty hot and everyone got sunburned while out on the water even though people had on sun screen. Guess this'll be good for next week.

During our spells on the beach while others were on the water, my sister-in-law-in-law and I had a tremendous amount of entertainment watching who we took to calling "Creepy Guy". Creepy Guy was possibly the most predatory wacko I've ever seen in real life. According to the sister-ILIL and my father-in-law, who go to West Branch a lot, the guy is a regular on the weekends. You can tell because his skin is the color of beef jerky. I don't know when I've seen a more tanned person. Creepy Guy started off in the grassy area to the left of the beach. He had your standard suntan accoutrements - folding chair, water, radio, book, food.... binoculars. The sister-ILIL and I noticed that he would watch the boats on the water with binoculars. Okay, sorta weird, but if you're busy giving yourself skin cancer, maybe you're just bored enough to watch boats on the water. Creepy Guy lost our attention at that point. Sometime later, a pair of late teen/early 20s girls and a guy showed up and setup shop on the beach in front of us, further towards the water. The girls were attired in what you would guess a pair of late teen/early 20s girls would be wearing to the beach on a hot day. Creepy Guy caught our attention again as he moved his setup over to the beach area at a place about 10' from the girls who were tanning. "Pretty blatant" was our opinion. We watched every so often to see if he tried to hit on the girls, but he never did. He would alternate sunning himself and staring at them - blatantly staring at them - i.e. propped up on elbows, facing at them and away from the water, etc. The Legend of Creepy Guy would be somewhat boring if it stopped here, but no! After he was closer to us, we realized that the binoculars were employed in a very selective manner. Boats on the water were only inspected who had obvious female riders. We also further realized, that he wasn't looking down the lake towards the dam, but was actually using binoculars on females on the beach. This was determined because he actually would spend long amounts of time peering away from the water to people on shore, including obviously younger teen girls. He kept this up - no joke - for at least 5 hours. Guess we can see why he's tan. This guy was a serious observer of females. It was very creepy.

Today after church, we drove through the town where we used to live and stopped at the army surplus store, formerly called Commando Joe's Military Surplus and Cigarette Drive-Through (yes, there is a drive-through for cigarettes). The store used to be crammed with all sorts of military surplus, cool foreign military stuff and other like-minded goods. My favorite was the complete East German Stasi winter uniform on display. However the new proprietors renamed it to "Army/Navy Military Surplus", seemed to have much less in stock, and still apparently sell cigarettes out of the window in the back. I bought some BDU pants and shorts for my trip, but I didn't find the quantity I was looking for. Oh well.

I really like the Hero soundtrack. The music is very inspiring.

I'm trying to get ready for my trip to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi next Friday. Our church is working through Lagniappe Presbyterian Church (pronounced lan-yap) to work on houses and sheds of Hurricane Katrina victim. Despite all of the press coverage of New Orleans, the center of the storm actually passed through further to the east where Bay St. Louis and Gulfport are. The area is still recovering and there's a tremendous need by the residents in that area. Twenty people from our chuch will be joining over 200 other voluneers the week of July 24th to work on either rebuilding houses or "Sheds of Hope". The sheds are a place of storage for items people have recovered from their homes and it's amazing how this small thing is so appreciated.

I'm taking the "beater" laptop down with me for basic e-mail, blogging and ability to upload photos to the photo gallery. It's a very low-powered device by today's standards (P2-333, 192M Ram) so I'm working on getting the lightest weight tools possible to deal with photos and get them uploaded. The bunk houses we're in supposedly have Wifi.

Here's a definition of Lagniappe. From what I've gathered from material I've read and people I've talked to, definition #2 is really the main use of the word in Mississippi and Louisianna.

Now I just need to find a store that sells the recommended "100% DEET" bug spray. Highest I can find so far is 30%.

Wife and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: The Dead Man's Chest today at the Regal 10 in Butler. Overall the experience was annoying to bad. The annoying part was the movie itself. Overall not a bad movie, but there needed to be more character development. The villans were virtually unexplored so you disliked them vicerally because they were framed with "evil" and want something bad but their motivation is unexplored. Plus the end is basically a huge cliffhanger for the 3rd movie so be warned. There's also this wierd quasi-love-triangle in the middle of the movie that completely destroys the original love premise of the movie, so even the hero's motivations are unclear and seem to have shifed by mid-movie.

The bad part is two-fold. First, we've had 2 Regal Cinemas gift certificates since Christmas of 2003. The Regal is margianlly inconvenient given there's 2 movie theaters closer to our house. But today we decided to bite the bullet and go to Butler since we could do some other errands at Wal-Mart there just as well as here. Upon presenting the gift certificates, we were informed that to see Pirates of the Caribbean we needed to pay $1.50 per ticket for a "premium upcharge" since this was a "premium" movie. The hapless ticket lady basically said it's because the theater wants more money. Fortunately the wife intervened, sensing I was about to get testy and unpleasant. We paid the $3 (for $12.50 of "free" movie) because we're sick of the gift certificates. So we make our way into the theater and sit down whereupon I discover that my armrest is covered in pop. After moving us up a few rows and then going and washing my arm off, we settle in to be treated to 45 minutes of commericals and previews (started at 15:05, movie "start time" was 15:15). Just as the movie is about to start, two people and their child squeeze down the aisle to sit. 30 seconds after sitting, the women got up to leave. Both times we stood in the aisle so they/she could easily get past. However, we didn't move for the next SIX times one or more of them left and came back during the movie. The traffic up and down the aisle was unreal -- can no one prepare themselves food-wise and bladder-wise to sit through a 2 hour movie? Geez. And, of course, the film broke right in the middle of the big fight scene.

Overall, not the best movie experience. However I'm feeling relaxed and calm now as I sit on the deck. I'm very happy I'm making a point to do this often and enjoy the deck, yard and neighborhood. I have not done enough of this in the past.

One last note, the block party last night was well attended. Definitely a success.

I do have to give credit, first off, to the technician for my local cable ISP who actually took some some time to do some troubleshooting into my problem while onsite. Far from replacing the modem and leaving, he actually ran some line tests on the cable from the service entrace out to the box on the street. He thought that the line was marginal and was going to run a new one. However when he opened everything up, he found my builder - in a strange fit of intelligence - had run two coax lines out to the box. He swapped the lines and I now have a much stronger signal than before. Thanks Dean.

Last night we had a "going away" picnic for someone at work. He and his family are moving overseas to start a two-year stint with a partner organization. About half of our team showed up to wish him well. I think we disappointed one person's kids at the lackluster fireworks. Ours were delayed until last night at 10p due to weather. Last year we could see them clearly over the trees. This year they seemed to be lower and we could only see the higher ones. spargelkohl suggested I use my power to have the trees removed. While that would probably thrill droopydog500, I don't think I can accomodate them. But it was a fun evening and I think fun was had by all.

Tonight is a block party for one of the streets our house is on (we live on the corner). Supposedly they are expecting over 100 people, which is pretty good considering that there's only 20 houses on the street. Should be a good time. I also exchanged some messages with spargelkohl as he slays the dreaded invasive garlic mustard.