Thursday in St. Bernard

Thursday was a day of change for both groups. But also a day of good food! My group (the mudding group) switched from mudding to sanding. The other group had an even bigger shift, they changed homes.

For the first three days, my group has been applying mud to all of the seems in the home. Since late Tuesday/ early Wednesday it's been clear that we would finish mudding before the end of the week. The question became: then what? Well, on Thursday we found out. Sanding. So we applyed mud to the entire house and now we got to sand all of the mud we applied. I think sanding taught us a really good lesson: do a good job now because if you don't your life will be hell later. In the places that the mud was well applied, sanding was a simple and fun task. In the places where the mud was applied in a haphazard (bumpy) manner, sanding became an unpleasent and exhausting task. You can only sand so much down by hand. So in places where there were huge (1/2 milimeter) ridges, it takes FOREVER to make that area smooth. Nonetheless, it was nice to get some physical labor in after three days of detail work.

Group two faced the unfortunate fate of switching homes and site leaders. The owner of the first home they were working on, decided she didn't want them there anymore. We all struggled to figure out why she would stop The Project's (and our) work in the middle of the most important step, mold remediation. In the end we had to realize that we just can't get into the mind of a person who lived their entire lives in a home and then had it destroyed in a matter of days. The impact that must have is unimaginable. In the end, the group switched homes and began drywalling another home. They're having a ton of fun doing it and, it seems, Tamir is a drywalling god.

The upside for both groups was lunch at Tony's Restaurant. Group one went to lunch on Wednesday, but group two had been eating PB & J all week. It was happy fortune that both groups ended up at the same restaurant for lunch. And it was a great lunch! Filled with stuffed crab, catfish, and oyster po boys (not together, though). It was a nice break from all of our hard work.