Welcome to Portland, I hope you brought your raincoat.

Hello!
I've been in Portland for exactly a week now. It started raining not long after we crossed the border into Oregon, and it has rained at least part of every day since then.
We got to our house about 8:30 monday night, and started work 12 hours later.
What am i doing? Habitat! We're working on 2 different Habitat sites. One is in its final stages, putting on the porch and the inside trim and the flooring and stuff like that. The other was just the frame when we got there, and the last couple days, we were putting the roof on and starting the building of the porch. This week, i worked 3 days at the house that's just a frame, and 2 days at the house that's almost done. I got to do flooring, and on saturday when i was there, i trained other people on how to do flooring! I've gotten pretty comfortable with the jigsaw and chopsaw and table saw and skillsaw (i used the skillsaw while on the roof the other day) and a pneumatic stapler. I'm getting better at hammering. We're all going to have huge forearm muscles from hammering by the end of this project.
It was cool to be training other people on Saturday. Especially because they were my parents' age. At first, working with people outside of americorps was unnerving. We've spent all this time working and training together to prepare to do all these work projects together, and here i am working with other people! I forgot that there are people that don't know who we are. And when they see just one or two of us, they probably don't realize that the clothing we wear is a uniform.
Being able to drive manual has made me a commodity, as I am also one of the drivers, so i've spent a couple afternoons driving big old scary trucks. It was awesome! The first one i drove had a horrible sound because the muffler is just kinda hanging off. And whenever i downshifted, it sang to me.
It's really good to be working now. It's not always great, they're still figuring out exactly what to do with us, but we're all learning a lot, and portland is a really cool city.

Definitely check out the team blog for pictures, i'll try to post again soon. We don't have a connection in the house, so i'm at the coffeeshop down the street. I just need to have the time to get here, which i haven't had until today.
Hasta luega
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