Gold 1 baby!

Since it has been a week now since i've updated on here, i have a lot to tell. For your sake, however, I will try to summarize.
First off, let me give ya'll my address. We finally got our team unit names.

Sarah Daigle
Americorps NCCC,
Winter class, Team: Gold 1
3427 Laurel St
McClellan, CA 95652

So send me mail, i like mail! Plus, when we leave for our projects we will still get the mail that is sent to the above address. Again, i repeat.. . send me mail! =)
Ok so this past week. . . hmm. . . where to begin
Well, last saturday night we had our first optional ISP (independent service project) opportunity. During our 10 month stay here we have to get 80 ISP hours on top of our regular hours with our teams. These hours can be in projects we create, or we can find some that are already set up by other corps members, etc. So myself, and about 30 others took advantage of getting 6 hours out of the way and particpated. We helped serve the food at a big fundraiser for a program called Project Ride here in Sacramento. This program gives handicapped kids and adults the opportunity to ride and work with horses. It was a fun night, a little crazy running around in a horse coral in a barn, with a TON of other people there, but overall it was fun. Plus, at the end of the night the live band was playing and we had a dance party for a bit.
Sunday, a few of us tried another church. Another dissapointment. . . but i won't go too much into that. We have managed to find some crazy churches here.
This week, mon-today was full of more trainings, like before. I honestly can't remember what all of them were, but there were a couple good ones. I'll share one good and one bad. The good one was Wednesday when we did the Hands on Peace training. This training is a team building, communication workshop. Some of the activities were just with our individual teams, and then others were with 2 other teams as well. Overall, i really enjoyed it, because it allowed me to spend time actually talking to my team, and being somewhat serious (we are quite a funny team), but also a time to joke around and be silly. My team is definitly growing on me.
Thursday my team worked on a Habitat for Humanity site. Each team did some kind of project this week, either on a habitat site, in a boys and girls club, or in a food bank. I have had so many great experiences on mission trips doing construction based projects that i found myself comparing this time to that, and it did not even come close. Then i realized that that is not fair for me to do. This is a totally different situation. Of course it's going to be different on mission trips with the youth. So i decided that it was a good day, even though we did boring things in the house. The highlight for me was using a miter (sp?) saw again. Always a good time with one of those!
The bad training experience was actually today. Overall, today was my worst day here so far. During the day we all sat through the most boring Red Cross mass casualty training seminar. The team leaders even said itw as horrible. It was poorly organized, repetitive, and dry. So most of us were pretty figity, and moody by the time that was over. We then had the Ameri-olympics, which was a bunch of corny games. Fun, but that fun was cut short when we thought we were going to be told where we were going to be in a week for our first projects. Right before most of our team leaders could tell us they were told thye were not allowed to tell use for another hour. You see, the motto for Americorps is be flexible. Things are always changing, and they don't tell us things till right before it happens. For example they said they could not tell us right then because there was still one final proposal for a project that had to come in. Hello. . . we leave in a week!! Anyways, most of us were extremely frustrated by the time they told us we had to wait LONGER. (Our Team leaders have known most of the week, but were not allowed to tell us)
Anyways, my bad mood changed around when i finaly found out what I will be doing, and where I will be going.
On Feb 5th we are all being sent out on our first projects. My team will be doing an education project in an elementary school. We will be in the classrooms (yay!) during the day, and then running the afterschool program in the afternoons. There's a little more to this, but i'll include that later, when i have more info, and can be more detailed. While being in a school again was exciting, the part that really made my bad day a little better was WHERE I was going. . . . Hollywood! (Los Angeles!!) Which means I will be with KATHERINE! (Who is my old roommate from UNCG, and one of my closest friends!) I am looking forward to being able to see her some during the month I will be there!

So there ya have it, a super condensed version of my week. Overall, a good one, other than this cold I have had, that is really starting to get old. We had PT (workouts) 4 days this week. It was so nice to be able to sleep till 6:30 AM on wednesday, the day we had off. Running hasn't been fun with not feeling good, but luckily they don't force me to kill myself.

Tomorrow myself and some of my wonderful friends are going to San Francisco. So you can look forward to another posting soon! Most of us are being split up here in a week for our projects, so we are looking forward to this trip to hang out with each other!

Later! =)