Day 32 (And Another Blurb on the Kindness of Others)

So the weekend was crazy, as I expected.  The craziness continues for a couple more days, then it is back to the normal insanity. 

As far as the countdown goes, a couple big things over the weekend.  All of our hotel and train reservations are now complete.  That's a huge deal, considering how hard it can be to navigate foreign hotel websites.  The wifey and I also came to a realization this weekend.  We only have two weekends at home before we leave for the trip!  CRAP!!!  The weekend before we leave, we are taking the dogs to her mom's in Arkansas.  The weekend before that we are going to my folks for Mother's Day as well as to pick up their dog to take to her mom's.  That means we only have two weekends to get everything done for the trip.  It is amazing how that can both suck and be exciting at the same time.  With work stuff to do tonight and tomorrow, church Wednesday night, and the 2o4D FFA Tourney Thursday night, It's gonna be a busy weekend of doing trip stuff.  It'll be worth it, though.

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I spent this past Saturday at work (all day).  Not that that is terribly unusual.  I generally have to do something at least work related pretty much every day, or at least every weekend.  But this Saturday I spent the day working on our latest construction project.  We are working on a 100X60 foot storage building.  Something we are desperately in need of.  No big whoop.  Companies like ours build building like this all the time.  What is amazing about this project, though, is that by the time it is completely finished it will have cost us a grand total of about $3000.  That is out of pocket cost to us.  Actual cost to build the building will end up somewhere in the $15,000-$17,000 range (including what the labor costs would be).  How did we manage that?  We have received, to this point, $9000 in donations and donated materials to build this thing.  Even better than that, we will not have to pay a penny in labor costs!  This Saturday there were 23 other people out there with me working on this project.  With the exception of our maintenance worker, not a one of them was getting paid (Including me, I guess.  Right now I have somewhere in the neighborhood of roughly 700 hours of comp time I have built up over the past year.). 

People continue to amaze me.  These folks were doing hard manual labor.  For those of you that know anything about construction, we were setting the trusses and lathing boards on Saturday.  Not a fun or easy project.  And all these people were there in mid-50's temperatures and working right through about 2 hours of rain, all the while joking, laughing, and never once complaining. 

I write all this not in the hopes that it will inspire any of you to support our work.  But as a reminder.  People are good.  People still help each other.  Sometimes I get mired in the absolute horror of the stories some of our kids face.  You combine that with the "world coming to an end" daily news reports, and it can get you a little depressed.  But, there is good out there.  Don't forget that.  And don't forget to show that to others.