Today was Induction!

I haven't written much lately because nothing really exciting has happened until today. We had our official induction today. We all dressed up in our black and whites, then lined up in a gym and a couple people made speeches. It was kinda like high school graduation with-out the walking across the front.

Tomorrow I start my Fire Crew training, its from 8-5 from Friday to Wednesday. Its mostly classroom work with a little bit of out side work a couple of the days. I am really looking forward to getting this done with because we are heading out for our first spike next friday. I wrote in one of the earlier posts that we were going to New Orleans but that might change to a city in Mississippi and possibly be in New Orleans that last couple weeks of the spike. We really don't know much about our project anymore. We probably won't really know what we are doing until the end of next week right before we start driving out.

My team is becoming much closer with each other and we are all starting to understand how each other works. I think this is going to be a good year with our team and we are going to have a great time. Well i am off to work on some paperwork. Talk to you all later.

Diversity Training and other stuff

2/21/08

Today we had an all day diversity training class. It was the best diversity class i have ever taken, the presenters had the presentation down very well and kept everyone intrested with lots of activites and clips from a film. It was definitely the best class we have had and probably will have.

Yesterday we got about 1/2 in. of snow and there is a little bit left on the ground now. We are supposed to be getting a big ice storm tonight or over the next couple days which will be pretty cool. Other than the fact that a 20 hour ISP might be cancled this weekend because of it.

Tonight my team went to our first outside of the 'A' outing. We went to dinner and my team leader paid for it. It was weird seeing everyone not in the uniforms and in our regular clothes. We are all getting used to each other but there is still a little personalitly clashes that i think the people will eventually learn to accept. I think its going to be a pretty good year. Tonight i filled out an application to Univerity of Colorado- Colorado Springs, i will probably be sending it off in the next month or so and possibly even apply to some other schools as well. Here is a picture of my team at dinner tonight.

New York- Presidents Day Weekend

Over Presidents Day weekend three of my house mates and I went to New York to site-see and get some ISP's (individual service projects) done. We headed out Friday late afternoon with Rob driving his car. We were taking him and his mom up to see some family in Eastern New York. Rob dropped Chase, Justin, and myself off at a train station in New Jersey and took the train north to Penn Station- New York, the ticket was $8. We got to Penn Station and started walking north to our hostel which is up in Harlem. On our walk we walked through Time Square and then just kept walking along side of Central Park since we didn't think it would be a good idea to walk through at night. It ended up being about a 5 mile walk. So I am getting tired of writing so i am going to just list the things that i did.

Friday
- We hung out in the lounge with the other residents and went to bed some what earlier since we were really tired.

Saturday
- Woke up early to walk to the homeless shelter
- Got there at 10am and met all of the workers and some residents
- We went to the basement and cleaned and organized a room with all the clothing donations. We had to throw out about 75% of the clothes since they didn't have room to store it all.
- there were tons of really nice kinds of clothes and we had to throw away most of it.
- we were able to take any clothes that we wanted. i took a couple shirts and 11 ties, all Armani, Saks 5th, and Hermes.
- We stayed 9pm and then headed back to the hostel to hang out with the rest of the hostel again.

Sunday
- Woke up early to go on our day of touring NYC
- Took the subway from Harlem all the way to the Statue of Liberty which is at the bottom of Manhattan.
- We walked north from there, going through the financial district, empire state building, UN Building, McDonalds that was featured on the Travel Channel and ended in Times Square.
- We stayed in times square for the rest of the day which was about 4 till midnight. We walked around checking out stores and then went to the Hard Rock for dinner.
- Afterwards we met up with some other AmeriCorps people and went out to some bars for the night.

Monday
- We worked at the homeless shelter at 9am. They didn't have much work for us so we just worked till 1pm after the lunch hour of serving. We headed back to Maryland right from there.

If you want any more information just ask or e-mail me about them.

Here is the link to my pictures from the weekend. http://picasaweb.google.com/rtaylorb

Hey Grandpa

Hi Grandpa!
I am glad that you are enjoying my blog, I hear that Mike has been reading them to you. I thought you would like to know that there is a girl on my team who grew up in Big Lake and Montecello, I don't know if you would know the family but her name is Kelsey Walter. That is all i really know about where she is from though. We just had an ice storm yesterday, everything was covered in a thin sheet of ice. While we were driving on the highway back from University of Delaware it was sleeting and our windshield was icing over while we were driving. Earlier in the day we had fluries of snow in the afternoon and tomorrow we are supposed to get snow most of the day. I hope you enjoy hearing about my life in AmeriCorps and I hope to see you soon. I Love you and have a good night sleep.

Wild Firefighter Crew!!!

Today I found out i am officially on the wild firefighter crew! Out of about 100 people they could only pick 45 people to be on fire crew and i got in! There is about two people per team, so there is one other person on my team that is also on the fire crew.

Our First Assignment!!!!!!!!!!

My team just found out our first Project Assignment. To find out about it they had us follow clues around the campus until the final answer, which was each individual letter of the sponsor organization and the location cut up and we had to put them together in the correct order. My team will be innnnnnnnnnnn........................................... New Orleans with the "Hope Has A Face" foundation. Yayyyyyy! I am really excited for this, i was so looking forward to going down to the gulf and helping out. We will be mainly building houses with a project called "100 houses in 100 days," as far as I know it will be framing, roofing, and drywalling. Salvation Army will be the ones providing food and shelter to us, we will be living in Salvation Army PODS. From what i hear those are the same things as those big white PODS you can rent to store your stuff in while moving houses. Well that's it, Talk to you later!

Chicken Alfredo Pasta Dinner

Tonight we had Chicken Alfredo Pasta dinner, all made fresh with no packets. Here are some pictures of us sitting down for dinner which we do most nights and Rob doing dishes right afterwards.

Watching the food cooking

Dennis cooking the Alfredo sauce

All of us eating our dinner

Rob and his girl doing the dishes