End of Week Two

It started raining last night and rained steadily all night long.  At the first drop of rain, the roof vent closed cutting off all airflow through the RV.  However, we were now hooked up to electricity so the use of the air conditioning prevented another difficult night like we had this past weekend.

It was still raining when we got up.  Looking out the window, the dirt roads snaking around the campus were now riddled with mud puddles.  And we were supposed to move to a different location today.

The forecast called for steady rain until about 4pm.  But most of our work is inside so we should be able to keep working.  I was sandblasting outside to keep the mess out of the shop, but this can be done inside if necessary.

And that is what we did.  Unfortunately, this project didn’t go so well.  I wasn’t able to finish all the vents because the sand was wet.  Ron painted what I had done and discovered this morning that there were some areas that weren’t covered well enough, so he spray painted them again.  Bad idea.  The new paint wrinkled up over yesterday’s paint and I ended up with all the vents back on the floor to sand blast them all over again.

Austin brought a bag of dry sand which worked much better.  After going over all the vents, I had sand all over the shop and sand in my eyes, ears, nose, and most of my clothing, including small piles in my shoes.  I’ve been digging sand granules out of my ears for the entire day.

Since the remaining paint was still a bit wet, we reinstalled the vents in the cafeteria to get them out of the way and to let them dry over the weekend.  A couple were just too wet to install so the kids will have to live with gaping holes in the ceiling for a few days.

We took a break and while we were sitting there talking to Austin, Lee came in with Amanda, their communications director. She wanted to talk to us about SOWERs and the projects we were involved in for their internal newsletter. So we spent the next hour or so in sort-of an interview.  After that, it was time for lunch.  And the afternoon was reserved for moving the RVs to a different location, so we really didn’t get much work done today.

The women worked in the thrift store this morning.

It was still raining when we finished lunch, so we moved in the rain.  For us it’s a relatively simple matter of disconnecting the shore power and the water hose, hanging the bikes on the RV, rolling up the awning, and driving away.  So it took us about 15 minutes.  The others were a bit more entrenched, having set up a pet fence and more stuff outside, so it took them longer.  Our new location looks like it is in a hayfield. Complete with the hay mowed into windrows.  Yesterday, the grass was 18 inches high and we expressed concern about moving RVs into the tall grass and having to slog through this for the next few days.  They graciously mowed the grass.  Now it is only six inches high with the remainder of the grass laying on top.

So it was a short day today.  We drove to Whiteville this afternoon and walked around town for a while, got some groceries, did some other shopping, and made dinner in the Walmart parking lot.  Whiteville appears to be trying to restore the classic walkable downtown, so there are several interesting shops to browse.  At the end of this stretch was a pawn shop.  I haven’t set foot in a pawn shop in decades and it will probably be decades before I do it again, if ever.  This one looked like a fortress from the outside, with heavy mesh over the windows and doors.  Inside it felt a little like a prison.  The store was largely empty save for a case of guns, another case of knives, a shelf of ancient power tools, and three older televisions.  We didn’t stay long. 

We took a walk at a nearby park before returning to mud-ville.  The rain finally stopped but things are quite wet.  The forecast for this weekend is not looking great, with thunderstorms on Saturday.  We’ll have to see where we end up.