Mondays

Good day today.  I love when the week starts off well.

So Mondays are our AmeriCorps team days.  We get together with all 12 of us spread out at different agencies to go to trainings, discuss issues, troubleshoot, and do service projects.  Today was a service project day.  We all met at The Compass Center in downtown Seattle which has many services for homeless adults (showers, food, etc.).  We worked specifically with Operation: Sack Lunch.  We cooked and served a hot lunch to about 50 people indoors.  Then we took the same hot lunch and served about 150 people outside under the I-5 overpass.  Operation: Sack Lunch provides HEALTHY meals for people on the street.  They use no msg and try to avoid high fructose corn syrup and trans fats.  Today they had pasta with chicken, a side of a vegetable medley, salad (with fresh veggies), fruit salad (with fresh fruit), a banana, and some juice.  So I spent about 2 hours chopping onions.  My eyes burned a bit.  It's been a little while since I served at a soup kitchen like this.  Maybe a year or so.  But it was cool.  Especially serving a hot lunch to people outside.  They were lined up around the corner by the time we got there with the food.  I saw at least one person in a suit with a briefcase who came to eat.  And there were many people carrying big bags and sleeping bags on their backs.  It was cool that we got to volunteer there today because they were SUPER short staffed and didn't think they were going to get everything done.

After that, we went to the University District to one of the homeless youth drop-in centers and heard from two long term service providers who shared their wisdom with us.  These two men really knew what they were talking about and had some really great advice to give all of us who were just starting out.  They have just had so much experience.  And yeah, I'm sure they still make mistakes, but it was helpful and encouraging to hear from them.

Once I got home from work, there was this free movie that I wanted to go see.  It's called Ethnic Notions and is about racism and and goes through American history tracing a lot of stereotypes.  It sounded awesome.  One of my roommates decided to come with me.  So we hopped on the bus and started walking to the address.  When we get to the address, it is a hotel.  So we went inside and they said some other people had asked about the same movie but they had never heard about it.  We ran into some other people who were looking for it also.  So we walked around a bit trying to find.  After 10 minutes or so, we called one of our other roommates to look up the place on the internet.  She gave us the ACTUAL address from a different website.  So we walked there.  By the time we got there, the movie had started 45 minutes earlier and the doors were locked.  There were two other people standing outside and the woman apparently had skipped work and traveled kind of far to see the film.  She was not happy.  So we had a little adventure.  So instead of watching the movie, we went and had some Indian food at this place called Roti.  I have never had Indian food before.  I had Saag Paneer which is creamy spinach with some kind of cheese over rice.  We also had samosas and naan.  It was pretty good.  LOTS of spices going on in my mouth.  And I got tons of leftovers.  So it was good, even though we didn't end up seeing the movie.

So today was a just an all around good day.  Oh, and I got a package from one of my favorite people in the whole world which made me smile.  And I got this other piece of mail that I had been waiting for for a few weeks now.  That made me happy as well.  I know Mondays are usually rough days for some people.  But this Monday was pretty sweet.  Good day, today, good day.