Yeah, yeah, I’m late again

I recognize I used to be pretty good about updating this on weekends, but it’s just same old, same old and there’s nothing to update.

The swamp is back and the only thing that’s changing day to day is the number of mosquito bites I’ve collected. Today, we’re supposed to get flash floods this afternoon, so the dock will probably be floating again shortly.

For about the past two weeks or so, I’ve tried my foot at jogging. I started walking regularly for about an hour, mostly just to get off campus for a little. I decided to try jogging and man, it hasn’t worked.

I had the usual getting-used-to-it pains at first, which were painful but oh well. However, after about 4-5 days, my right knee started feeling really, really bad.

Perhaps it’s coincidence, but my right knee is the one where I tore the PCL a little – not enough for surgery – about 10 years ago (I was safe and went on to score a run.) And then two years ago, it’s the same one that came up severely bruised after the horse flipped over on me at the ranch.

With that in mind, it seemed like maybe running wasn’t the thing to do, but I have still been trying to do it. But two days after feeling like my right leg was going to snap off, the left one followed.

The pain is different; on the right leg, it’s more on the side. On the left, it’s slightly below the kneecap, so I’m not quite symmetrical in my pain. No clue on if that’s good or bad.

On Saturday, when I drove the Red Cross truck again, I could barely get in or out, so I knocked off totally on Sunday. However, yesterday, I felt just as bad so I went ahead and tried to move again for an hour. I figured if I even tried to jog I’d probably fall over, so I just walked. Slowly. It took a solid hour to do just the part where I had run previously.

Today is Tuesday (Happy Birthday, Laurie!) and, after the painful trip from the RV (the stairs are scary – I now fully understand and appreciate the whole “grab bar” thing), I made it to the dining tent, where Steve immediately told me I needed to see a doctor.

I won’t, of course, but the thing was, I thought I was doing better today. Once I get going, I can gimp along all right; it’s just the getting going that is really slow.

After walking last night, I sat at my desk with ice packs and watched the last of the Stanley Cup Final. I had my feet up, the computer streaming and the ice packs just sitting there, something like 10 p.m. or so.

It’s the church office and no one was there, so I felt right at home. Since the internet doesn’t reach my RV, my office pretty much is my home on the weekends, so I didn’t think anything about kicking back last night.

All of a sudden – I think it was right after Boston scored late – I looked up and my supervisor was walking up. He saw me and bust burst into laughter. I felt like Jake from “Major League” with the ice packs.

Anyway, I am thinking I’m not going to be a runner. This stinks because it’s something I could do on the cheap. And I don’t get it. I know running – or jogging very slowly, as I was doing – is harder on your knees, but I did the elliptical for hours in Jakarta and was fine. I don’t understand how jogging a total of .8 mile – interspersed with walking – is just not agreeing with me.

So now I’m a concert promoter

Recently, I asked Jen if she planned on making tea. Last year, in addition to Gatorade, water and lemonade, we always had tea and I miss it. So, now that we’re swinging into a groove, it seemed like a legitimate question.

She kind of blinked and said, “Oh, I asked Steve about that and he said you did it.”

So now I am the Official Tea Maker of Hope Village. It’s “sweet, but not Southern sweet.”

Somehow, I wind up doing all kinds of stuff like that. When someone asked me about it this morning as I was wiping down tables, I said every time I do something that I think isn’t in my job description, I realize that I really don’t have a job description.

PR is, though, and honestly, you can really stick everything under PR. It’s sort of one of those catch-all things that encompasses chatting it up over breakfast with volunteers or helping someone track down a lost cell phone as I carry a toiletry bag in the other hand.

Two weeks ago, I found myself fielding questions thrown at me in the shower: “I’m sorry to bother you now, but …”

And along about that time, I added “concert promoter” to my list, too.

Last year, we’d had a supporter who knows a lot of local musicians offer to mix up a little get-together, like maybe music by the fire pit. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do it then, but kept it in mind for this year.

Independent of that, we also had an oil group – Hess & Halliburton – offer to grill for us. And for some reason, we couldn’t follow through with that, either.

So this year, once we hit our stride, we figured why not now? And decided to combine the two and have a cookout and concert.

And since that loosely falls under PR – somehow – I got to be the promoter. Yay, another hat!

Really, it was very low-key. The cookout folks (burgers, brats and dogs) could handle 120, and at first we thought we’d be pretty close to that count so I didn’t push it, But we had to postpone a day due to a conflict in the church (no mosquitoes) and therefore about 60 volunteers headed home that morning.

The up side of that was I got to invite more people from the community, so it was cool.

And just illustrating how much I own the media, I was 3-for-3 the night of, with one of those even appearing in the morning to promote it. I looked up and there he was – somehow I’d left my phone in the RV and hadn’t realized they’d been calling and texting to set up an appointment. When I didn’t answer, he just came on over, for which I was grateful.

Anyway, the event went just fine. I was a little disappointed that not all of the people who came to mooch food bothered to stay for the music, but that’s how it works out sometimes.

And now, I get to do an encore – we’re planning the same type of event on July 23.

Faking it

I’m running a bit late this week, although there’s not much of an excuse. I’m obsessing over a little house in Monticello and have been doing way too much research on that. It’s a long shot that I follow through with it, so it’s really not healthy.

Anyway, we’ve finally had two days of sunshine after an eon of rain. Steve rigged up some kind of pump to pump out the lake so, overnight, my RV went from lakefront to swampland again. At this point, it’s hard to keep up.

Last week, I helped out at a disaster drill put on by the county. It was a pretend plane crash at the airport. I was media. Afterward, the airport director (the real one) pulled me aside and said it looked like I'd known what I was doing. He said I asked real questions. Yup.

Heck, I even asked for titles, spellings of names and all that. He, along with the PIO and incident commander, was pretty much shocked to have been put through a realistic news conference.

The others portraying media were kind of nitwits. We'd been given a list of questions and one person was so focused on one of them (phone number for families) that she was obsessed with it. Every person she tried to talk to she'd say "But what about the FAMILIES!!??"

It's like, sweetie, chill out. That's important, but it's going to be the last line of the story. Let the PIO tell us first how many people are injured, killed or whatever (we ended up with six critical but no deaths, so her question was even less important) and, well, you know ... what happened. Everything he started to say, she'd cut in "What about the FAMILIES?"

It's like, what about them? Thirty pretend people on the plane, none killed; more people will be interested in if the airport is closed and if fake terrorism is involved.

It was kind of funny, really. There really always is one (at least) in the scrum. (And Dana, I bet you’re thinking of the same name that I am thinking. Rich, isn’t it?) But I was asking all kinds of stuff, like that would show I'd done research on it and was gathering information from elsewhere, like asking the specs of the plane and all that.

It's supposed to be a live drill but I walked right up to the “plane,” through the “contaminated area” and could have gotten on if I wanted. No one told me to stay back.

When I mentioned that in the hot wash (the review right after on how everyone thinks it went) after, the first responder said oh, but in the real thing you wouldn't have been there. I said maybe, but I was and no one did anything.

He got really belligerent, saying no way would media get that close. I said again, well, I was. That was, after all, the point of the drill -- for it to be real. In real life, someone should have pointed me to where I could be safely. As it was, I wasn't interfering, but I was clearly not supposed to be there, but none of the responders asked me to move.

Later, the other pretend media were traipsing all around the “triage” area – where they had NO business, because they were interfering with rescue operations – and again, no one asked them to leave. Lessons learned - set up your perimeter!

But, even though it was a drill and I really didn’t have to write a story, it was a rush. I really do miss reporting, researching and writing.

I got to write one story this week, on one of the teams that came through. It’s on the website (www.hopevillagend.org) but I have a hard time pushing it on anyone else except the local paper.

The media is funny here. The local flood writer at the paper is absolutely awesome, but the rest of its staff, with few exceptions, isn’t full of crack journalists. The paper itself does, probably, as best it can with the resources it has, but news-wise, it’s kind of lacking.

There was this huge news conference about two weeks ago about a downtown project and the front-page story – with a jump – was a straight play-by-play of the newser. No analysis whatsoever. Just “X said that it would be good. ‘It will be good for the city,’ X said. Y also said it will be good for the city. ‘Yes, it is a good thing for our city,’ Y said.”

A straight report of what they said (in order of appearance, or, in the case of Z, non-appearance: “Z, who was not able to attend, had his remarks read by V.’” But nothing about what it really meant to the city.

Sometimes, I am thankful for the paper, though. I can send a news release and the paper will run it verbatim. Without checking a fact. To me, the fact-checking copy editor, that is just so very wrong, but for my purposes it’s very helpful.

We have two TV stations. One has had amazing coverage of the flood, including, at the time of the flood, broadcasting something like 80 hours straight – even as the homes of the news director, anchor and other reporters were flooding.

Their ongoing coverage has been phenomenal as well. We had a story today that was just well done. http://www.kxnet.com/story/22554644/hope-village-milestone  It was close to two minutes, which, really, is unheard of. (It was a good milestone, though. Very newsworthy.)

The other TV station is more of a starter station, but most things I get on there go to Bismarck, too. But I rarely get more than 30 seconds, no matter how much film they get.

Note to self: It's not naptime

This is not my handiwork (I tend to list the states) but I thought it was funny.

Bonnie found this in her collection of old programs. I think it's from 1995.

Piling it on

I finally found something to do in my free time: volunteer. And in disaster recovery, no less.

Yes, I work more than full time in it already, but this is a bit different: For Hope Village, I rarely leave the campus. Yes, I’ve been out an about a few times, but really, I don’t spend a lot of time in the flood zone.

The Red Cross has decided to resume its sandwich service in the flooded areas here. They did it all last year, but despite me telling them I was ERV certified (that means I took the class to drive the emergency response vehicle and a subsequent defensive driving courts; just try signing up for one of those without getting a ticket first – they think you’re nuts) no one contacted me.

But this year, I got a call early on and went out on Saturday for four hours. Well, maybe a little less than that because I went over the whole map with the guy who did the morning route.The thing was, staring at the map didn’t do much for me. I am totally lost in the area. I know a few of the neighborhoods but not many.

The river snakes through the city; more correctly, I guess, is the city was built around the river. It crosses at least twice, which is why the flood was so devastating. I mean, it was a  FEMA level-5 disaster. That’s the same as Katrina, but no one really knows it.

And driving around, loaded up with sandwiches, water, donuts, chips and water, I spent a couple of hours touring the flooded areas. And some of them just looked horrible. Not even touched at all. It’s just so depressing since we’re really trying to get done this summer. The building season is so short here.

At Hope Village, we do have lots of volunteers coming to work, though. This week it’s not too busy – four teams early in the week, with more coming in – but starting next week we have three solid weeks of at or near capacity. I really hope we’re able to knock out some of the homes.

The rain let up for the weekend, so it was a nice time to get out but because it’s been so crappy lately – and predicted to be again – I don’t think too many people were out and about.

The boardwalk to my RV was more soaked than it’s been, which was quite a feat because it’s been so swampy.

So I wasn’t too disappointed when I wound up keeping my supervisor’s dogs again. He went to Baltimore to do a wedding and the person was supposed to keep them got called out of town on a family emergency.

I’m now at his house with five dogs, but the tradeoff is I have running water and a private bathroom until Tuesday. These things are drastically underrated.

With the exception of the puppy breath, it’s been a great weekend. I’ve been re-watching season four of Arrested Development, writing some grant reviews, playing with spaniels and handing out free food in the flood zone.

It might not be all that exiting, but it’s not too bad, really.