Lovin it.

Okay so, we went on our work place tours on Wednesday the fourth (Riverside school, Huntsville Public school, Muskoka Heritage place, Arrowhead Provincial Park, Parks and Cemeteries, The Table Food Bank, The Chamber of Commerce, and Family Focus). Then when we got home we choose our top three. My three were 1. Arrowhead 2. Huntsville Public School and 3. Muskoka Heritage Place. After we had finished picking our three and eaten dinner we headed over to the bowling alley. We told them that we were Katimavik volunteers and they graciously gave us 50% off. It was only $5.00 each for shoes and two games, which is awesome. We played one game and then played a game of pool and then played a second game. In my lane there was Fannie, Me, Marjolaine, and Loan, we all did alright. Then after bowling we headed home and passed the foam football around the living room for quite some time. Then on Thursday we had free time in the morning so Melissa and I made some Pizza dough for Calzones. We then had an Interview Skills Workshop at the YMCA, then walked home. We had a blitz clean after dinner and also had calender planning. Before we started calender planning we played a little ice breaker game where you tell everyone something that they didn't know about you before. One of our groups members Scott told us that he had a machete in the closet upstairs and many more knives at his home. Leah then proceeded to tell him 'thanks for sharing that and I'll need to have that after this meeting' Katimavik does not allow people to have knives in the house. If they brought any they need to surrender them to the PL so they are in good hands at all times. She will then give them back to the person if they ask to use if for a specific task and then they have to give it back to her after they are done using it. We were all in shock when he told us that, that is pretty scary.... But don't worry he brought it for camping. Anyways after the calender planning and what not Scott went up to his room and got the machete. I wanted to take a picture of it so Ben was holding it near Marc's neck as a joke while I took a picture and Leah freaked out and said some pretty funny stuff. On Friday Melissa and I were house managers. We had interviews in the morning at the Algonquin Theater. Then we made our calzone/mini pizza things. Jenna also came over and we watched a documentary on cleaning products, then we learned how to make our own. I also got my job placement which is Huntsville Public School. So I was happy about that. Jenna also went over CCK structure with us. Then we made dinner, and had a dependency dinner which was SO FUN. I was blind, and Marc was blind. Then Melissa was mute, Fannie was fully able, and everyone else was either pareplegeic (either only able to use arms or legs), or quadriplegic (cant use and limbs). So what ended up  happening was Melissa, Fannie, Me, and Marc served people dinner. Then Fannie helped everyone eat drink and what not. I fed Marjolaine (a quadriplegic) while I was blind. It was too too funny. Mike couldn't use his arms so he picked up a spoon in his mouth and then would scoop up the rice and hole it out for Kelsey to eat. Also too too funny. Overall it was extremely fun and we all want to do it again. We were thinking that we should do one dependency dinner per month. On Saturday we had free time in the morning so we woke up at 10 and headed over to Lions Lookout to try out our $7.50 snowboard from the Restore. It was really fun, but on my last go down the hill I fell on my tail bone and it really hurt. For the next few days it hurt to move even the slightest bit. But whatever it was worth it. That day Leah our PL was gone so we had a really slack day. We made some french posters and labelled like everything in the house French and in English. I was in charge of Sienna (the dog) for the day, so I walked and fed her. Shes supper cute, and listens pretty good. We also went swimming at the Summit Center and planned for CCK. On Sunday (Jan. 15) Linda, the Project Coordinator, was here to give us some forms to fill out, and to tell us about her job. She stayed for dinner and then left, after she was gone we had a blitz clean and made action plans for ourselves. Then we had our very first CCK, I thought that it would take forever and be horrendous but it was actually not that bad. We managed to plan two weeks worth of stuff so we didn't have to have a CCK the following Sunday. Monday (Jan. 16) was my first day at work, it only takes three minutes to walk there! When i got there the principle, Ross, gave me a mini tour and then dropped me off at Jolene M-P's classroom. She is one of the teachers I will be working with, she is the arts teacher. So the arts include visual art, dance, drama, and music. I work with her on day 1, 2, and 3. In the evening we went to our first French class at Riverside Public School. It was a bit frustrating at first because it was an intermediate class and the teacher only talked in french and we didn't understand anything that she was saying. However near the end of the class the teacher came at sat with all of us Katimavik noobs and had us fill out a worksheet and taught us some really useful stuff. So all in all the class was pretty good. On Tuesday (Jan. 17) I went to work for the day, Leah left for her well deserved time off, and then we went sledding at Lions Lookout after dinner. It was really fun, we went for like three hours. On Wednesday (Jan. 18) I went to work and was supposed to work with the second teacher (Cheryl Schmid) but she wasn't there, so I ended up in the kindergarten room. We did a bunch of little crafts, read some books, and best of all went outside and played on the ice slide. It was really fun, all the little kids are so cute. We had free time at night so Ben, Melissa, and I went to the library to get some movies, then to Tim Hortons, then to Zellers. It was really nice to get out of the house and go sit at Tim Hortons just the three of us, it felt good to have something other then our living room to look at. It was overall a good day. On Thursday (Jan. 19) I worked with Cheryl untill 12:00. It was really fun I was working with the kids at the word wall making up different games for us to play with the words. The word wall is a wall with different words on it, the point of it is to create a fun way to learn the words. The kids really liked all of my games, so that was good. I only worked a half day because we had our Fitness evaluations at Motivations Fitness. We had a push up, sit up, flexibility, and running test. They also took our measurements and recorded our BMI and BMR. I was actually pretty please with my results. I got 42.5/50 on the running so I was happy with that. It was also Cody's 19th birthday. It was the first day I missed home. On Friday (Jan. 20) I worked with Jolene M-P, I leveled books, burned disc's, and helped out in her classes. The usual. At night Ben and I made Cinnamon Rolls. They took forever to make, and it took forever to clean up the dishes but they were pretty good. Everybody devoured them and we were pretty proud because we had no clue what we were doing when we made them. We just winged it. On Saturday (Jan. 21) we were volunteering at a dog sled derby in Haliburton. It was an hour and a half drive away, but it was a really fun day. Most of my group didn't have any fun, but i really enjoyed myself. I was helping run dog sled teams to and from the Start/finish line all day so I got to meet all of the dogs and mushers. It was really neat to see the dogs doing what they love to do. On Sunday (Jan. 22) I got up pretty early and we went to the Muskoka Loppet at Arrowhead Provincial Park. Fannie, Marc, Mike, and I were traffic control. It was actually pretty fun. Me and Marc were dancing in the parking lot and I was making huge hand gestures to indicate to people where to park. It was pretty cold out though, my eyelashes were frozen. We finished pretty early so we had some of the free lunch and then called Leah to come pick us up. All of our other group members started later, ended later, and were marshals not traffic control. When we got home we cleaned up our bedrooms and then headed over to Trinity United church to help them take down a stage from a concert. We waited for about half an hour for the concert to finish (which was actually really good) and then helped for about ten minutes. I didn't really see how it was necessary for us to go and help but whatever we represented Katimavik so that was good. It was also Fannies birthday so Leah bought a cake mix and I secretly made it while the house managers were making dinner. Then we presented it at dinner and it actually tasted really good. It was Carrot cake with cream cheese icing, umm umm good. On Monday (Jan. 23) I went to work like usual, then when Catherine got home we quickly blew up balloons and put them on Fannies bed and put up two Happy Birthday banners above her bed. Then she walked into the room and we all yelled Happy Birthday! After that Ben, Catherine, and I ran over to the gym and worked out for a while and then came home and ate some dinner. Then we played some french games did some calender planning and went to bed. And Dinners ready now soooo... That's that for now.

Time of my Life.

So there's a lot to say and not a lot of time so I'm going to be a little vague in this post but it's better then nothing. So to start our true colors workshop was cancelled because the instructor was sick. So instead we took a drive to Algonquin park and went to the visitor center. Algonquin is HUGE, its like almost 8,000 square kilometers. It has tons of wildlife and canoeing spots and hiking trails and everything. The visitor center is really nice and was fun to walk around in. After Algonquin we did road maps (basically a drawing that represents where we are coming from, where we are now, and where we are headed) and then did the ECAL (Eco-citizenship active living program) over view. Then on Saturday we learned how to make bread and pizza dough, that was really fun. Our bread turned out perfectly! And then we had house managing 101. Sunday we pilled in the van and drove an hour to Orillia, a near by town, and met up with the three other groups in our area. We met at the Orillia recreation center and we basically went over all of the rules of Katimavik. It was as fun as it could have been, we had a tail gate party for lunch (in the freezing cold). Then yesterday (Monday) we went mass grocery shopping which was pretty fun, ran home made lunch (sandwiches) and then we went Cross Country Skiing  at Arrowhead Provincial Park which was the funnest/funniest thing ever!! It was so GREAT! Everyone was falling everywhere and it was hilarious, and then at the end we found a jump and almost everyone went off it it and no one stayed standing for much longer then the landing. It was sooooooo funny! Best thing yet. Loved it. After we finished laughing our asses off we crammed all of our skis and such back into the van and returned them from where we had rented them. The rental place was really nice and actually let all of us (the 9 of us that skied... everyone else walked) rent all of our stuff for free. We then scrambled home and me and Catherine pulled out the leftovers for everyone to quickly eat before our food safety class at Soul Sistas, a local restaurant (very good food! very healthy! ). This morning we woke up the earliest yet 7:15am and headed out to our very first volunteer project. We spent all day at Habitat for Humanity helping them out. Taboo a resort in Gravenhurst is remodeling a couple of their floors so half of us went over there and emptied out all the furniture from all the rooms loaded into box trucks. That was hard work! Especially because we all could barely walk before we begun because we were so sore from skiing. We (me, Loan, Scott, Melissa, and Kelsey ) could not wait for lunch time. When it finally arrived we all packed into one of the ladies van and headed back to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. We had some strange pizza there, but it was alright. The one had pineapple, tons of onions, and black olive. Strange I tell yah! Then after lunch I changed positions and hung back at the ReStore. We took off a bunch of knickknacks off some shelves, then stripped the paper off of them. Then we put new paper and re organized the knickknacks on the shelf. Exciting stuff. I told my friend that I would try and find the ugliest knickknack possible and send him a picture but it was so hard to decide which thing was the ugliest one. Maybe I'll post the pictures later. After we finished that we got the final truck load of furniture from the resort and unloaded that into the back of the ReStore. And that was that, we then came home and ate some very delicious spaghetti. Tomorrows our work place tours, Woohoo! And that's that for now.

A New Beginning.

What a long day yesterday was. I was supposed to be at the Calgary airport at 9:15 am but received a phone call at 7:00am saying that I had been given the wrong information and the flight was actually at 1pm. So I got to sleep in a bit, thank god. After saying good bye to my parents and going through security, I sat down and waited at gate A18. I saw a girl in a Katimavik shirt pass by and I said hi but didn't make to much effort to start a conversation. Later on she came back with another girl in a brown Katimavik jacket and stood in front of me and yelled for all other Katimavik people to join us. Then we all gathered and waited in line together to board the plane. When we got on the plane we had the best seats. There were 6 of us (that we knew of at the time) and we were all grouped together on the plane. The two boys together and the four girls together. We each had a seat in between us too. It was fantastic. Once we landed we discovered two more Katimavik people had been on our flight. We were all kinda stressed about how to get to our buses because the instructions did not make very much sense. But as soon as we got our luggage and walked out of the doors there were many Katimavik people holding signs up and they took us to the meeting place for the bus. The bus toke a while to depart because a flight from Winnipeg was delayed. We ended up leaving the airport around 10:30pm instead of at 8:45pm as scheduled. That was one LONG buss ride let me tell you. We had to stop at two other stations to pick up fellow Katimavikers and then drop off three other groups at their houses before we finally reached our new home. When we got here and got all of our luggage inside it was around 4:15am. We then had a quick meeting and went to bed around 5:45am. This morning we got to sleep in because we didn't have anything planned until 12:30 which was very nice. even though we got to wake up late we still didn't have much sleep. The day commenced with lunch, two kinds of soup and two kinds of wraps, all vegan. We have two vegans in the house hold which I think is awesome. There are in total 12 people living in this one house. Four from Quebec, four from Alberta, one from Nova Scotia, one from Prince Edward Island, and one from Winnipeg. They all seem awesome :) There are three rooms, two boys in one, four boys in the other, and then the six girls in one room. There are three closets in our room, with some hangers. So aside from my coats and hoodies, I will be living out of my suitcase for the next six months. FUN. Our house has a big kitchen, a living room, the three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, the project leader's (PL) room, an unfinished basement, and a garage. One other thing that is really great about this place is that our PL has a dog! Which is super fantastic! Her (the dogs) name is Sienna and she's really funny. Today we had to go on a scavenger hunt around the town of Huntsville and take pictures of the stuff we found. My favorite picture of the day is the one above of me high fiving some random lady that was walking down the street. We met some really nice people today and got a good feel for the town. I think I'm going to like this whole small town thing, but we will see. This evening we had a talk about roles, responsibilities, and expectations. Are our awesome posters from that are below. After creating the master pieces we learned a little french. Tomorrow we have to be up and ready by 9am because we are going to a 'True Colors' workshop at the YMCA. I think that'll be fun. And that's that for now.