Rain and other weather
Rain kept us another week in Lake Arthur, so our leaving date is now Sunday morning. We are so glad we stayed! A cold front came through and stalled out, and it rained more from Thursday through Monday than we have seen the whole eight months we’ve been here.
When we arrived, we could see daylight under each section of the pier in front of the cottage. After three days of steady rain, the lake level rose enough to be lapping at the edge of the top of the pier.
The rain overwhelmed one section of the roof in the cottage, so we spent Friday through Sunday setting up buckets for ever proliferating leaks, and we finally had to mop up water all over the floor by Monday morning (we’d had the foresight to move all the furniture out of that area).
It was harder that the temperatures were quite cold again too. We found ourselves back to huddling near the space heaters and leaving the heat lamp on in the bathroom so we wouldn’t freeze. Were we ever appreciative of the new hot water heater for showers! Overall we’ve been longing for temperate weather.
Before the rain, we had breathtakingly beautiful weather – in the 60s at night and 70s during the day, with 20 to 30 mph winds every day. We spent all possible time on the back porch in the rocking chairs, laptops set up, getting our work done. It was truly wonderful that Chelsea was able to bring her laptop and walk over to work outside the dining hall on the wireless Internet.
CRWRC
The campground here has been full of members of the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, known as the “green shirts” (yes, they all wear green shirts with their agency logo when on the job), or the Disaster Relief Services. The CRWRC is an agency of the Christian Reformed Church. With headquarters in Ontario Canada and Byron Center MI, CRWRC is affiliated with some big names in the disaster relief arena, like the American and Canadian Red Cross and the Salvation Army.
DRS collects together volunteer teams who go to specified sites to help in disaster recovery. The teams in Texas and Louisiana have responded to recovery efforts after Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike.
Right now the primary thrust is giving relief to homeowners who were victims of fraud – paying workmen and companies for work that was never done or never completed, or paying for work that was so shoddily done as to render the house uninhabitable. We heard stories like the house where all the electrical outlets had been covered over by drywall, or the house that electrical work was done, but when checked out, it wasn’t connected to anything.
We’ve been really impressed with the resources and primarily the organization of the group here. Each location has rooms or trailers for the workers as accommodations; a site manager; a trailer full of tools that the workers need each day (the tools are checked out in the morning and then checked back in and inventoried each night); cooks to cover all the meals; work clothes for each volunteer with daily laundry; and transportation to each job site for each worker.
Normally the volunteers are at a site for three weeks, although that can be lengthened or shortened. Volunteers are responsible for getting themselves to each location, but then are covered for accommodations, food, laundry, and so on at the site itself.
Sites are not always near where the group is working – right now this group is staying in Lake Arthur but working in Lake Charles – a full hour away. A former group was staying in Lake Charles but working in Jennings, a full hour away. Everything depends on where they are able to set up living accommodations for the group, and that can change.
The CRWRC pays for the wireless connections here, so Chelsea needed to check with the site manager, Jean, to get the password. Not only did she give Chelsea the password after checking with headquarters, but she invited us to dinner one evening, too. Dinner was a wonderful event – it was great fun to be a part of this big group – about 24 volunteers altogether, who live and work together.
The food was the first non-Cajun food we’ve eaten in about eight months – it was standard midwestern fare. There may have been as many as six different dishes offered, not including coffee and dessert. Needless to say, we loved it (and they gave us the leftovers – enough for another small meal for both of us!).
Justin and Kathy
Though nearly all the volunteers are retired, this group has one young married couple, Justin and Kathy. Just over a year younger than Chelsea, they have spent the last seven months on the road, traveling from site to site as volunteers for CRWRC. After dinner they adjourned to our cottage with us, and we stayed up until almost one a.m. talking.
We thoroughly enjoy our time with them. They are really intelligent and articulate, and are intellectually curious, with a great sense of humor. That’s a great combination. Justin graduated from school not quite two years ago, and was a newspaper reporter while waiting for Kathy to graduate.
Justin will be following Kathy to Boulder, Colorado, where she’s embarking next September on a six-year graduate program leading straight to a doctorate in Physics. Her particular love is quantum mechanics, and she’d really like to work with atoms in her research. Her goal is to do pure research.
We checked out the Yacht Club with them on Saturday (Kathy crews on racing sailboats), but the rain was really dreary so we bailed on any more sightseeing and headed back to the campground. I’d been having a lot of trouble with Google related products on my laptop, and the whole computer had slowed down to a crawl. Justin suggested we have a “geek day” and work on my computer.
Computer cleanup and repair
I spent some serious time on my laptop over the next few days. I combed through my programs and uninstalled everything I’m not using. After that, I combed through all my other directories for files and directories I no longer want, and found more files that were bits and pieces of uninstalled programs. I deleted the whole lot of them.
After the cleanup, I then ran my Windows registry repair, followed up with defragmenting my hard drive. To my dismay, it appears that I have some damaged segments on my hard drive, though it’s less than two years old. Windows was able to repair a few of them, but several are still damaged.
Justin and Kathy then double-teamed on my laptop, partitioning my hard drive and installing Ubuntu, a Linux based operating system. It’s reputed to be very stable and infinitely less vulnerable to viruses, worms, and malware than Windows is. That sounds wonderful to me, as we’re headed into the world of international third world Internet cafes here pretty soon.
The whole process of cleanup and installation took the better part of several days, but my computer now runs like a dream. I’m really excited about learning Ubuntu, and I think Chelsea will ask for Justin and Kathy’s help on having it installed on hers before we leave.
Girls’ night out…
In between massive hours on the computer cleanup, we did manage to have a girls’ night out with Heuetta and Peggy. The four of us hung out laughing and talking at Heuetta’s house till midnight on Saturday, then got up early for a luxurious homemade breakfast.
We did actually go to a bar in Gueydan on Saturday early evening – the first time Chelsea has even been in a local bar (there were only 4 other people there) and the first time I’ve been in one since the Czech Republic.
Canadian Geese
A few years back a local car dealership owner got permission to hatch a few Canadian goose eggs, with the idea that they would migrate north to Canada each year. They duly hatched and spent the winter here, but no one had told the geese about the plan to migrate back north. Having been born here, with mild conditions and no other geese to inspire them to migrate, the Canadian geese have become permanent fixtures in the local landscape. The flock grows in size every year.
Though the geese have their favorite spots all over the lake, for some reason they really like the area exactly in front of our cottage. We nearly always have at least two, and right now we have at least thirty of them, happily hanging out on the shore of the lake, on the pier, and taking baths in the water.
They are really hilarious to watch. Talk about noisy! They start honking under many different conditions – when other geese arrive from somewhere else on the lake; when they are gearing up to fly away from here; when someone comes too near; when hormones run high and one or another starts an “alpha goose” dance; and they often start lengthy squawking sessions for no apparent reason at all.
They look like fighter jets when they come in for a landing – straight backs, necks stuck out, heads down for final landing, skidding across the water on landing.
I love watching them take baths – a full bath can take upwards of forty-five minutes. They clean their feathers carefully; they dip their heads repeatedly in the water, in a snake-like motion; they turn upside down with their bums in the air (in silhouette after sunset it looks like shark fins); and best of all, they actually turn completely upside down with their plump bellies to the sky and their feet pumping furiously in mid-air.
They finish by stretching up out of the water and flapping their wings hard for a moment or two. My absolute favorite though, is watching those plump little bellies and feet working like mad in mid air, upside down.
Getting ready to go
We’ve been keeping a really low profile around here. We are caught up on all photos and blogs for Traveling Roses except for this week, and we’ll do those tonight or tomorrow. We still have to go to the local library for books for the road, and we need to visit the post office to send boxes back to Alex.
I am now caught up on the blogs for our new site, which we plan on launching on Saturday. I still need to write our first ever newsletter, and write some blogs for the site for next week.
We are making arrangements for Sunday breakfast in Gueydan at Fat George’s, then we’ll head off to have a barbecue with the Schexnaider clan in Abbeville. We aren’t sure right now where we’ll be Sunday night, but it will be our first night back on the road (probably down near Pecan Island, or up near Forked Island). We are really excited!