Weekend fun

The past two weekends have been quite fun and busy. We started our weekend off last week by watching Newsies on Friday night as a house! It is such a great movie but it wasn't quite the same for me as watching a group of middle school boys from the Regis High School REACH perform it live as they did in the summer of 2006. On Saturday we had a relaxing morning at home and spent our afternoon with Eileen and Meg (an FJV from last year and my supervisor.) Eileen took us exploring along the beach and huckleberry picking, where Katie did her best Blueberries for Sal impression by eating nearly as many berries as she picked! For those of you who are like me and had never heard of huckleberries, they look like blueberries but are a bright red color (some can be blue though) and have a more tarty flavor. After we picked enough berries Eileen taught us how to properly clean the berries and get them prepared to make jam. Once it was time, it took a total team effort to turn the berries into the twelve half pints that we were able to make and save for later.

On Sunday, we all went to church at St. Gregory's where a retired priest from the Bronx resides! In the afternoon we went hiking with Eileen along Indian River and saw the very beginning of the Pink Salmon run. It has finally started to rain so hopefully the salmon will start running soon. We hiked for about three hours and the weather was constantly changing from sun to rain and back for the entire time. After our hike, Meg and Eileen invited us over for fish tacos where Meg was house sitting. Dinner was delicious and it was nice to hang out with them before our work week started.

Last night we had our first meeting with Bridget, an FJV and our support person. We had some brownies and ice cream and shared our motivations for applying to and choosing JVC Nortwest as well as our thoughts on which of the four values we felt would be the easiest and hardest for us to engage in, as well as our greatest fears for the year. For me, I think that what I am most afraid of is getting too emotional in my job; I am worried that at times I might get overwhelmed with emotions and be unable to give 100% in my job or separate what I experience at work from my own life and emotions. For this reason, I am blessed that I have such a strong support system here of my housemates, support people, FJVs and my coworkers on whom I can turn to help ensure that I am taking care of myself and dealing with things that come up and impact me one way or another.

Today, our house participated in a charity basketball tournament! Eileen financially backed our team to help benefit an organization called Young Alaskans Building Affordable Housing that she works for. We called our team the New JVs and had very low expectations for our team because most of us have never played basketball outside of gym class or pickup games in high school. We lost both of our games but we got awesome t-shirts, it was a great time and an even better cause!