Katie Hanchuruck: Time Flies When You're Having Fun

This time next week I’ll be in El Salvador! I’m going on a Global Village trip to volunteer for a week with the Habitat for Humanity affiliate down there. I’m super excited for this experience and to spend a week serving in a community with a completely different way of life. It’s supposed to be 92 degrees the day we arrive, and I’m told the work we are doing will be very physical. The last group who came back from El Salvador said they spent a lot of their time carrying cement bricks up a hill.

Here in Charlotte my team is currently working on a huge repair project. The house was severely damaged in a fire. We’ve spent the last week, and the last few weekends doing demolition, and preparing the materials for the big rebuild. This week we are having two all-staff days to get the new roof on the house. Then, Friday is Realtors Cares day and we’ll be having a huge crew from their group shingling the roof. This project has given me the opportunity to do more new construction type tasks, such as building the ladders attached to the gables for the new roof, as well as some demolition work. Our first day on that site we led a crew of Homeowners-in-Progress (HIPs) knocking down the drywall and insulation out of the attic and cleaning it up so the lead remediation contractors could remove what remained of the roof. That crew of HIPs was so great we requested them the following weekend to remove the old baseboard to prepare the house for the electrical subcontractors to do the rewiring.

This week Caroline, Alex and I went to Fern for their weekly outdoor yoga class. I biked there right after work for a cocktail and appetizer. (Fern is this natural, local vegetarian restaurant!) The appetizer I ordered (Cauliflower Poutine) was awesome, and my kombucha-rum cocktail was delicious! The yoga class was awesome! The turnout was way smaller than I expected (only five people, which I expect is because it was the first event of the year) which meant we had a lot of hands-on assistance from the instructors. It was probably the most physically demanding yoga class I’ve ever done.