I've now, finally, finished my first day of work on Tuesday, and it was lots of fun. There are 14 kids, some of which we pick up from school and bring back to the church. So I'm going to be working Tues, Thurs, Sat, and occasionally Sundays. The schedule with the kids is pretty easy, they have snack time when they get there, then they do their homework and play for awhile, then it's reading time, and at they end they do arts and crafts. It's a pretty cool program and I really like the other two women I'm going to be mainly working with.

Repairs on the house are going really well, I finished staining the deck and we should be having the stone put up on the house while we're gone for Thanksgiving. And of course I'm going to be in Charleston for Thanksgiving!

So I've spent all day staining my parents deck. I haven't gotten very far, just the top part, and I've already gone through at least 7 gallons of stain. I get to try to finish it tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever I finish. I just know that I'm going to need more money to be able to buy more stain, because we only 3 gallons left and our neighbors said that they use at least 25 gallons, and his deck is much smaller than ours. So needless to say, I'm going to be staining for quite awhile.

I got to watch my first Clemson football game this season, and Hooray! We beat FSU 40-24. It was awesome! I even busted out my Clemson pants, since I can't find any of my Clemson shirts. Hooray for a Clemson win!

Today was a very good day in the state of Oklahoma.

I managed to finally get my driver's license for only $25.50, not expecting that. I also got a job offer, for a job that I interviewed for at a local Presbyterian church. For that, I'd be working for 3 hours in their afterschool program tutoring and playing with local kids. I've also registered for an EMT course at Oklahoma City Community College to start in January. And I have my library card, which I got well before my driver's license. Even better, I have a girl's night out planned for this Friday! Hooray! I'm finally going to have people to hang out with.

I've made it through my 10 month internship and am in Oklahoma City with my parents for the time being. The last week in NH was lots of fun, filled with 3 days straight of cleaning everything in site including, the vans we used for 10 months, the lodge/office/bathrooms/kitchen, my summer cabin, my winter cabin, and the roofs of all of the winter cabins and summer cabins with new roofs. It was really sad to have to clean up everything and everywhere we'd lived for the last 10 months, but we made sure to make it so that the new people coming in in January would be happy with where they are now living. We even went on searches for pieces of wood to stock pile for them, like the people before us did. I do have to say that the best day ever was Commencement/my last night. Commencement was sad, of course, but we all got an NHCC '09 hat, a NH patch, and a letter that we'd written to ourselves at the very beginning of our internship. Then we had an awesome dinner, all the "other" people left, and the drinking began! The majority of us all stayed up until at 2am drinking, hanging out, and singing randomly together. It was amazing! And there are now pictures uploaded of at least my time at Umbagog, if not also my last night in NH.

Umbagog

I've now officially completed all 4 of my hitches and only have a week left in New Hampshire, *tear*. But to update you on my last hitch. I was at Umbagog State Park in Errol, NH. It's really far north, and amazingly beautiful! When I get to OKC in just over a week I'll be posting lots of pictures, but I don't have time to do that now when I have so little time left here and very little time off during the day. The major highlights of this hitch:
*The Bull Moose Restaurant and Lounge, our local watering hole that was just under a mile walk from the campground that we were staying at. It was awesome!
*Abraham, Onyx, and Champ. The dogs of the guys who worked at the park and who were there whenever they're owners were there. It made laugh that much better
*Commuting to work sites on a pontoon boat, basically the best commute ever!
*Seeing moose!
*Seeing bald eagles!
*Loons!
*Red foxes!
*Fall colors on the lake
*Everybody getting together from all the crews for one big party down at White Lake State Park
*First snow of the year, and working in it
*Having to drive an hour in either direction to get any sort of cell phone reception
*Trumps, everywhere we went
*Heated cabins when it was really cold outside
So basically this hitch was awesome! And I would love to go back to that place, if I ever get the chance. Everybody was so nice and it was just so beautiful, and I was living on a lake for a month.

So now I'm in the middle of our rec trip, which is pretty fun so far. Today we hiked up a small mountain called Mt. Kearsarge and then went to a corn maze/ice cream place. That was pretty awesome. Tomorrow we're heading down to Lowell, MA to hang out for the day and Sat we're going to a rec center to play games inside.

Monadnock and SPNHF

I have less than a week left in my hitch, and I'm enjoying my last day off, which is much deserved. We finally finished a bridge in McCabe forest for SPNHF out of natural lumber, so a rustic bog bridge. The only bad thing that happened, besides the bugs, was that both of chainsaws broke the day we were going to start canting the logs to flatten out the logs and actually make it into a bridge. Thus, we had to do all of the cuts that were 2 inches apart on 2 17' logs by hand, with a bow saw. Luckily, our site contact, came to visit us and bought us two more bow saws, which made things go a lot faster. We're really proud of that bridge, but it took forever and the bugs were horrible. Not having a chainsaw literally added on a day and a half of work. But it's done, and we got to get pizza afterward with the gift certificate our site contact gave us.

We also had yesterday off, and so I hiked up Mount Monandnock, the most hiked mountain in the country, and the second most hiked in the world. It was lots of fun, and I really enjoyed hiking the second half by myself to the very top. It was very peaceful. I took a ton of pictures, which will go up once I'm done with this hitch and not on a library computer. Tomorrow, we go back to work, and we'll be putting together another bridge for SPNHF that will probably only take us a day to do, and then they're going to find us more work to do. But in the meantime, on Saturday, we're going to go back Heald forest and work with Bart on clearing more blowdowns from the trail, which is always lots of fun. We worked with him last Saturday, and totally wore him out, because we're used to working all day, and he normally only works half days. We would be totally cool with only working a half day this Saturday, and then chilling out elsewhere for the rest of the day.

I'm really excited for my parents to be coming up to NH between my next two hitches, and especially beading with my mom on Wed and Thurs.