Betting on Barrels

1,606: The pounds of food Kaitlyn and I delivered to Shared Harvest today.

I used up some of my building comp time to take the day off yesterday. I was looking forward to sleeping in, watching bad TV, and playing with my cat Albert.

I ended up waking up at 7:30 in the morning, anyway. And while I did spend most of my day watching movies and doing jigsaw puzzles, it might have been safer to have just gone in to work. My doorbell rang in the middle of "Juno," so I pushed away my makeshift puzzle table and stood up only to fall at a really awkward angle. My legs had fallen asleep at some point during the movie and weren't functioning properly. I basically landed on the right side of my ankle.

I don't think it's broken, but it might be sprained or something. I can walk on it--I just have to do so carefully. Moving it to the side the tiniest bit is painful.

So I was a little worried about all of the food drive pick-ups Kaitlyn and I were scheduled to do today. I usually like picking up barrels from food drives--it gives us the warm and fuzzies to know that a struggling family is going to get that extra help. I just didn't know how helpful I was going to be on the day I can barely support the weight of my right leg, let alone hundreds of pounds of food.

Our first stop was Ohio Casualty Liberty Mutual in Fairfield. This place was awesome. Not only did they have six FULL barrels of food to contribute, they also had a loading dock that could lower itself to the height of Gus! They even offered to back Gus up to the dock and load the barrels. Fine with us!

I was more than happy to stand aside while they put the heavy barrels of food into Gus!

There was no more room in Gus after that excursion, so we drove back to Shared Harvest to empty and weigh the food. To make the day a little more interesting, Kaitlyn suggested we bet each other on how many pounds of food we had collected from Liberty Mutual Fairfield, without going over. It turned out that we had gotten 938 pounds of food (WOW!). I won the bet, so Kaitlyn had to drive to our next destination: Staples!

The guys from the warehouse help us get the barrels out of Gus

We didn't have any problems with Staples. They had eight barrels, but half of them were empty.

We did come up with a great system for loading the food into the truck, though. Gus doesn't have a ramp and we don't always have fancy machinery for easy lifting, so we have to get creative. We use the dolly to carry the full barrels out to the truck, then I take out the food and hand them up to Kaitlyn, who puts them into an empty (or almost empty) barrel that's already in the truck. When the barrel on the ground is light enough, we lift it into the truck and use that one to add food to for the next full barrel.

We were pretty proud of ourselves for coming up with that system! It all went very smoothly.

Staples had collected 246 pounds of food. I won that bet, too, so Kaitlyn had to give me two mini-Reeses Cups.

We had to drop the food off at Shared Harvest again, then after a quick lunch we went to our last destination: The Ohio Casualty Liberty Mutual office in Hamilton!

A lone barrel sits in front of Ohio Casualty Liberty Mutual

This place had done a fantastic job in their food drive, and they were really helpful in getting it all together. They had collected 422 pounds of food (I won that one, too, by the way, but that's neither here nor there). They took the dolly off our hands and brought down all of the barrels for us, and they were really excited about their food drive.

All in all, we brought back 1,606 pounds of food to Shared Harvest--amazing! My ankle hurts from walking on it all day, but I was able to find a few places to rest throughout the afternoon...