I'm alive!

6: The number of days since my last blog post.

I know I haven't been blogging lately, but to be honest there wasn't very much going on! My last two trainings were canceled because so few people signed up. I wasn't able to do much or go anywhere because of my ankle, so I was mostly sitting in the office making phone calls and staring blankly at spreadsheets.

But things have been picking up lately, and now I feel like I have a ton of stuff to say! I'll start with the best news ever--I no longer need my crutches! I went to the doctor this morning and he said I could start weaning off the crutches. Which means I can walk around, but keep the crutches close by. I managed to fit my foot with the cast in my gym shoe, but not without effort. I had to wrap the foot/ankle in gauze, then put on a small sock, then put on the air cast as high up as it will go, then I had to untie my shoe and stretch it out as much as I could. So I am wearing two shoes for the first time in almost a month.

The doc also said I could shop on Black Friday, so I am a happy girl.

Moving on, yesterday was a crazy busy day. Kaitlyn and I were out doing food drive stuff all morning and all afternoon. Our first stop was to Springboro Area Small Business Network. Kaitlyn had packed her new GPS, General Paulette, but she couldn't find the address in her system. So we had to rely on Map Quest.

The address we eventually found after driving back and forth a few times was a quaint yellow house in the middle of nowhere. We were extremely confused, so we called our contact person. The call went a little something like this:

Me: Hi, this is Alex Moning from Shared Harvest Foodbank, and we're not really sure--

Her: Oh, is that you in my driveway?

Me: ...Is it the yellow house?

Her: Yep!

Me: Well then, yes we are.

She helped Kaitlyn carry the bags out to the car (they hadn't requested a barrel). I was still on crutches, so I put a bag of paper towels around my arm. Yay, I helped! They collected 180 pounds of food!

Next we went to Summit Academy School. where the kids were more than happy to help carry the bags (and barrels!) out to Gus.

We still had bags in the truck from our first stop, so we just had them put the bags on the ground. Here they are proudly standing next to their donations:

And here they are goofily standing next to their donations:

They would have been happy to help us out some more, but Kaitlyn and I had some organizing to do! We sorted all of the food from Springboro into boxes, then constructed several more boxes so we had a place to put the overflow food from Summit Academy. We were in that parking lot for a lonnnng time. They had collected 655 pounds of food. Wow!

Our last stop was for Catnip N Carrots (I have no idea). We were a little worried, because Gus was getting filled up fast and this place had 9 barrels. Fortunately, we were able to put our Tetris skills to use. Most of the barrels were a little less than half full, so we just combined them and stacked them and managed to make it work. They collected 370 pounds of food!

Below you'll see a picture of Kaitlyn with a very full Gus, and a picture of Kaitlyn filling Gus with gasoline. See any similarities?

Anyway, after a very quick stop to the PNC bank in Tri-County, we went to Sacred Heart Elementary for their pick-up. We didn't think it would take too long, because they only had three barrels. We didn't realize how much overflow there would be (see below).

Uh-oh.

This pick-up took many, many hours to complete. Kaitlyn wheeled out the three barrels while I constructed more boxes (my hands are really, really dry). We emptied the barrels into the boxes until we could lift the barrels into Gus, then we emptied the boxes back into the barrels. We really need a ramp on that truck.

That took a long time to do. When we finished that, we went into the church with our boxes and began filling them with the overflow food. To make it all fit better, we had to empty each plastic before putting the food into the boxes.

Needless to say, this took FOREVER. I was at least able to sit down while filling up boxes (remember, I was still on crutches at this point), then Kaitlyn would wheel them out to the truck and load them in.

Finally -FINALLY- we had packed all of the food and loaded all of the boxes. They ended up collecting 1166 pounds of food. Woohoo!

See me below holding my tape dispenser in a very James Bond-esque manner.

As you can see, Gus was very full at this point and we still had one more pick-up to do. But when we got to PetLand, they hadn't collected any food at all, and the manager said that they wanted to hold on to the barrel for another week or so to see what they could do.

That was a relief. We might have had to stick the barrel in the front seat with us. So after a quick look at the puppies, we went back to a dark and almost-empty Shared Harvest and got out of there at about 4:30.

Well that very, very long blog post ought to make up for my abandonment over the past week or so.

Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. Be careful on Black Friday--last year someone ran over my mom with a shopping cart.