The Visitor Wave

So my wave of visitors hit hard this past weekend! It started last week with Mikki Nana and Bruce visiting, then this weekend 8 members of River 7 (another AmeriCorps team that is currently doing Habitat for Humanity in Alabama) rented 2 cars and came to visit us in N'awlins for the weekend! Some people from my team and I got a hotel room for Saturday night so we could all hang out that night, since the government team van we have can't be out past midnight, and we toured around the River Walk area which was fun :) It's crazy how we were away from that team for 3 weeks, and yet when we got together this weekend it immediately went back to the way things were before...it was as if we had never been apart! I'm sure that's what it will also be like when I eventually get back home to Maine for Christmas, but right now since I am so far away I just feel like I am missing out on so much!
Today was our first day of being full out site supervisors, and I was super nervous to become a leader instead of just a volunteer like I have been used to! All morning at our site while we were going over last minute things and organizing our site for our volunteers I had such a tummy ache and butterflies of nervousness like I used to get before basketball games....it was terrible! But as it got later and later into the morning (around 10:30am) we were really starting to wonder where our volunteers were and if they had gotten lost, since they were supposed to arrive around 9am...so we called the office and they told us that we didn't actually have any volunteers today or at all this week until Thursday! Go figure, that would have been nice to know this morning! But I was super relieved and my stomach immediately felt much better after that! So we got to work on putting drywall up and mudding by ourselves today, which was fun and good to get more experience ourselves before we have to really tell others how to do it. Again, I will say my all time favorite quote that I live by, "everything happens for a reason"! Since we didn't have any volunteers, it was almost lunch time, and the River 7 crew was heading out soon, so John, Cain, and Taylor from that team stopped by for a bit to visit and say goodbye before they headed back to Bama...so sad! But they reminded us that we will all be back on campus in Mississippi for transition in 3 weeks! That seems so soon, it's crazy, I mean we just got done training for this project! Anyways, after they left, Joe, Eric and I knocked out some decent work in the house and I cleaned and organized the house some more, which reminded me how much I love to clean! So after we got back from work tonight, Auntie Beth, Linda, and Diane came to visit me! I am telling you, I have been so blessed/spoiled with visitors lately, I am absolutely loving it! They took me out to dinner at Applebees, which was amazing, because I had not seen one down here until tonight and we also went to a new area of Louisiana that I hadn't been to yet and it was really nice! As usual, it was awesome to see Auntie Beth and feel re-connected to my Mainers back home! But then I get sad when they leave and I know that they get to return to Maine soon and I am still here for so many months without my close family and friends back north! I just wish that there was some way that I could be with EVERYONE from back home AND all my new friends from AmeriCorps at the same time...that would be freaking SWEET!