My work week began with an encounter with a small and overly friendly dog in the street who jumped at me and left some nasty scratches and bruising.  Fortunately, my job site has a free clinic, and they bandaged me up and gave me the most painless Tetanus shot I've ever received.

I started at Hope House during one of its most hectic weeks.  The summer youth program Hope House runs was finishing up, and we had a big block party for the community on Saturday.  I'm still in a bit of a haze, wondering if I'm actually helping or just getting in the way, though I have been assured that I am in fact helping.  I mostly got to supervise kids' activities this week, which involved going to an indoor waterpark, making pizza, and playing soccer.  Volunteering can be a real hardship sometimes.  At the block party, we handed out new school supplies for youth in the neighborhood in the alley behind the building. I made some wisecracks about our illicit back-alley school supply trade.

Transitioning so quickly from home to orientation, and then from orientation into work, has left me a bit dazed, looking for ways to root myself in the community more solidly.  The people in my workplace are wonderful, and the office is one of the cheeriest I have worked in despite the fact (or perhaps because) they work with some of the most frustrating situations in the city. It seems to me that if you learn how to not go crazy working with the kind of socioeconomic obstacles that Hope House encounters, you end up being a pretty cool person.