Doin' it fo the shoatiez

Last Thursday I completed a project at work that took 5 months of planning. It was, quite often, a gigantic pain in my hiney. I frequently wanted to throw myself out a window. Or I wanted to throw someone else out a window. Or I wanted to throw my computer out a window. There was a major threat of some sort of defenestration at any given moment.

On Thursday, all of my company's 23 offices, around 200 employees, closed up shop and everyone went out into the world to do a volunteer project. Well, we nearly closed shop, we had to keep the phones up and running all day. There were t-shirts and other stuff to be ordered and distributed and a blog to be kept. A project had to be found for each office and for Atlanta we needed several because there are 80 of us here. Oh, and rain plans to be made. By all accounts, it should have been way more fun than any of the other projects I worked on during the same period. Sometimes it was. Since it was my project, I had had the distinct pleasure of selecting one of the Atlanta projects. That meant I could do something in my own neighborhood of East Lake.


Eleven of us headed over to East Lake Park to build a portion of fence to create a barrier between the very busy Memorial Drive and the playground. It's a split rail fence, because they can't put a fence in there that will block the view into the park from the street by the police and neighborhood watch types. We worked so quickly that we not only built our portion of fence, but indeed, completed the entire fence and mulched the paths around the playground. I'd like to believe this is because I supplied the team with coffee from Kirkwood's Gather Grounds and biscuits from Candler Park's Flying Biscuit Cafe. The coffee run resulted in some half & half spilling on the floor of the CR-V. This is a smell we have still not managed to remove.


All last week the weather was stunning. Sunny and warm with a light breeze...dandelion fluff floating everywhere. Every day last week except Thursday. Thursday had an 80% chance of thunderstorms. I took it personally. But the rain held off until mid-day and by that time we were so committed to our fence that we just worked in it. We were all completely soaked by the time we finished. But it was a lot of fun. And from what I've been told, everyone else's project was, too. A couple projects had to reschedule for Friday (those sissies at the National Park Service didn't want volunteers out on the river in metal canoes with such a strong threat of lightning) but they had fun on Friday. And so, like childbirth, I already am only remembering the delightful end-product of a painful labor and would probably easily be tricked into doing it a second time.

Below is my team. I love them!