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Mar. 26th, 2005 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bobcatmoranI got back at about 5:30 this morning, having driven the last leg of the 7-hour drive from Kansas City, KS. I was amazingly awake for it, considering that the 3-5:30 AM time slot fits into the category of "Times when Bobcat is nearly always asleep."
The trip was awesome. We stayed at the affiliate's house for Americorps volunteers, with the two Americorps people who were living there and a cat named Carter. It was very nice, especially compared to the usual church basements that we stay in for Habitat trips. The houses we were working on were the most complete Habitat hosues I've ever worked on. Rather than the usual framing, putting up roof trusses, or sheetrocking, we were doing stuff like installing towel racks, painting, and caulking. Kaw Valley HFH (the affiliate we were working with), unlike every other affiliate I've volunteered with, doesn't seem to have too many Americorps site supervisors. Instead, we worked under:
1) An ex-chemist, ex-nurse, ex-electrician who, although a very nice person, had a somewhat distressing tendency to give highly specific directions like, "Put that thing on that other thing over there."
2) A woman who was astoundingly adept at single-handedly managing 14 volunteers by herself at a site that wasn't her own and referred to everyone as "brother" or "sister" (which I suspect was at least partially because she couldn't remember anyone's name).
3) A pair of Germans who somehow managed to work for an American Habitat affiliate as a substitute for their mandatory military service. They were very cool guys. One of them was the only site supervisor I've ever worked under who was actually younger than myself. He was known for putting anything in a sandwich. One day he had a sandwich with (I kid you not) tuna, salsa, orange slices, and canned corn.
Probably one of the best parts of the trip was that a very good friend of mine came along, and I haven't seen much of him in the two years since he transferred to the U to work on getting certified as an RN. I was actually a bit surprised when I heard that he was coming, since I thought his Guard unit had been deployed to Iraq, but apparently he had some medical problems come up, so he can't be sent overseas. Good thing, I guess.
Anyway, thanks to the fact that I was the only one who left my CDs in the van during the time we were in Kansas City, there was quite a bit of listening to my music going on, and much to my surprise, said friend saw the Fullmetal Alchemist OSTs in my case, and as it turns out, he's quite the fan. We had an astoundingly geeky conversation while everyone else was asleep during the drive this morning about FMA, Inuyasha, video games, Japanese, Godzilla, and IRC. I'm going to be burning him some CDs of hard-to-find-in-the-US music and FMA fansubs.
Oh, and also, while on the trip, I finished a handwritten draft of the second part of A Glimpse of the Future, featuring Rock, Roll, and Blues paying a visit to a still under construction X. I'm not quite sure if I like where it went, though. I had the ending all figured out, and then Rock suddenly decided to go into total denial mode when Blues mentioned that in thirty years, Dr. Light would almost certainly not be around. I'm worried that I might have taken Rock into OOC territory, and I think that by using Roll to point out some of the fallacies of designing a robot that has virtually no constraints on its ability to develop and make its own decisions I might have made her OOC as well.
At least I seem to have gotten past the problem of trying to describe X from a third person limited Blues perspective without sounding too weird and borderline pervy. I had major problems with the fact that I think that Blues would be much more observant than Forte and more prone to noticing a lot of the little details that I think Dr. Light would have added to make X as human-like as possible (as opposed to Forte, who, when looking at Zero, was a bit like, "Wow, what a dumb, girly robot. What the heck's up with the hair?").
The trip was awesome. We stayed at the affiliate's house for Americorps volunteers, with the two Americorps people who were living there and a cat named Carter. It was very nice, especially compared to the usual church basements that we stay in for Habitat trips. The houses we were working on were the most complete Habitat hosues I've ever worked on. Rather than the usual framing, putting up roof trusses, or sheetrocking, we were doing stuff like installing towel racks, painting, and caulking. Kaw Valley HFH (the affiliate we were working with), unlike every other affiliate I've volunteered with, doesn't seem to have too many Americorps site supervisors. Instead, we worked under:
1) An ex-chemist, ex-nurse, ex-electrician who, although a very nice person, had a somewhat distressing tendency to give highly specific directions like, "Put that thing on that other thing over there."
2) A woman who was astoundingly adept at single-handedly managing 14 volunteers by herself at a site that wasn't her own and referred to everyone as "brother" or "sister" (which I suspect was at least partially because she couldn't remember anyone's name).
3) A pair of Germans who somehow managed to work for an American Habitat affiliate as a substitute for their mandatory military service. They were very cool guys. One of them was the only site supervisor I've ever worked under who was actually younger than myself. He was known for putting anything in a sandwich. One day he had a sandwich with (I kid you not) tuna, salsa, orange slices, and canned corn.
Probably one of the best parts of the trip was that a very good friend of mine came along, and I haven't seen much of him in the two years since he transferred to the U to work on getting certified as an RN. I was actually a bit surprised when I heard that he was coming, since I thought his Guard unit had been deployed to Iraq, but apparently he had some medical problems come up, so he can't be sent overseas. Good thing, I guess.
Anyway, thanks to the fact that I was the only one who left my CDs in the van during the time we were in Kansas City, there was quite a bit of listening to my music going on, and much to my surprise, said friend saw the Fullmetal Alchemist OSTs in my case, and as it turns out, he's quite the fan. We had an astoundingly geeky conversation while everyone else was asleep during the drive this morning about FMA, Inuyasha, video games, Japanese, Godzilla, and IRC. I'm going to be burning him some CDs of hard-to-find-in-the-US music and FMA fansubs.
Oh, and also, while on the trip, I finished a handwritten draft of the second part of A Glimpse of the Future, featuring Rock, Roll, and Blues paying a visit to a still under construction X. I'm not quite sure if I like where it went, though. I had the ending all figured out, and then Rock suddenly decided to go into total denial mode when Blues mentioned that in thirty years, Dr. Light would almost certainly not be around. I'm worried that I might have taken Rock into OOC territory, and I think that by using Roll to point out some of the fallacies of designing a robot that has virtually no constraints on its ability to develop and make its own decisions I might have made her OOC as well.
At least I seem to have gotten past the problem of trying to describe X from a third person limited Blues perspective without sounding too weird and borderline pervy. I had major problems with the fact that I think that Blues would be much more observant than Forte and more prone to noticing a lot of the little details that I think Dr. Light would have added to make X as human-like as possible (as opposed to Forte, who, when looking at Zero, was a bit like, "Wow, what a dumb, girly robot. What the heck's up with the hair?").
