Much Ado About LA

Another successful weekend! On Friday night, Theresa and I crashed the Verbum Day Staff Luau. Well, okay, maybe we didn’t crash it…we were invited. Nevertheless, after another long, hot day organizing our office, we headed over to the Multi-Purpose Room. There we found most of the Verb faculty enjoying Mai Tais, beer, or an unidentified frozen blue concoction. There was a light spread of Hawaiian BBQ snacks.  The gathering was very low-key, but I got to hang out with Julie and Zach and enjoy a cocktail before even leaving work!  My first thought walking into the room was “This would never happen in a public school!”

In true Jesuit fashion, this gathering was just the first of many social appearances of the evening. After swinging home to change and grab John, we drove over to Homeboy Industries downtown, where we joined all the other LA JVC houses, supervisors, former JVs, and support people. Our regional program director and program coordinator, Kelly and Andrew, even came down from Santa Clara for the evening!  Homeboy hosted this ‘housewarming’ party for all the JVs. They had delicious food from Homegirl café, where Cara works, and we even got to bring the leftover drinks from the Verb luau! Theresa and Jeff, the director of Operations and JVC contact at the Verb, joined the party. It was great to see everyone and get to meet some of the former JVs. I recognized one FJV from an overnight that BC’s Volunteer Service Learning Center hosted last year. Marcos served 2 years with JVC in Micronesia and is now volunteer teaching and working on a Master’s in Education through Placecorps.  It was great to see him again!

My Casa at Homeboy!
Cara, Zach, John, Me, Julie

We spent the rest of the evening at the Jean Donavon house at a birthday party for John, who also works at Homeboy with Cara. On Saturday night we went to Rose’s 30^th birthday party. (Rose is the FJV who brought us dinner last weekend.)The party was Glow themed…meaning there were blacklights, glowsticks, highlighters, glowing cocktails, and  every possible glow in the dark decoration you can imagine – including Rose’s custom made shoes. We didn’t know anyone else at the party but that didn’t stop us from dominating the dance floor! Rose was happy to have us there and constantly offered to help us out with anything we might need in the next year.

Rose's GLOW Party
(lime green shirt = John!)

On Sunday, we had big plans to hit the gym before mass and then going to see Shakespeare in the park. We only accomplished 1/3, but I’m glad we did! See, we had to postpone the gym trip until tonight because of car-sharing logistics, which was fine.  We were ready to go and out the door at 4:30 to get to 5pm mass at a church near Griffith Park, an enormous park in the middle of LA. Unfortunately, we got lost – twice – on the way.  By the time we even got close to the church it was already 6, and we had clearly missed mass. So, we traded pews for a picnic blanket, got a good parking spot on the lawn in the park, and enjoyed our picnic dinner,  until Much Ado About Nothing started at 7. The show was excellent! It was the last night of a free Shakespeare festival in LA. I’m so glad we went, even though we did miss mass and got home too late to hit up the late-night USC Newman Center mass.

The highlight of my day back to work today was something that a few people out there will understand very well – specifically those of you whom I used to subject to playing school with me after school every day. You might remember that I used to ask teachers for extra worksheets that were leftover from class (go ahead, laugh at my nerdiness! But know that when I say I've always wanted to be a teacher, it's true!) I'd use the worksheets later in the day with my own “class.” (Why on earth did you guys let me get away with that?)   Well, if my 8 year old self had seen the massive binders filled with hundreds of different math, reading, and writing worksheets that I sorted through today, she would have been in afterschool heaven. The only thing that could have made her happier would have been a box of fresh chalk and a captive audience to make do the worksheets. (Unfortunately, my students still haven’t started school and chalkboards are practically antique.)

That’s about it for now…we just got home from the gym where iron is being pumped in preparation for the JVC Olympics (okay, that’s just a dream of ours, but we would clearly kick butt!).