a bit of a catch up

So where have I been?

Well, other than spreading my cold germs to everyone in the house, I've been pretty busy.

Sunday (feeling a little sorry for myself) I called my folks who had just got back from Kenya. A trip that I found out about through a friend noticing my mums status change on facebook, and my brother found out about when he received an email to say they had arrived safely. His response: “I'd care, but I didn't know they weren't in the country.” Here in lies a functional family. Anyway, I was chuffed to hear they had a great time helping (although I suspect there it took the form of playing) with some kids over there.

Monday was spent shuttling food from weight watchers centers in the area to the store at the food pantry. There were a bunch of young guys at the army sign up place next to one of the centers who I'm sure were wondering if it was a big ploy to help people loose weight; take away their food.
Here's the thing: there are the exact same amount of people in the world who are obese at the moment as those who are starving. A sobering fact that ww decided to make people aware of. For every pound that people lost over a set amount of weeks, they pledged to give a pound of food to set organisations. Ont op of that, the centers in the area encouraged people to take in food (using the amount of weight they had lost as a suggested amount) to go local pantry. Two of which, went to us.

We weighed 1600lbs of food from one center alone, and figured we had and actual tonne of food altogether that had been donated! How cool is that?! I couldn't believe how generous people had been, esp in the current economic climate!

And it was much appreciated. This morning the pantry was constantly full. Over the two hours we gave help to forty three families. Given that we normally average between forty and fifty with the morning and evening pantries combined, that was a lot. The only bad point with being so busy was that it meant that I didn't get a chance to talk to the guys coming in, some of whom I've started to get to know pretty well.
Although I did get a little embarrassed when one of them took in their son to meet me, who seemed to know everything about me before we met. It was meant well but I didn't really know what to do.