Closer…Getting Closer
It has been an interesting week around here. The guys at Pen2 ended up getting locked down for the week, and 25 of us were voluntold to go over and make them bag breakfast, lunches & dinners. Somehow, out of 375 women, I was lucky enough to be one of the one voluntold. At first I was not sure about it. Everyone around me told me how terrible it is to work over there, long hours, lots of work, etc. I went into it not feeling very good about the job at hand. Three other ladies from my unit, that I talk to, were on the list, so we decided we would just stick together. One had done it before, and told us how her group made it work in the past. After arriving at the Pen, and getting through all of their security and gates (think of the movies, one gate closes, the next one opens…pretty scary), we went into their lunchroom to start working. Everyone split up into groups, and my group was responsible for four sections, a total of about 430 men. That meant 430 breakfasts, 430 lunches & 430 dinners. We sat down, got our plan of attack together and knocked it out in record time, and had a lot of fun doing it. As a matter of fact, we finished so fast, we ended up helping another group, who was way behind, finish theirs. The biggest difference, besides us using our own assembly line system, was, we only had one chief. When you are working with a team, there can only be one chief/leader, the rest have to be the followers. Some of the other teams broke down, because everyone wanted to lead, and no one wanted to follow. The second day, we ended up taking over one of the other groups that had broken down and two of the girls did not come back for one reason or another, so that day we made about 755 breakfasts, lunches & dinners. We noticed one of the groups in the back adopted our system, and finished very quickly also. It was amazing to see the difference when everyone worked together as a team than when everyone tried to run the show. As a reward, we had the best lemon meringue cupcakes I have ever eaten. I don’t know why they get them at the Pen, and not at the camp. It is probably a good thing though, I bet they are about 1000 calories each! The downfall to the days..we had to get up at 4:45am! For someone that is not a morning person, I was not thrilled with that wake-up time. On Friday, we were up, dressed and ready to go, and at 5:30am they called over and told us they did not need us anymore. Ugh! I never saw so many women move so fast to get back in bed! It made the week go by faster, I had fun, made some new friends and even had a very enlightening conversation with one of the officers at the Pen about how we were in the safest place we could be if there was a Zombie Apocalypse (I guess he is not used to talking to a group of women, and decided that would be a good conversation starter?).
My days right now are spent walking, crocheting & reading. My average daily schedule is:
7:30 – be up and dressed and bed made (I wait until the last possible second)
Walk 2 miles
read/crochet/work on my book
10:45 – lunch
walk a few laps
read/crochet/do puzzles
nap
walk a few laps
read/crochet/puzzles until dinner
4:45 – dinner (I feel like I am on a nursing home schedule)
walk another 1.5-2 hours, read crochet, shower
10:00 – bed
Rough day, huh? I cannot wait to get back to work, I am going to hate giving up my afternoon nap though :-). I am averaging 6-8 miles a day right now. Every time I get bored, I walk. I will miss the walking when I am on home confinement, I wonder how many laps around my backyard equal a mile? It is funny, back in October, my goal was to walk 100 miles in 31 days, and did not quite make it, now I am doing it every two weeks. I wish I would see the weight dropping with the walking. Everyone here says I look like I have lost weight, but I am not seeing it. I have cut back just about all sweets this week, and even have only been drinking 1-2 sweet teas a day (and water the rest of the day), so I hope to see some sort of change before I leave here. All of the meals here are so carb loaded, it doesn’t help.
I am still working on smiling at everyone and trying to make other people’s day a little nicer. Some of the staff here does not make it easy, but I haven’t given up yet.
Have a great week! I am counting down the days!
Julie
3 more chicken days!
1 more visit weekend!
1 more blanket exchange!