Methodist volunteer, puzzles and gym

JANUARY 27, 2024

Well, I’m just too tired to finish writing this today. It was a very, very full day. I’ve just got my first draft of the photos in now... I’ll share that and finish the rest tomorrow after I rest a bit. I have to admit that I woke up at 5am today to help out at the food shelf, and I felt that it was good I was there for the setup too.

Alright, I’ll attempt to write through my pics now. First thing in the morning, I had my meds with half an avocado toast and a leftover piece of pizza or two. I’d woken up at 6:45 am and I drove over to Methodist to help with translation. They weren’t registering any clients, just giving out food to everyone who came and asking how many kids/adults in the family, so I definitely felt less necessary than on a normal Tuesday. 

One cool thing is I ran into the woman with whom I had a great conversation with last time, whose name I remembered was Alicia. I will say I was glad to have gotten there so early though because it meant I could work with other volunteers to unload the pallets of food and sort boxes. I even met Alicia’s boyfriend, whose name might have been Isaac, but I’m not sure. 

Afterwards, I went back to my car and I literally thought I’d run my battery out by leaving the lights on, like I always used to do with my Kia Soul. So I called Jodi to help me, and I actually walked the three blocks to her house. When I was there, she and Bill helped me to figure out that it was probably the electronic fob in the key that was out of battery, not the car, since I hadn’t even been able to unlock my car. We struggled to open up the key fob, and after watching YouTube videos, we had to drive over to a nearby hardware store to get someone to open it. Even he had a hard time opening it, so it wasn’t just us. 

After we got my car sorted out, I drove it over to Jodi’s house and we decided to attend this jigsaw puzzle competition. We watched the people who were all competing on the same puzzle, and then we tried one or two out ourselves in the free puzzles area. We failed at both the ones we tried. Then we headed over to try the Minneapolis JCC, which I’ve never been to before. The Minneapolis JCC does a different thing where they separate the pools for women and men, and I liked it much less than the St. Paul campus because we couldn’t even see Bill while we were in the hot tub.

I also succeeded in just testing whether my body was in good enough shape to work out a bit. I did a few leg presses and lifted some very light weights. I was just trying to prove to myself that I can work out at all now. Then, we went back to Jodi and Bill’s house, where I purposely took my medication as soon as I could so then we could wait two hours and eat freely. I did my meds at 5:03pm with half an avocado, and then two hours later, Papa came over and we had “stuffed pita,” which was literally a pita with lamb on it. I was also able to eat ice cream shortly after dinner because I hadn’t done my meds with dinner this time. At night, I wrote this up and didn’t post it because I hadn’t finished it yet.