Status from Baton Rouge

Eh-hmm. Please pardon my recent lack of updates.

Of the ten houses we built in Hidden Cove, five are currently occupied and the other five shall be occupied soon. In fact, we are primarily waiting on electricity to be turned on at three of those houses, and the others will be closed out soon enough.

This is not to say I've really had a hand in that part, Christiaan and the other construction workers have been keeping that up. I've been doing office work. You see, it all started a few weeks ago when [start crazy flashback sequence]...

A couple of Friday's ago we lost our construction director. The next Tuesday, Christiaan, Mike and I met with a couple of members of the board and we decided that we would try to plan the thirty-two houses that we are building this fall and finish up the twenty-ish houses we currently have in development. So my part in that has been to figure out where we are, where we are going, and how can we get there. For some reason, I've felt that I needed to develop something to help do that, and I've spent the last couple of weeks basically developing a web front-end to a database where we track the status of our current builds. I guess you go with what you know, although I really don't know that much about web front-ends, or databases for that matter. Anyway, it works, for now.

The hard part really was figuring out where we are, which I believe we almost have an accurate picture. The next hard part is beginning the next wave of houses, currently scheduled to begin on September 9.

To help us, we have a new team of Americorps NCCC starting this Friday, and we have some new construction bodies that have and will start soon. Rachel joined us last week, and at least three more should join us during the month of August.

Today, I got to meet our new Executive Director, Chris. Today was his first day so I had limited interaction, but he will join us at our 7:30 construction meeting tomorrow to get an idea of what we've set as our current priorities. I think it will be nice to quit being headless, or more accurately, quit being a hydra.

In other news, the future homeowners of the last house to be built on Faith Court had a little tragedy over the weekend. The house in which they currently live caught fire, so it is now uninhabitable. We've decided to focus our efforts on getting their new house completed, so we've set a goal of getting them in their house by next week.

Speaking of Faith Court, as Christiaan and I drove by the Popeye's down the block from Faith Court, Christiaan pointed out something strange about its side door. You could tell from the Police line around the building that it wasn't going to be good, and later we confirmed that the door was indeed covered with blood. It turns out to be the blood of the manager, who was shot, stabbed and left to die in the freezer early this morning. They did catch and charge someone with the murder. Lynn pointed out to us that it wasn't the assistant manager who always calls us "baby". Instead, it was someone equally as nice. Apparantly, there was a shooting at the Piggly Wiggly parking lot (across the street from Popeye's) the day before.

The handprint on the door, visible from the road, is still lingering in my mind.