Second day of work (featuring Anderson Cooper)

Wow, we've had quite an exciting Tuesday! We split into three work groups: one primarily sanding drywall, one cutting and hanging drywall, and a third group that worked at an organization that distributes food from the Food Bank. I'll let our guest bloggers tell you a bit more about that. Tonight everyone was abuzz because CNN's Anderson Cooper was broadcasting live from a home that's being renovated as part of the St. Bernard Project, the organization two of our teams are serving. We gathered outside the home just in time to get spots right behind Anderson, and several members of our group were able to talk to him and get his autograph. He's incredibly gracious, and spent almost every moment that he was off camera talking to the people who were gathered and humoring all of the requests to be in pictures (including our own). I'll do my best to get those posted in the photo gallery soon, s0 keep checking back to see if they're up. Now, on to our guest bloggers...

Hello, this is Madison Gallagher! Today we went to a really cool place called Just The Right Attitude (www.jtra.org) where we met some cool people. There was one lady whose name that I can't remember, that was the founder of JTRA, and she had founded this organization in 1999, and she fed people based not on their money or job, but how they were right then. For example, she served people who made too much to get help from the government, but too little to make ends meet. After a long day packing boxes of food for people, Russ took us to Coldstone for ice cream. well, that's my day! 10-4 rubber ducky!! :)

Hey, it's Katie Swanson. Guest-blogging. Whoop whoop. Today my group went to a food bank called Just the Right Attitude. JTRA is a non-income based food bank that provides food for families that otherwise couldn't afford it. We loaded food into boxes and onto a wagon-like structure. Oh, excuse me, a hand truck. Thanks Russ. We were all in charge of different food items, such as green beans, corn, flour, chili, mayonnaise and the Little Rainbows. The Little Rainbows were sugary, artificially flavored kid's drinks with foil tops. The foil tops cut my finger. Ouch. On the bright side, this gave me an excuse to use my brand new Dora the Explorer band aids. Whooo. After the JTRA visit, we went to the TWO STORY TARGET. Exciting. I had lost my tooth brush the night before, so I bought a light up, crayola crayon tooth brush. After the two story Target, we stopped for ice cream. Again, thanks Russ. We went back to the church and slept, which was nice. The other group came in about two hours later, and we then had dinner, which included green spaghetti, or as Shelby and I called it, Alien Brains. Mmm. Yummy. After dinner, we went to the place they were filming CNN with Anderson Cooper. It was the bomb. He's super, super cool. HE SIGNED MY SHIRT. I called my mom a total of 6 times during this ordeal. Russ blows his nose very loudly. Good day, good day.