Weekend, Volunteering, etc.

Last weekend was a pretty busy one. Xiumin came to visit. She arrived on Saturday but I was volunteering until the afternoon and was kind of tired from volunteering. I had volunteered at the same place (a food pantry) the Saturday before and had gotten out early. The thing about the food pantry is that if you're packing food in the back, then the work runs out towards the end because they just don't need that many bags of food packed. So you can leave early once the work is done. But if you're working out front and actually giving food out to clients, then you basically have to stay the entire time. I was hanging out the big bags of food so I was pretty tired afterwards. I really enjoyed it though.

It's much more rewarding to be hanging out food to people instead of just packing food. I realized that it's much more enjoyable to work with the clients when I went to volunteer again on Sunday. Sunday was a soup kitchen type thing at the St John the Divine church. I stationed myself as one of the servers when we finally got everything ready to go. I know I would be much more comfortable doing backend stuff and never see any of the people I am helping out. I would be fine with that but it's just not as rewarding. Most people are grateful that you're taking the time to help them.

Anyway, Xiumin and I strolled along the Hudson and a bit of Central Park on Saturday. We didn't do much, just chatted. It was just like old times again (i.e. chatting about random things instead of focusing on psets at school). On Sunday Yalu got all of us into the MoMA for free. She waved her Citi ID around and bam, we got tickets. It was great. The museum is also very cloese to where we live so we just walked over there after eating lunch.

It's been a slow week at work so far. I finished a project that I have been working on since the beginning of the summer. So... now I really have nothing to do. There's also been a 2 hour training on a finite element program every day for 2 hours. That's been cutting into everyone's schedule so work's been slow. I played around with the program today and failed to get it to do very much. Anyway, hopefully there will be work for me to do tomorrow. I don't mind playing around with the program but I don't think I should be doing that the entire day...