Various Things That Have Happened

A lot of little interesting things have happened, so here are some little updates, trivial things first.
First off, the squirrel is gone. We figured out that it was getting in through the A/C window unit. Steph and I chased it around with a broom for a while (on her birthday!), and then our city director's husband came over and chased the thing long enough that it finally gave up and jumped out a window. It's been half a week since then, and so far the squirrel appears to be entirely gone.
Each week we have decided to give ourselves a new team name. This is because not all of us in the house are Young Adult Volunteers, and many of the YAVs don't feel like Official DOOR people, so we are on the lookout for a more universally accepted name. This week we are Team Awesome.
Tonight we had dinner with the Mennonite Volunteer Service group. They live in community like we do, but have more of a rolling acceptance time and tend to stick around in the same placement for more than a year. They're also the second group which has had us over for community dinner, which means that we need to start having other communities over sometime soon.
Yesterday was my first day teaching the junior high group at Fourth Presbyterian, which is called Elevation. (Quick note for the Nebraskans: Chicago has no real understanding of "middle school". A lot of schools go K-8, and then high schools go 9-12, or occasionally smaller schools just go K-12. So although Fourth Church recognizes 6-8 graders as a separate group, those kids would probably not think of themselves as middle schoolers, and the delineation seems a tad more arbitrary than it would in a district where 6-8 graders go to a separate school.) There were just over 30 middle schoolers, which the assistants assured me was more than usual, but normal for the first Sunday of a new school year. I have two assistants, and they are both great at getting the kids to focus and also at knowing what to expect, since they've been around a few years. Since it was the first week, we focused on doing icebreaker games and brainstorming ideas about what to do in the upcoming year (apparently gardening sounds like fun to them, but sorting donations does not).
After Elevation, we had a Sunday School kick-off lunch and carnival, which included a safer equivalent of a dunk tank where victims had water balloons popped over their heads. When the youth pastor told me to bring clothes to get wet in, I assumed that this would be a fleeting wetness, like being squirted with a water gun. Not so much. I had at least a dozen gigantic water balloons popped over me, which completely soaked every part of my clothes. The experience left me really, really clean, sopping wet, and also endeared me to the kindergarteners who were playing the game. After the first balloon popped over me, John (the youth pastor) told me, "Welcome to Fourth Church!" with a huge grin on his face which was probably derived from the fact that he had finally escaped the water balloons. After that somewhat chilly baptism, I do feel more like somebody who belongs there, not some kid who just keeps showing up during the workweek. I'll see if I can get a picture of it to post - I know some were taken, and I'm pretty sure they look ridiculous.
I also met some of the volunteers at Sarah's Inn this weekend, in my first volunteer meeting. It was great to get to put names and faces together, since my boss has been trying to bring me up to speed by explaining the strengths of each volunteer in our directory. Eventually, I might even be able to remember them all.