As a required assignment for PSL, I've been asked to write about a person I've met that has affected me in some way or form. Well, this is that post. Hopefully it will keep me from drowning in my own failure. It's dark below C-level. I don't know how fish survive, day in and day out.

So, I've been accumulating service hours for PSL through volunteer work at a homeless shelter called PROJECT HOPE. It's your typical homeless shelter, though small in size, on the verge of a huge expansion. There's been a lot of talk about the expansion I've overheard, but I don't think I'll waste that just yet. Possibly on a later post? We'll have to see.

At PROJECT HOPE, the typical shift goes from 7-11, with three volunteers, two staff members and the people seeking shelter at the time.

My first trip alone to PROJECT HOPE was borderline deadly. On the freeway, I was caught in a horrific rainstorm, so hard that the windows on my 2013 Kia Soul began to leak on impact. For some reason, my defoggers had quit functioning, (Later had I discovered that unlike my previous car, the vents had to be on for the defogger to function.) and I wound up in XXXXXX, XXXX. That's a good ten minutes in the wrong direction. Fortunately, inexperience had caused me to leave an hour early, as I had no prior knowledge of the fifteen minute tracks it takes to get there. Turning around and depending heavily on a miracle, I traversed blindly and eventually made my way to XXXXXXXXXX, XXXX. Not QUITE there, but close. Very close. With the ability to see, it might have been three minutes until I had arrived. I, however... had no such thing.
I proceeded to waste literally 45 minutes lost in the back streets of XXXXXXXXXX with my head out the window attempting to see road in rain you could DROWN in if you weren't careful. About twenty minutes into the forty five, I had to park the car in an empty street. (It is possible the street wasn't empty, and that everyone had been washed down the waste water pipe.) Not to catch my bearings but to watch in horror as six deer literally began to CIRCLE MY CAR. CIRCLING. LIKE SHARKS. Drenched, I shrunk into my seat another ten minutes hoping the foul beasts would move along and mercifully grant me life. Fortunately, they deemed me unworthy of death and moved along, granting me another 15 minutes to find the actual building I was supposed to be volunteering in. Arriving in the driveway, I contemplated ritual suicide for disgracing my family by going in an estimated three-minute circle around the same building for three-quarters of an hour.

Literally wet behind both ears, I was eager to get to work. Entering the building, I was so excited to see another human face. It was then that I met XXXX, aka "The subject of the blog entree." Needless to say, I was literally in shock from the trip there. He calmed me down and showed me the ropes of volunteering. You know, setting up salt and pepper shakers, hotplates, moving the food downstairs without burning yourself... The ropes. We also had been forced to wash all of the tinfoil in fear of stories of a nun who ruled over the kitchen like an angry god. Neither of us, last time I checked have met said nun, but I've discovered she is indeed a volunteer and not an employee.

What's weird is even the staff fear her.
Who is this woman?

-XXXX