12/9/08 The Piles Just Don't Go Down!

This afternoon 9 women from the park and I went to help with the Arizona City Children's Christmas Party. The party wasn't today, it was gift wrapping day. We did this last year and I contacted Val, the lady whose "baby" this project is, the day the office opened to let her know we wanted to be involved again.

I tried to explain what it was going to be like to the ones who weren't here in Arizona last year. They were still amazed at all the things that had to be wrapped. To be honest, even I was surprised because 200 more children are registered for the party than were last year.

Large boxes like this all over the place, just waiting to be wrapped. There are between 30 and 40 toys in each box for the bigger kids and probably even more for the 1 - 2 year old toys like pictured below.

Val and her "elves" (her friends who help with this project) spent many hours sorting the toys by gender and age group in preparation of our arrival. Of course this didn't include all the toys we brought with us that the winter residents in Quail Run donated. Wrapping stations were set up throughout the house, which means any flat surface available was used for gift wrapping.

Here the two Carol's are busy at work on the back porch.

Billie shared her wrapping station with me. That was a lucky thing for me because she likes the challenge of wrapping oddly shaped things like basketballs and skateboards and I'm strictly a square or rectangular box type of wrapper. We had the Boys (7 - 9) box so there were plenty of oddly shaped things to wrap!

Judi and Sandy worked on the little tiny kids box and they thought they'd never get done!

This is what happens when you let the roll of paper get too close to the edge of your wrapping station. Kim learned a lesson here!

Take notice that the piles are all the same paper. This is so that the "elves" know what pile to pick a present from when a child visits Santa at the party on Saturday. A present for a seven year old girl is wrapped differently from a present for a twelve year old girl. Its all very scientific, trust me.

We wrapped and we wrapped for three solid hours and we only got half of the them done. It was agreed we would all come back on Thursday to finish up. This made me very happy because Val had some delicious cookies and fudge sitting out for us. I thought since she went to so much trouble to provide snacks for us that is was only right to not let them go to waste so I wrapped a present, had a piece of fudge, wrapped a present, had a cookie. I guess you could say I wrapped and ate my way through an afternoon.

At four o'clock we called it a day because several of us had our "Tuesday evening dinner in an empty RV space" to attend. We still had tomatoes to chop, lettuce to shred and ground beef to cook up. Remember, its Taco night!

As you can see by the pictures below its cooled down a bit here in Arizona. Its just a temporary thing because Friday we're going back up to 79 degrees.

Our ranks have expanded again by two more workampers arriving this week. At this dinner we had forty present. The tacos were sooooo good!

I don't know why or how this started but all of a sudden we were doing the "wave". We spent the rest of the time telling jokes and singing.

Around seven things broke up as the cool air was getting the better of us. I took some pictures of the rig when I got home.

We're using the red lights again this year but Bob has made some changes all the same. This year he added this Christmas tree. I just noticed the light above the tree isn't on. I'll have to take another picture of this for the full effect.

A close up of the front.

As you can imagine we're getting lots of comments on the lights. It really does "glow". We're keeping our fingers crossed that Bob's hard work will take first place this year.

This evening Bob played in the pool league and him and his partner took two out of three games. A pretty good day all around for us.