What Tim Chose

about me

name Tim C Hose
sex male
birthday 03.27.81

friends

Portfolio Websites

Kendra Coggin
Katie Cooper
Daniel Green
Amanda Burrow
Brandi Jones
Lisa Carter

After Ten Billion Years Down the fat! Spring Break: Hands and Feet End of the Break BREAK POINT End of the Break CONTINUED End of the Break Biloxi Blue My Kryptonite Accidental Perversion Work, it turns out, is hard work.

Archives

12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005 01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005 05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005 06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005 08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005 09/01/2005 - 10/01/2005 10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005 12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006 01/01/2006 - 02/01/2006 02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006 03/01/2006 - 04/01/2006 04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006 09/01/2006 - 10/01/2006 12/01/2009 - 01/01/2010 Current Posts

Way Cool Websites

Vlad Studios
Exploding Dog
The Blue Letter Bible
Woot Sales
Zefrank
Yanko Design

Friday, March 31, 2006

Okay, so continuing in the saga of my odd spring break trip to Biloxi, we take the story back up where Gomer the Idiot Carpenter had just revealed that the tender parts of his psyche could not stand spiders apparently even more than a friend of mine. I make this assumption because rather than send one of the other people down there with the spiders, he happily kept us all out of the danger of eight legged freakiness.

My other friend would have happily sent us house diving if it meant not chopping up some poor lady's floor, and that's just fine folks.

Alright. So. After the dreaded spider revelation we loaded the truck back up because that was literally all we were doing at this lady's house. Our slightly grumpy band of still-eager missionaries plowed onward to the next house on the list, making a brief stop at Lowe's for one single small piece of plumbing that we needed. The only reason we needed said piece of plumbing was because Gomer the Idiot Carpenter also added Idiot Plumber to his list of achievements the day before by digging straight through a lady's waterline.

Arriving at the second house, we bail out and start unloading tools while Gomer runs behind the house. Ryan deftly handed me a bag of plumbing fixtures and joints, and we all headed for the source of trouble, only to be met by Gomer coming back around the house.

"What are y'all doin'?" He asked.

We all stared blankly, and a few of us pointed weakly at the water main he had broken.

He shook his head like a big shaggy bear and goes "Naw! I'm done! Only thing ah had to do was around back!"

So we got back in the truck...

and left.

By this time, get this... it was lunchtime. We had done nothing the entire day, and let me tell you, it made for a really unhappy group of men and one woman who just wanted to help somebody. There was destruction everywhere, but we had done nothing the entire day.

As soon as we got back to the church, we all agreed on something.

We weren't going to do this anymore.

They had told us the very first day that we were there that if we did not like what we were doing on a project to just walk up the street and ask somebody if they needed help, so we decided to take them at their word and do just that. We were tired of unfinished projects, tired of not helping people improve the situation they were in. There were some people in my group who I had never seen angry the entire time I'd known them.

Oh, you know who you are!

Anyways, after we made this decision, everyone immeadiately felt better. We were excited, a little nervous about stepping out like this (such rebels!) and really really happy to be doing something that felt more in line with what we thought God had called us to do down there.

During lunch, however, Gomer came up to me and we had a little confrontation. He stopped me in the bathroom of all places, and holds out his hand with a smug look on his face.

"Dude. After lunch, we're really gonna hit it hard!" He says to me.

I looked him straight in the eye and said. "No, no we aren't."

He looks confused for a second, and then says "No, really. I've got us another job! Another older couple who need their lawn done. Just up the street from the last house."

I started trying to talk, but he stopped me again and says "Now, it ain't gonna be nothing too hard, just some easy work."

I say "Gomer! We really want to do something hard!"

He kind of waves that off and goes "Ahh naw! You guys are going to have a fun day tomorrow on the beach! You need an easy day!"

I gaped at him, and say "Yesterday was an easy day! We really want to do something hard!"

He just kind of laughed at the idiot kid, though, and left me standing there awkwardly in the bathroom as an old guy exited the stall and gave me a weird look.

Right at the end of lunch, my friends Ryan and Carl went to tell Gomer that we were not going to be on the other crew. These two guys are some kind of special studs, because Carl told him that we just had another job we were going to do. Apparently he got all flustered and started going on about how we needed to do yardwork for the memebers of the church, and Ryan instantly p0wn3d him with his fury alone. He told Gomer that there were people sleeping under the bridge, and he didn't think that lawn work was important.

I love those guys, and I wish I'd heard it.

I'm going to need one more entry to finish this guy up, but I promise, it's the best part of the entire trip. If you've been following the story, then it really is a storybook ending filled with some of the best characters I know.

It's a lucky man who has friends like these.

TimChose [ 1:18 PM ]

Right. Where was I?

Ahh. We'd just found out that our work project had been cancelled.

Not the most amazing thing to hear and not be told about. We really really wanted to work!
This other guy, though, claimed to have loads of jobs lined up for just such a young eager crew of large guys to handle. We all jumped into the truck, headed over to the tool shed, and he goes.
"Okay, get everything!"

Ah ha! We've heard this one before, sir!

Keeping a close eye on the man, we grabbed every tool and power tool we could find. Mowers, trimmers, chainsaw-on-a-stick, wheelbarrows, crowbars, circular saws! All of it!
Then, we loaded into the truck, packed 7 people in there like sardines and took off to these promised jobs.

The very first house that we went to was the house of the old woman who was in the wheelchair. Same place we'd been to the day before. Leading the way, our guide took us into her actual house for the first time ever, and this is where your host began to get a little concerned and angry.

The house was torn up inside. Literally. The sheetrock was gone, the flooring was gone, no insulation, nothing. So, while we had been happily mowing this woman's lawn the day before, her house had been sitting there just... waiting for somebody to help make it livable for the poor woman. FEMA trailers are not big by any means, folks, and are not quite built for the handicapped, or for people who want comfort.

Anyways. Once we get inside, the dude says "Okay. There is a hole somewhere under this house that her dogs keep falling into. We need to find out where that hold is and fill it in with dirt!"

Some of us exchanged puzzled glances, and I asked "Umm, hey. Wouldn't it be better just to get some trellis and block it off from the outside so that the dogs can't get under there at all?

He looked at me with an incredibly blank stare for a moment, and then then said "But... she wants the HOLE filled in!"

Then, he says "Stand back!" and started to CUT A HOLE IN THE WOMAN'S FLOOR with a circular saw!

"Woah!" We yelled. "What about her floor?"

"Ah," he says, "we're going to replace the whole floor."
That sounded okay to us, so he cuts a hole, right? Cuts a hole right in her floor, then stands up and looks at us and says, "Well, we're not really going to replace the floor. Just cover it with wood. It'll be strong."

I pointed at the hole and say "Well yeah, but not there."

Done is done, though, so we look down the hole and find out that the pit under the house is all the way on the other side of the house, and is actually made of concrete, like a well or cistern.
Gomer Pile the carpenter happily walks across the house and starts in on another hole right above the place.

This is where I realized how little carpentry experience the man had.

Picture this. No, really. It's nuts.

The man cut a hole...... around himself!

Just like in a cartoon! Luckily enough he was standing on a stud and didn't fall on through, but come on! He cut a HOLE around himself! After he was done, my friend Krystle pointed this out to him, and he gave this weird little laugh and stepped off the area and went "Daaaaang, sure did!"

Anyways, we find the pit under the house, and he starts measuring how deep the thing is. I asked him why, and he told me it was so that they could figure out how much fill dirt they would need to buy to get it done, and how much of a hole they would need to cut to dump it in there. I asked him if it wouldn't be easier just to not get all of that fill dirt, and not to tear up this poor woman's floor anymore, and instead just build a wooden cap to go over the pit.

Blinded by my logic, he nods and agrees, then took measurements for his masterpiece box. Feeling wary, I asked him what the measurements were.

"56 by 62!" He happily replied.

I waited.

And waited. He started working on something else.

"Hey," I finally said, "Don't you need to know how tall it needs to be?"

He froze for a moment, then snapped his fingers and yelled "Yup!"

After he got that measurement, he says "Lets go!"
Apparently, that's the only thing we needed to do there. Just take measurements.
So, I asked him why we didn't just crawl under the house to get those measurements.

Seems reasonable, right?

Gomer the Idiot Carpenter looks at me, straight in the face, serious as can be, and says...

"Ah hate spiders!"

TimChose [ 1:16 PM ]

So here is the dramatic end of my spring break week of mission work fun.

Want to know the end before I get to it?

We left the worksite in frustration.

No joke! Ok, here's the skinny, as the homies say. (Yes, I know that was an fase reference. Homies would never say that, or their boys would be checkin' on 'em for a looooong time, son.)

Alright. Well, after my last entry, the workdays went slightly odd. Wednesday we did yardwork. I'm serious, yardwork for church members, which I can tell you is pretty hard to do when you've looked at people who are sleeping under a bridge.
What they did was to take us to these church member's homes and do "beautification projects" where we mowed the lawns and trimmed branches and stuff. At first, it didn't seem like a bad thing, because the woman that we were doing this for was in a wheelchair and couldn't do the work herself. No big deal.
the second house of the day, though, was for people who's lawn had been named Yard of the Year in Biloxi for like, 4 years running.
Now, I don't want to sound ungrateful. The church was putting us up and feeding us, but come on. The whole time we were mowing this lawn or moving branches, or spreading mulch, we were talking to each other. Is this what we were here for? Did God want us cleaning these people's yard? Wasn't there someplace else we could do more good?

Well, in most cases, the moral to the story ends up something about how the group prayed about it and decided that there was some lesson about life to be learned in the simple service of doing the work.

The only thing was... it wasn't like that. We prayed about it, yes, but the message really was that we could be doing much, much more.

So, the next day rolls around on our frustrated little group of missionary adventurers. We had secured a job where we were supposed to demolish the ceiling on some woman's house because it had been damaged in the floods. Sounded pretty cool to us, so in the morning we loaded up into this guys truck and headed off.
We got in the truck.
And drove.
Across the parking lot to the toolshed.
Where the guy goes "Okay, go get all the tools we'll need!"
We're pumped!
We jump out of the truck.
Rush to the toolshed.
Grab all the tools we'll need. Crowbars, hammers, etc.
We run back outside.
And...
He's gone.
Truck and all! The dude TOOK OFF while we were in the shed, and so we waited for him to come back. We waited for an hour and a half. No kidding.
When he finally gets back, he parks the truck and goes into the building without saying a WORD to us. Minutes later, a different guy comes out with papers in his hand yelling "I got us some JOBS! Come on!"
"Wait," I said, "what about the ceiling job?"
"Oh, that got cancelled!" He happily replied.

Dang, kids. I'm tired. My birthday was yesterday, so I'm going to go to sleep and finish this sad sordid tale tomorrow. Have a great night!

TimChose [ 12:47 PM ]

This week.

Pretty bizarre week so far, people. I'm in Biloxi right now helping with hurricane relief this week, and it's pretty interesting. Thus went my week, sirrah.

We all boarded up on the vans Saturday morning, and headed out for an 8 hour trip down here to the rocking land of Biloxi. I had been worried about how this trip was going to go down because let's face it. Eight hours in a van with 15 or so people can get a little tedious.

So, I decided that it wasn't going to happen that way, and I bought toys. My supplies to create a vastly fun trip included:

1. Glass Chalk. With this we decorated the outside of the van with many fun slogans such as "Hey you! You are an awesome person! (And Cute!)" and we also drew bears, bunnies, and people running all willy nilly.

2. Sticky Balls. These little guys are made of suction cups, so they stuck to everything they hit. Awesome for nailing right next to a drowsy friend's head.

3. Snacks. We all loaded up with fruit rollups, granola, and chips.

4. Bubbles. Yes, people. This was the big one that sent our trip into astronomical fun-time. I bought a huge pack of little bubbles, so we spent literally hours creating a 60's wonderland of flying colored fun. Hopefully somebody else will clean out the inside of that van.

Anyways, that's how the ride went. We all arrived just fine, and then got our first taste of what had really happened down here. It was pretty sobering.

Not that we were drunk. Just for the record, we weren't.

No, really.

Ok, the coastline of Biloxi is almost gone. Almost all of the houses new and old, every single reasturant, the ocean casinos, and anything else unlucky enough to be in the way of a 30-foot tall wall of water.

The big thing here, though, is the church that we are staying in. These people are some kind of amazing. We are literally across the street from the beach, so the water got into the church during the hurricane. The pews are all messed up and the church has been overhauled.

Not overhauled like you would think, though.

Every SINGLE Sunday School room has been changed into sleeping places for missionaries. They have gone in and changed a large downstairs room into showers for the missionaries, and these people have been working for, get this, six months straight without time off as voulnteers coordinating different visiting group's labors. They are excited about the fact that sometime around August they might get a week off. No kidding.

Well. Since I've been here, I've worked on a cleanup crew down by the highway. We got rid of a lot of trash and such that had blown in, set a fence back up, and that kind of thing. Today, though, it was a little wierd. We went to this lady's house where she was diabled from repeated surgery, and her father was bedridden. They had cans. THOUSANDS of cans, people. This lady and her dad love Diet Coke with a passion and had decided to recycle before they were injured. Well, those cans have been sitting there since 2003, and the pile just got bigger and bigger. My friends Roy and Carl were given the task of pulling these soda cans out and recycling them. Well, we got to talking about it, and all we could think about were the tabs on those sodas. You see, there are a couple of different things that you can do with those tabs. One of them is donate them to the Ronald McDonald House, and I hear that they will pay for one minute of chemotherapy for children with cancer. It has to do with the fact that the tabs are higher in metal content and worth more for recycling.

So, we went to work and pulled hundreds and hundreds of tabs off of these guys before we re-bagged them and sorted them. Fifteen bags later we called it a day, mowed the lady's yard, and came back to the church. After dinner and devo, a few of us wandered the town and saw the Katrina memorial site where I got to talk to a couple of locals who were actually in the storm. Later, we think that somebody shot at us froma boat, so we came back to the church.

There, we found our looters.

Yes, we have our very own looters! These lovable morons have returned to the apartment beside the church for three nights in a row scavenging what they can from the place, so we decided that we would just... watch them. It worked like a charm, and freaked them out so badly that they started to shout at us and left.

As they left last night, one of them apparently was annoyed at being run off by Arkansans, being of high Mississippi blood, so he yelled at us "Heeey! Ya'll got you tee vee up thar in Arkansas yet?"

Now, I'm not sure what happened in my brain, but I yelled back "No sir! We're due to get that started up next year though! We're real excited!"

This took the poor fellow aback, so he kind of went "Uhh. uhh" for a moment, and then in a brilliant flash of insight yelled another "tee vee" related insult.

"Y'all got you cable? Huh? Haw haw haw!"

So, I yelled back at him, "Heck yeah I got me some cable! I use it to tie down stuff in mah truck, or to rope some steer up to things. Cable's real useful!"

I really don't know if the guy ever realized that I was messing with him or not, but they retreated before my vivious verbal onslaught. We have a lot of fun standing outside watching them every night when they come back.

Anyways, that's been my trip so far. More updates will come later! Other people need to use this computer, have a great night!

TimChose [ 12:46 PM ]