Tuesday, May 26, 2009

First Ice-Cream Cone of the Season

Yesterday was a rainy and overall dreary Memorial Day in our area so instead of celebrating with the traditional BBQ, my wife and I drove up to Pick City and got ice-cream cones at The Crab Apple. Pick City is a very small community that picks up during the summer as it's near the lake and camping grounds. As a result, some of its business (including the aforementioned Crab Apple) are only open during the summer months. They have very good ice-cream and it makes for a pleasant outing on an otherwise "indoor" kind of day.

Sunday was Underwood High's graduation. This year there were twenty seniors that received their diplomas. It's neat to experience the difference between a large high school graduation (and college for that matter) and a small town commencement. It included a PowerPoint slide show featuring pictures of each of the graduate's family, friends and memories, as well as shots of the whole class. Unlike larger graduations, we were encouraged to applaud as each student was handed the diploma (their diplomas were actually in the covers; they didn't have to go somewhere after the ceremony to get the real thing). At the end of the festivities the graduates formed a greeting line so that friends and family members could extend congratulations personally. The students also had graduations parties later in the day of which my wife and I were invited to one of the guys that I got to know through basketball coaching.

For those of you who are familiar with the board game "Settlers of Catan" (and if you're not I highly recommend going out to Barnes and Noble and buying it), my wife and I have recently been playing around with a few rule changes. We first played a game by placing our opening two settlements and roads for each other. The only rule was that each settlement had to be bordering at least two numbered tiles. That didn't go so well (I got whomped). Yesterday we played a two-person game but used the expanded board (for 5-6 players). I did quite a bit better that time around.

Our Congregations is going to be quite busy this summer. We're planning on hosting a couple "Worship-in-the-Park & Community BBQ" events (including a summer kick-off one June 14th), we'll be hosting a booth at the County Fair again this year but this time instead of giving away bottles of water we're going to have a carnival-style game for kids and give away prizes, in July we'll be organizing some prayer walks around the community and in August (in addition to an end of the summer "Worship-in-the-Park") we'll be hosting a booth at Harvest Fest again. The Elder Board recently came up with a slogan for the banner that we'll display at these events: "Serving Our Community for Jesus" What do you think about that?

By God's Grace, Jeff

No comments: