Mission Trip and Randoms

Sorry for the delay in updating the blog, I've been pretty busy with Vacation Bible School at church followed by a week long mission to San Marcos, Texas. Both went very well, but I'm very excited to be done with both. I am exhaused!!! But both were a lot of fun. This first picture here is more for Brittany than anyone else, So thanks Brittany for the birthday clothes and shoes, they are awesome! They help keep me a little cooler. But when it gets at least 95 degrees every day for the past 3 weeks, well, everything is hot. But in a small part I think that I'm getting used to it. In a very very very small way...

Here is a lovely picture of my first attempt at a texan meal. I had originally planned on grilling it with a baked potato, but we were out of propane, so the put the brakes on that idea. So I improvised and cubed the potatoes and cooked them in a frying pan together. On the whole, this wasn't my strongest idea I've ever had, but it go the job done(and a healthy portion of ketchup fixed the overdone potatoes). Where the plan went really wrong, was when I was cooking it, I filled pretty much the entire house with a thick cloud of smoke from the butter and steaks. It pretty much looked like a bar throughout the house, but smelled like heaven.

On our mission trip we had a wonderful time helping out a gentleman that goes by the name Mr. Lee. He has had quite a few back problems and surgeries and has done a number on his finances. We helped him out with quite a bit of painting, both inside and out, including his cement porch and walkway. We also layed lamenant tile throughout the whole house and put quarter round moldings around the base board. And it was HOT! A couple of days reached one hundred and seven! But we survived and managed to have a little fun too! One of the evenings we jumped at the chance to go to Austin and check out the city a little bit and this is a picture of their famous bridge(which I forgot the name of) where the bats come out of. It was sooo cool. We was literally thousands of bats come out the the bridge for about 20 minutes. It was really neat, I've never seen anything like it.

A couple of evenings during the week we had the opportunity to play in the river that runs through town. One night we went tubing and another night we just went swimming and found a nice waterfall to jump off of and explore. We got a steak dinner one night and spent friday at a water park. On the way home we stopped at a small german themed town, fredricksburg, that I guess is pretty famous, but it was pretty weak compared to frankenmouth. I would have liked to enjoy some good german beverages, but I was at work.......such is life. Maybe a return visit someday.

I'm having a lot of fun down here and I love my job. I have new and exciting challenges every day, but I couldn't imagine doing anything else. I'm learning a lot every day and hopefully I can put that knowledge to good use. On my horizon I have two weeks of summer camp and a visit from my beautiful fiancee! On the work front, I am implementing a plan to redo our youth wing and I feel mildly over my head with the whole project, but I'm faithfully moving forward.