Into the West - 3 Times
The SV Executive Getaway at the Pines Lodge (near Vail, CO) was a great success, with significant money raised for Student Venture. Our small Development team worked really hard, took a lot of pictures, sang a lot of songs, and helped the guests have a memorable time.
The visit to 4 Eagle Ranch was especially good, as we added team activities - Cowboy Croquet and the Pack Burro Relay. The croquet was a relay race, set up so that people from each of the 6 teams converged on a single pole at the end. The result was pretty funny - a big blob of people knocking into each other. The Pack Burro Relay used the same 6 teams, and involved bridling and harnessing the animals, putting a pack saddle on, finding "gold nuggets" buried in a trough, putting the "gold" and other things (including exactly 49 sodas) in the saddlebags and then leading the burro around a course.
I had expected the burros to be stubborn and uncooperative; I was actually looking forward to taking pictures of people trying to tug and coax them along. But maybe it's mules that are famously stubborn, and I'm just too citified to know the difference.
I took portraits of each couple at the ranch, and ran to Wal-Mart to get them printed the next day. We put the 5x7's in a cardboard photo frame and presented them to the guests that evening. They were very impressed - some said that these were the best pictures that had ever been taken of them!
It was nice to leave them with a nice memento of the conference.
We typically end the conference with a slide show featuring many of the photos we took all weekend. Last year I stayed up 'til about 3:30 a.m. doing this in PowerPoint. Praise the Lord, I found an inexpensive slide show product called PictureToExe that let me build the show, synchronized with music, in less than 2 hours. Another advantage I had this time is that SV now owns a really nice digital SLR camera. Another staff guy and I took a lot of good pictures with it (including the portraits mentioned above), so we had plenty to choose from.
Sunday morning came - the end of the meeting, and I hit "Play" on the slide show. 120 photos came and went, and the people loved it. Whew!
Scott and I drove down the hill to Denver Sunday night after the conference. On the rental car shuttle, I started talking with George, our driver. He goes to a Catholic church but did not have a clear understanding of salvation by faith. I tried to explain to him that we are saved by grace, not by works. He told me that God must be working on him, because someone had been sharing with him just the day before. He showed me a little evangelistic card that had been left in his tip bucket. Very cool.
Eric just finished two 2-week sessions of summer school. This segment was Personal Fitness, which included running, basketball, volleyball, ping-pong and bowling (some were optional). Oh, and the weight room, where I found out he can bench press 120 pounds.
Eric is now also officially taller than Katie, which of course she's not real happy about, but what will you do. He's almost 15, and we expect the guys to be taller eventually. He and Katie still have not hit 5 feet yet, but it's only matter of time before Eric does, thereby passing up his mom.
The travel continues. On Friday, July 8 I head off to San Francisco by myself to go to my mom and dad's 50th anniversary party on July 10 (the actual day) at my sister Kathy's place in the Berkeley hills. I come back Monday, then we'll head off again the following Friday for Colorado for Campus Crusade's bi-annual Staff Conference. But more on that later.
The visit to 4 Eagle Ranch was especially good, as we added team activities - Cowboy Croquet and the Pack Burro Relay. The croquet was a relay race, set up so that people from each of the 6 teams converged on a single pole at the end. The result was pretty funny - a big blob of people knocking into each other. The Pack Burro Relay used the same 6 teams, and involved bridling and harnessing the animals, putting a pack saddle on, finding "gold nuggets" buried in a trough, putting the "gold" and other things (including exactly 49 sodas) in the saddlebags and then leading the burro around a course.
I had expected the burros to be stubborn and uncooperative; I was actually looking forward to taking pictures of people trying to tug and coax them along. But maybe it's mules that are famously stubborn, and I'm just too citified to know the difference.
I took portraits of each couple at the ranch, and ran to Wal-Mart to get them printed the next day. We put the 5x7's in a cardboard photo frame and presented them to the guests that evening. They were very impressed - some said that these were the best pictures that had ever been taken of them!
It was nice to leave them with a nice memento of the conference.
We typically end the conference with a slide show featuring many of the photos we took all weekend. Last year I stayed up 'til about 3:30 a.m. doing this in PowerPoint. Praise the Lord, I found an inexpensive slide show product called PictureToExe that let me build the show, synchronized with music, in less than 2 hours. Another advantage I had this time is that SV now owns a really nice digital SLR camera. Another staff guy and I took a lot of good pictures with it (including the portraits mentioned above), so we had plenty to choose from.
Sunday morning came - the end of the meeting, and I hit "Play" on the slide show. 120 photos came and went, and the people loved it. Whew!
Scott and I drove down the hill to Denver Sunday night after the conference. On the rental car shuttle, I started talking with George, our driver. He goes to a Catholic church but did not have a clear understanding of salvation by faith. I tried to explain to him that we are saved by grace, not by works. He told me that God must be working on him, because someone had been sharing with him just the day before. He showed me a little evangelistic card that had been left in his tip bucket. Very cool.
Eric just finished two 2-week sessions of summer school. This segment was Personal Fitness, which included running, basketball, volleyball, ping-pong and bowling (some were optional). Oh, and the weight room, where I found out he can bench press 120 pounds.
Eric is now also officially taller than Katie, which of course she's not real happy about, but what will you do. He's almost 15, and we expect the guys to be taller eventually. He and Katie still have not hit 5 feet yet, but it's only matter of time before Eric does, thereby passing up his mom.
The travel continues. On Friday, July 8 I head off to San Francisco by myself to go to my mom and dad's 50th anniversary party on July 10 (the actual day) at my sister Kathy's place in the Berkeley hills. I come back Monday, then we'll head off again the following Friday for Colorado for Campus Crusade's bi-annual Staff Conference. But more on that later.
posted by Pat @ 12:37 PM
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