Consecration Sunday and Capital Campaigns

On Saturday, the Traveling Roths traveled accross the street. Mebane Presbyterian Church is having a capital campaign to raise about $900,000 to do a lot of repairs on the Baker Building, the church's social hall that used to be the sancturary before the present sanctuary was built in the mid 1950's, as well as some important stuff for the sancutary building, like new air conditioning.

Saturday night was a big celebration dinner on the eve of consecration sunday; the day that everyone hands in their pledge cards to say what they'll be giving to the church in the next year, and additionally to the capital campaign over the next three years.

I'm on the Building Committee, and we had set up displays with our architect's 3D renderings of how the changes would look.

The parishoners seemed pretty into it.

We had a catered dinner in the big hall. The dinner consisted of salad, green beans almandine, red-skinned potatoes, herb stuffed chicken, and roast beef au jus. For dessert there was chocolate mousse or strawberry cake. Like always, here's a picture of my dinner.If you think I'm going to make fun of the food, think again. It was very delicious, and it was very generous of whomever paid for this to provide us with it.

Whoops, I forgot to mention the dinner roll. Actually, that was the one part of the dinner that was not worth mentioning. Why can't we get bread right in the South?

For entertainment, a four piece brass group played, and they were awesome. They had some very cool arrangements, and their tone was impeccable.
There were some speeches. One by Tim Gabel, the head of the capital campaign committee
And another by the guy with the beard, a capital campaign consultant from the Presbyterian Church.

Meanwhile, the kids were being attended to in the other building where they watched movies, and had pizza and soda. When we got home, Tristan informed me that he had consumed five sodas, four slices of pizza, and several cookies. Fortunately, he has a metabolism like a jet engine, so there was no real consequence.

And as a sort of an update. . .

Aerial Pumpkins

Remember the melon tree post, where we found what we thought was a watermelon growing from our dogwood tree? It turns out it is a pumpkin. Here it is. I added the mesh bag a few weeks ago, and tied it off to the tree, so it's still growing. For comparison, there is a traditional pumpkin in the background that may be from the same plant.


Another aside, this is the first post in Blogger Beta. Do you see a difference? I migrated the blog over on Sunday night, and so far I don't have an opinion.