Thursday, November 15, 2007 - Convention Day 2

Oh what a day Thursday turned out to be. It began with a wonderful breakfast with the Mussers and then HA led me to the gas station so that I could get gas and told me how to get to the convention center. I arrived at about 8:10 and started to organize all the pieces for set-up that day while I waited for Curtis and Janeil to show up. Janeil showed up, followed by Curtis, his brother and a friend of his, and the fun began. This church that we are trying to build was way beyond our area of expertise until Curtis brought us extra hands. We started at about 8:30 and broke for an hour for lunch and still did not manage to finish putting everything together and all the tables set up and organized until almost 4:30. We only got done that soon because Maureen showed up before lunch to help us guys do the church and Erin and Laura Jo showed up to help hang everything and organize the tables. The frame of this church is six 3 inch bamboo posts that are not straight, hollow, and very easy to snap. The top is seven eight foot quarter inch posts going from back to front and four 10 foot quarter inch posts from end to end. We had to put two corner brackets on each post and tie two of them to items in our display and the rest to the tables for our display. After it was all together and standing on its own, we moved on to putting the roof on. This consisted of 14 pieces of grass thatching and we need 15. Fortunately, Chris (Curtis’s brother) was inventive enough to make it look presentable. After we got the roof on the four of us went out to the trailer to unload a Club Cadet, which is a glorified golf cart that Janeil had donated to his family last week. The fire marshal was in checking everyone’s booths to make sure we were not going to burn and for us that consisted of fire proofing all the thatching, which was done at the office warehouse, have working smoke detectors and a fire extinguisher, and disconnecting the batter of the Cadet and making sure that there is only a quarter tank of gas in it and making sure the battery is disconnected. Once we found the battery and found the something to test the level of the gas and found it to be ok we VERY slowly pushed it off of the trailer and made our way to our booth. It works very well as another stand to hang things from and makes for a real nice seat/place to play for Ne Ne and Josiah. After the Cadet was in place we were done setting up and got to relax, WOO-HOO. The main session started at 6:45 and ended around 8:30. Most of us hung around until about 915ish while the crowd died down and then called it a night. On my way back to the Mussers’ house I got lost in downtown Cincinnati because I am not familiar with the roads and directions anymore but after about 10 minutes of trial and error I figured it out and was back to the house at about 10:30. I chatted with the family for about an hour and then hit the sack. Peace.