Boys Will be Boys

Before I get to this weekend I'll recap my Thursday. I was on the road for another town hall meeting. This one in San Antonio. I ended up going to the office in the morning to finish up a couple things and it was a good thing I did because several people had changes to their parts of the presentation. I ended up leaving just after lunch for the four hour drive to San Antonio... or so I thought. The drive ended up taking more than five hours thanks to rush hour traffic in Austin and San Antonio. Apparently there's a bypass for Austin, but I didn't know it at the time.

The presentation went as well as any of them so far. We got most of the wrinkles ironed out and this town hall was the best attended. Folks in San Antonio seemed very concerned about getting more schools in their area. They have two schools that I believe go up to 9th grade, but the conference itself is so spread out that it's not entirely uncommon for the nearest school to be a considerable distance away, even in metro areas. Part of the challenge is that opening more schools requires money. The conference can help to some degree but a school requires a dedicated base of financial support by the local community. This reminded me that it's probably time to start giving back to those who shaped my education.

While all this was going on Matt and Micah were flying into Dallas. So as soon as the meeting was done I jumped in the car for a late night marathon drive to kick of the weekend of bros. I picked them up in Keene just after 1 am and I think we finally got settled in for bed by about 2:30. That made for a late start on Friday. We pretty much just relaxed at my apartment for most of the day and then went to dinner at Babes Chicken in Burleson. Homestyle fried southern food with all you can eat veggies and biscuts. It was a glorious evening, still well into the 70's on the way home from dinner.

Still recovering from finals, the boys ended up sleeping well beyond church time. When we finally did get up and around we decided to go check out the Ft. Worth Stockyards. It was then that we discovered that the temperature had dropped by about 40 degrees overnight. In addition, there was a robust wind, which added to the chill factor. When we pulled into the stockyards a few wispy snowflakes were being added to the mix. But we persevered, because that's what the situation called for. Ducking into every available building we made our way along the historic streets, not really sure what we were supposed to be seeing. It was a lot of tourist stuff, and a lot of bundled up tourists.


Words cannot express how cold we were.

Finally we did find the cattle and they were very impressive:


A couple times a day they do a cattle drive down the street, but we were far too cold to wait for that to happen. It was time to head back to the apartment for warm drinks and some college basketball highlights.

Sunday I had to do an interview for a work project, so we hit the road for Lewisville and I whipped out my reporters notebook to gather information about Fisherman Ministries. It's an evangelism program that centers on one-on-one Bible study, as opposed to large-scale group meetings. Participants work with people who are interested in Bible study and take them through a systematic program of study that culminates in an invitation for baptism. The program has been transplanted to several other churches and is even in use in Africa. One of keys to this program's success is the one-on-one interaction helps people who are interested in spiritual things develop personal connections with people in the church, which makes the far more likely to stay connected for the long term. It should be a good article.

The next event on our schedule was a Dallas Stars hockey game. We had about 4 hours to kill so we decided to opt for another warm option, the Bass Pro Shop in Dallas. It was everything a massive sporting goods store should be. Guns, fishing poles, rubber worms, camouflage hunting suits, stuffed animals and an indoor pond stocked with massive fish. Even after we wandered to our hearts content there was still time to kill. We decided to go find the JFK memorial and maybe see about getting some lunch nearby. This proved to teach us two things. 1) Even when the temperature has risen to the mid 40's if the wind increases to 30-40 mph it is still terrifyingly cold outside. 2)In big cities like Dallas most restaurants in the business districts are closed on weekends. We ended up finding a place finally and just headed to the hockey game 90 minutes early. The game was exciting, even though the Stars lost in a shootout. Next trip we'll have to see about taking in a football game in Dallas...

Since I've been logging some serious hours with work projects over the last week and I had to take the boys to the airport I worked from home today, getting the next month's batch of stories ready for the union magazine and putting some of my notes together for the stories I'm working on for the conference magazine. Then it was off to deposit the boys at DFW and home to clean up and get ready for the next stretch of work. A couple more local town hall meetings are coming up in the next couple weeks and a pathfinder camporee at Lake Whitney Ranch, the new summer camp the conference is developing. Those events are sure to keep me plenty busy in the short term. Hopefully the'll be a nice long weekend somewhere along the way when I can make my way north. I'll be ready.