Sunday morning I left Grande Vista/East Oakland and met Jenny and Rachel and kids at a great farmers' market on the Berkeley-Oakland border. We ate crepes adn Indian food in the crispy but sunny air and migrated over to a playground. I got to see Jenny's daugther Chloe and Rachel's daughter, two weeks apart in age, play in the playground, see Rachel's oldest daugther (12) help take care of the younger ones; and Jenny's youngest (2) frequently in search of bathrooms, as she makes the transition out of diapers.
We stopped at Rachel's parents' second house, the Arts Center, the home for music and arts students wehre I stayed for free one Bay area trip ago (in the shadow of the Claremont Hotel, the white hotel at the top of the Berkeley hills that narrowly escaped burning down during a fire up in the hills in teh 1990s). While we visited, an audition for an opera preformance went on (Rachel's younger sister is an opera singer).
I rushed off an made it to San Jose and the McEnery Convention Center a little later than I had intended, but in time to give my colleagues Jack and Deborah a break. As I drove through downtown San Jose in search of the center, I spied our Tallahassee pastor, Brant Coperland and aksed him where the center was (and he directed me).
My office has a great booth in the sprawling exhibit area. We have a great corner space, a slew of free reasources, a neat Tools for Congregations logoon a tall sign and in new brochures, and a box for a raffle for a congregation to take a U.S. Congregational Life Survey for free. Pastors, presbytery staff, laypeople, and people staffing other booths stop by. My colleagues have been at this since Friday. I can be assertive, wanding out into the hallways between the booths and such and handing people our cards and invite people to sign up for the raffle.
I quickly got broad questions about the causes of our membership and attendance decline and narrow qeustiosn about how to find specific resources on our Web site. I stick with this for another 4 1/2 hours, before going - again, for South Asian Indian food - for dinner with my two Research Services colleagues. I then checked into my luxurious hotel room, drove my rental car back to the San Jose airport, then hopped on a free bus and then shifted to one of San Jose's famous light-rail trains (like those in Portland and Minneapolis). I had a little trouble with this shift, as I couldn't get the ticket machine ito take bills and I initially mis-guessed which train to take. I managed not to get into trouble for riding the train with no ticket. The train rode back by the Indian restaurant until it dumped me right in front of myhotel. Unpacking, fixing an error I'd found in my handouts, and blogging in the business center kept me up past 2 a.m., at the end of what had been a long day. As I blogged, half a dozen Youth Advisory Delegates, whose hotel I'm staying in, played charades before they retired to their rooms to play cards. Wonder if they got up at 7:30 a.m. also.
We stopped at Rachel's parents' second house, the Arts Center, the home for music and arts students wehre I stayed for free one Bay area trip ago (in the shadow of the Claremont Hotel, the white hotel at the top of the Berkeley hills that narrowly escaped burning down during a fire up in the hills in teh 1990s). While we visited, an audition for an opera preformance went on (Rachel's younger sister is an opera singer).
I rushed off an made it to San Jose and the McEnery Convention Center a little later than I had intended, but in time to give my colleagues Jack and Deborah a break. As I drove through downtown San Jose in search of the center, I spied our Tallahassee pastor, Brant Coperland and aksed him where the center was (and he directed me).
My office has a great booth in the sprawling exhibit area. We have a great corner space, a slew of free reasources, a neat Tools for Congregations logoon a tall sign and in new brochures, and a box for a raffle for a congregation to take a U.S. Congregational Life Survey for free. Pastors, presbytery staff, laypeople, and people staffing other booths stop by. My colleagues have been at this since Friday. I can be assertive, wanding out into the hallways between the booths and such and handing people our cards and invite people to sign up for the raffle.
I quickly got broad questions about the causes of our membership and attendance decline and narrow qeustiosn about how to find specific resources on our Web site. I stick with this for another 4 1/2 hours, before going - again, for South Asian Indian food - for dinner with my two Research Services colleagues. I then checked into my luxurious hotel room, drove my rental car back to the San Jose airport, then hopped on a free bus and then shifted to one of San Jose's famous light-rail trains (like those in Portland and Minneapolis). I had a little trouble with this shift, as I couldn't get the ticket machine ito take bills and I initially mis-guessed which train to take. I managed not to get into trouble for riding the train with no ticket. The train rode back by the Indian restaurant until it dumped me right in front of myhotel. Unpacking, fixing an error I'd found in my handouts, and blogging in the business center kept me up past 2 a.m., at the end of what had been a long day. As I blogged, half a dozen Youth Advisory Delegates, whose hotel I'm staying in, played charades before they retired to their rooms to play cards. Wonder if they got up at 7:30 a.m. also.
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