bob.wilson.blog

Greetings from Ireland! We are just starting the second week of our time in Europe and have been having a great time!  The first few days we were a bit crazy, with some time spent in Iceland (@ the Blue Lagoon), England, Wales, and finally Ireland.  And just like the movie, we’ve spent time in planes, [...]

For the past week, 11 of us from the Ithaca Vineyard have been down here in the Poconos for the Vineyard’s regional conference. It has been a weird sort of limbo week for me & Liz. On the one hand we are basically done with our work at the Ithaca Vineyard for the rest of the summer, and at the same time, we are looking ahead to our trip to Ireland that starts on Monday. When I first got down here, I was figuring I’d be blogging, tweeting & sending a bunch of updates for what was going on here.

So I was able to get a bunch of the stuff I’d been thinking about earlier in the week, so we’ll end the week with an abbreviated Friday Data Dump.

During my junior year of high school my basketball coach told me that although I would never be a starter on the team, if I worked really hard over the summer, I could be a good 6th man (first person off the bench for those who don’t follow basketball). Well our little chat inspired, me and I set out to prove him wrong.

This morning’s post was written by David Stipanuck. David is one of the teacher here with Vineyard Kids, as well as Professor Emeritus at Cornell’s Hotel School. This fall, one of the churches in our area, Trinity Lutheran, is hosting a “food packing event” in September.

When I was a kid, my favorite column in the Buffalo News sports page would be when one of the writers would start our their column with “Random thoughts while wondering whatever happened to” and then he would name some athlete that was on the scene for a bit & then faded away.

Over the 4 years Brenna has been @ Fall Creek, she has performed a number of songs. Over the past couple months she’s taken it up a notch and has started writing songs! Below is he song she performed this morning for the last day of school (and yes, she wrote it all by herself!)

It’s hard to believe how much work it is to get ready for some time off. Elizabeth & I spent most of last night finding rental cars online, looking for hotels or houses to rent for the week or so we’ll be in the southern part of Ireland, and then we fall into bed about 2 hours later than we should have.

A news story came out this week reporting that volunteering in America rose dramatically in the past year. Many expected that the recession would cause people to be less likely to give their time to the cause of their choice, but actually the opposite happened. In fact the number of volunteers rose by 1.6 million people in 2009 to 63.4 million!