Hope you are all enjoying warmer weather by now! I say this because I’m actually writing this about a month before you get to read it for the first time. I don’t like deadlines, so I work ahead. Great for me, but it does kind of keep you behind. Maybe most of you reading this aren’t directly involved in our project and don’t have day to day knowledge of what’s going on.
Anyway, I said all that to say, sometimes you have an idea that just seems like you should have had it some other time, but I have learned that ideas can be God’s way of prompting you to do something, so they do need to be investigated. Someone on the funding committee, not me by the way, had an idea in February to hold and ice cream social and open house. Who wants ice cream in the winter? But the time was right for an open house, because we wanted people to see the project early on, and we had heard that some neighborhood people wanted a chance to visit the old school.
After some discussion, (full disclosure, I am on the funding committee), we decided to go ahead and serve ice cream, cookies and other baked desserts, coffee. and drinks for the kids. Everybody loves cookies and coffee, right?
It didn’t take long to get volunteers to do the baking, and others got supplies around. We only decided to have the social about 3 weeks before the actual date, so we hustled to get signs printed and put out at various locations. Someone located 2 ice cream machines, tables and chairs were set up, and we were about ready. One area of concern was parking. There just isn’t much here, in fact, we have discovered from old aerial photos that a large portion of the north parking lot was covered over when they graded for the football field. I have a feeling I will be writing about our efforts to uncover that some day!
We obtained some portable lighting to make it easier to park in the crowded lot in the dark, and it turned out to be a good idea, because we had a large, steady crowd most of the evening. But, like many organized events, things didn’t go quite as smoothly as we had planned.
We decided to have vanilla and black raspberry flavors of soft serve ice cream, so we had 2 machines going. The first customers were just being served, when there was a loud bang, a long hiss, and one of the machines stopped working. I was expecting to find something, either oil, ice cream mix, or who knows what, splattered all over the walls, but all that actually came out was a very weird smell that filled the whole gym.
My first thought was, God, you do know we planned this to fund your project here, why is this happening? A couple quick prayers and right away people set to work trying to fix the machine. We have a school committee member who works with heating and cooling, so he was soon dismantling the broken machine, but there was no fixing it. It appeared to have overheated and blew a coolant line. Phones came out, and we soon dispatched some guys to get another machine.
I would guess that in less than an hour we were back up and serving 2 flavors again. We did have to dip the mix out of the broken machine by hand and carry it to the replacement. No need to waste it!
I think everyone who attended had a great time. I know they were well fed, because we had a great selection of cookies, bars, brownies, etc. I noticed some people who were there almost the whole time. We got to see a lot of people we don’t see every day, and a number of people had fun reminiscing about their old school days. A few people even managed to beg private tours of areas we aren’t using right now! It was good to see the amount of community support we have. I really hope we can continue to be a great asset to everyone.
We had a donation box out for people to help, and they were very generous. With the baked good being donated, (thanks everyone!), we were able to keep expenses down, and the evening was a success. Thank you very much to all who attended and donated! We have heard that due to the short notice, a number of people were unable to attend, so heads up, we are planning another open house later this summer when everything is ready to open. Maybe we will pick a real hot day and have more ice cream! We WILL try to give you more notice about the next one.
But in the meantime, if you would like to donate any items or money to our project, don’t hesitate to contact us. You can go on our website, www.uccs.school, there is a Donate button there, or you can contact us for more information about what we might be needing. If you would like to make a totally anonymous cash donation, there is a button on our website to go through the Anabaptist Financial group. You can direct them to send your money to us, and your identity remains private. If you own a business and have products that you would like to donate to help, we will gladly accept them.
