Its been a long time since an UP date

Well now, it has been quite a long time but I've been having such a good time and so much to do. The Coffee house is almost finished, and it looks great. It went from being dark and dank to bright and clean, we have nice new concrete floors with nice tan walls, great lighting, and some slightly pre-used kitchen equipment, but everything looks amazing. I will post pictures of that one pretty soon.

We also have a new garden to show off, but considering it snowed today (4/5/06) some of those nice new plants may no longer be with us, as in, they might be dead. So here's to hoping they didn’t die. But with this new garden comes a little patio for outdoor seating and a lawn full of tractor marks and mud. You win some you lose some. But once we seed and straw the lawn, we should have a nice green lawn for the summer. Hopefully this summer, people will know we are open and welcoming in the entire community. Right now, most of the neighborhood see's the work we are doing, but they think we aren’t even open. So we hope to change that once the coffee house opens up, they will be able to see all the other things that are going on in the community.

Thanks to Christine Taylor collection and my mom, we were donated +200 yards of fabric that we can use to drape around the sanctuary as a sound buffer for our concert hall. It was pretty cool of them to do that for us. In addition to that donation, a lady donated her time to design our garden and outdoor lighting for much cheaper then we expected and we rocked out our garden budget and have done very well with the money we were granted to do this with. Duane rented a bobcat front end loader, like a little tractor, and he and Dustin and the volunteers had a field day with that one driving it around and destroying our yard. Sure beats digging up the yard by hand with shovels!

So as my internship starts to wind down for the semester, I need to write a 10 page paper on some type of reflection. I have decided to write about racism and the racisms and prejudice i have while working in the East End community and how these views have changed and become apparent while working at the UP. Once it is done, I will post it somewhere that you may be interested in reading, but like I said, its 10 pages.

Well it is time for me to get moving, I have practice for a big worship service this Friday night. I will talk and post to you all later! Take care!

Reed