Another Good-bye

We've been having hot, hazy weather this week, and the rising sun has been beautiful every morning on the way to work. I stopped in the church parking lot to try to capture it today. It was prettier than this, but this will help me remember it.

Today we had another going-away party. Joann VanMeter decided to retire (I think she had toyed with the idea for some time), and we had a surprise farewell lunch for her today at noon. Matt Lockhart expressed the company's appreciation for her 14 years (I think that's the right number) of service, most recently (and most valuably) as our rights and permissions manager. Her skill and knowledge of the whole rights scene has grown with her years of experience. That, plus her knowledge and concern for our customers and contributors and her warm personality and ready laugh all combine to make us very sorry she's leaving.
But she's not the only one to go. A week ago Friday I treated the Magazines staff to lunch so that Shawn McMullen could tell them that he's been recommended by the elders of Lifespring Christian Church to become their senior minister. He'll preach trial sermons at Lifespring's various campuses this month, and if the elders' call is confirmed September 29, he'll begin at Lifespring November 1.

This follows a summer in which we lost Jared Alexander, Robb Faust, Zach Davis, Valaira Hoskins, and a couple of others I didn't know as well and whose names I've forgotten.
Someone came by my desk after lunch today, "You're not planning on leaving, are you?"
"Not planning on it," I said.

A Day in Winter, I Mean Spring

 

All afternoon and evening yesterday we kept returning to the Internet for weather updates and reports of massive snowfalls in Kansas and Illinois. Before we went to bed, the newsmen here were saying, "This is very difficult to predict. I'm not sure we'll see as much snow as we at first thought." They had at first thought about 5 inches for Butler County. But we awoke this morning to steady snow, but only an inch or two of wet, heavy snow on the ground. I drove Evelyn's car to Barnes automotive (that "Check Engine Light" came back on again last week), and Robb Faust gave me a ride from there to work.

We enjoyed something different at lunchtime. A cooking demonstration and talk about nutrition from two representatives from the culinary school that offers classes in the building across the courtyard from ours. The homemade spaghetti sauce over spaghetti squash was wonderful. I've never cooked a spaghetti squash before, but I want to try it. And he mixed broccoli slaw into the tossed salad, dressed with a homemade vinaigrette.
Soon after lunch I joined a few from Standard at Christ's Church at Mason to help with a video we were shooting there. It 's a training video that will be posted at standardpub.com to help users know how to use (and decide to use) Standard Lesson Commentary and Standard LessonQuarterly. My friend Jared Alexander needed some folks to pose as members of an adult Sunday school class for some "B-roll" shots.

We had fun trying to look like real Sunday school class members while joking and chattering with each other. It sounds simple, but we were there almost two hours. Stephanie Woeste asked me to read the brief intro for the video before we left.

Robb and I went to pick up my car at Barnes's, and I ran some errands before coming home.

It snowed all day long, but thankfully the warm highways and the air temperatures just above freezing kept it from sticking on the roads. Nevertheless, the scenes outside our windows all day long were from Christmas cards and not Easter catalogs.