Goings On

Tuesday night turned out to be monthly poker night here at the Ranch. Men from church, mostly Baptist pastors and a few ladies with babies, came over for fellowship. We ladies watched a movie with popcorn, while the guys played poker. The winning pot was a gift card for the winner to take his wife out to dinner. There's a missionary couple raising support in the area who are staying here for a few days, too.

Wednesday's job was washing windows. The sunroom, which is the dining room for retreats, has four full glass double doors and at least a dozen windows besides. I gave them a touch-up.

One of the items you can buy in Mr. Bunky's restaurant/meat counter/thrift/hardware store, which is on the way to Columbia. They also allow dogs and have two birds inside, and the birds were supposedly quite mean and prone to bite.

Wednesday nights Mr. H takes part in a chapel service on post for Army recruits in training. I went along to see what it was all about. It was a smaller group than normal, apparently. The chaplains' wife just had a baby and some thought there wouldn't be service because he was taking this week off. We sang a few praise songs, had some prayer, and watched a video. It was a good opportunity and I think will be a good exercise for me in starting ministry-minded conversations with strangers, which is definitely my weak point. I did not know until now(Thank you, wikipedia) that the Ft. Jackson is responsible for training 70% of the Army's female recruits. Ft. Jackson is also a lot smaller than the other bases I've visited, namely Offut AFB and Ft. Bragg.

Thursday morning we went to the food bank. The food bank is where the Hs get a lot of their food for the retreats. Businesses donate old or damaged goods to the food bank, and the food bank distributes it to charitable organizations. Everything is divided into categories like produce, canned goods, drinks, etc, and there's a small per-pound fee. Since the donations change week by week one never knows what decent food will be there, and since they don't like you opening the boxes sometimes you don't even know what you're taking home! Last week we got a whole box of hostess twinkies. This week I managed to grab a mango and some juice, and we got pasta and two whole boxes of breakfast bars, and a bag of shampoo, among other things. When we get home we open up all the boxes to discover what we got(that's fun) and Mrs. H sorts out what we can keep and what to give away. The H's give foodstuffs to several families in need as well as the church food pantry.

Mrs. H at the food bank.

Tomorrow we'll be cleaning the Ranch house for the group coming on Sunday(we're expecting more than thirty sailors for dinner) and then Saturday is our day-trip to Charleston!