Needless Lodging Woes

July 21st, 2005 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tomorrow night I will be in Saint Louis, Missouri, watching the Cubs battle it out with the Cardinals. I am more than a little excited about this. Myself, Brandon Barker, a random father, and 8 students will be making the trip, which has us going to St. Louis tomorrow and Kansas City on Saturday for a Royals/Blue Jays game, then back home. As part of my internship, I got to plan the whole thing, which included finding and buying tickets to the already-sold-out Cubs/Cards game and finding a place to sleep in St. Louis on Friday night. The latter would prove to be a much more formidable task.

Brandon had a contact with a church in St. Louis, so I called him last week and inquired as to whether or not we could use their church to sleep in for a night. The dude that I talked with said that it shouldn’t be a problem and that I should send an email to the facilities woman. Shortly thereafter, Facilities Woman receieved a fun and information filled email from me. I did not get a response from from Mrs. Woman until Tuesday, at which point she informed me that we would not be able to use the church because they already had it booked.

Awesome.

Now I only had three days to find a random church in Saint Louis at which to sleep. This is approximately the point that I started freaking out. Molly calmed me down (she fed me warm milk and rubbed my head¹), and I began making phone calls. I called more than ten churches, all of which had nobody available or just plain refused. One church, however, had a very nice woman named Jill who said she would do some “research” for me. Jill, wherever you are,² you totally came through in the clutch. After nearly a day and a half of what I can only assume was extremely intense research, fact-gathering, and annotated bibliography making, Jill informed me that we could sleep at her church. How encouraging… I am just so blessed - ahem.

I am speaking for Sunday school on.. Sunday. I’ll probably talk about John 3 (Jesus vs. Nicodizzle) and John 4 (Jesus vs. Anonymous Samaritan Woman). Jesus wins both battles. It should be pretty sweet.

My brother and I played ultimate frisbee last Saturday in the Iowa Games, with my team from school, LUFDA. Temperatures reached nearly 100 degrees. Centigrade. The scorching heat, however, did not prevent me from ripping nearly 92% of the skin off on my knee on an incredibly poetic diving block. When all was said and done (more doing than saying, probably) we ended up with bronze medals, having only lost one game - to the University of Iowa. Not being content with an ugly, slowly healing wound on my knee, I thought it would be a good idea to sacrifice my body for the good of my team last night at Des Moines Ultimate Summer League. I completely ripped the scabs off of my knee and elbow, and my elbow was bleeding so profusely that blood was dripping from my fingertips. I had planned on returning to the game all courageous-like, but my weak tolerance for the sight of blood wouldn’t have that. So I basically passed out on my car instead.

As for other areas of my life, as Matt Wertz would say, “everything’s right”.

1. This is a lie. She neither fed me warm milk nor rubbed my head. She laughed at me for a while, though, which was pretty comforting. ↩
2. Probably St. Louis. ↩