yelm moment of the day

0Josh • 16th Sep 2007 • blog entries, cascades experences, photoblog

Wow, now I know that there are millions of bloggers out there, and that probably only very few of them do a “good” job of updating their site, but almost a year without a substantial entry is pretty ridiculous.

Life has been good down here in Yelm, things at camp are still great and I still feel so blessed to have the job that I do. Summertime and the months leading up to it are insanely busy as we hire almost 80 full time college-aged staff to help our various camp programs and our rental facilities, summer is always the most rewarding part of the job here, and its always sad to see everyone leave… but its kind of nice to be suddenly out in the middle of the woods by ourselves again! (Speaking of camp, our new program intern Claudia is going to be helping to keep our Cascades Blog up to date each week, check it out!)

Everytime I think about coming back here to this blog, I struggle to see its purpose, its been two years since we moved back down here to Washington after our 12 month adventure in Nome, Alaska. The time we spent in Nome was this blog’s hayday, and its hard to imagine anything being as fun for me to write (and maybe more importantly, for you to read) as when we chronicled our great white journey. HOWEVER, I’m just going to do it regardless…we’ll see what happens.

yelm moment of the day:: After turning onto “Bald Hills Rd” Lydia and I noticed that our local feed store had about, oh…400x the normal amount of cars parked in the parking lot. Not only were there cars in the lot, they were parking at a store across the street, and on the side of the road (both sides) for about 150 yards. We had no other option but to pull over and find out for ourselves what on earth could possibly be going on. We parked on the side of the road and started walking up to the store. Once we got to the parking-lot we were greeted by about 250 people crammed into a small area near the entrance to the store, we looked in the middle of the crowd, and there was a temporary pen setup and in the middle was a baby calf sleeping. The sign on the pen told that the calf, and a year of its feed was the grand prize in a customer appreciation giveaway. It mentioned that the winner would be picked Sunday evening at 4:00, and that the winner must be present in order to claim their prize. I looked down at my watch and saw that it was 3:57, we had only a few minutes until the contest would come to a close. Lydia and I ran inside, and with all thoughts of “logistics” aside were going to try and win ourselves some cow. I ran up to the register inside the store and asked for two entry slips and just as I finished writing our phone number on the second slip, the manger was trying to make his way through the crowd with the box of entries in his hand. I pushed my way to him and was one of the last entrants in this bizarre contest. The manager made his way outside and was greeted by a forklift which he stood on, as to get above the crowd. Alas, we did not leave the store that afternoon with a cow, but we did leave with some pride in the crazy hick-ville that we live in.