Last week I also started a new volunteer adventure with Nellie - Girl Scouts! We are working with Hannah's Daisy troop and I'm really excited about it. Look forward to more pictures in the future!
After the Bike MS craziness, it was really nice to have a relaxing weekend with not a ton going on. Friday night after work I headed to Forest Park with Nellie and the kiddos for Balloon Glow, one of my favorite STL fall events. We packed a picnic dinner and ate while we watched the balloons go up as the sun set. It was lovely and the weather was heaven.
In the world of the National MS Society, where events are the way we make most of our money, there are Walk chapters and Bike chapters. Gateway is a Bike chapter. This means that Bike is our largest fundraiser of the year and we are well known among other chapters as doing it well. Out of 100 or so rides, we are in the top 10 in money/participants.
Our ride was last weekend, which means I lived and breathed Bike MS for about a week to pretty much the exclusion of everything else. This year the event faced some staffing challenges as our Director of Development was unexpectedly no longer with us as of 10 days before the ride and my boss (our Assistant Director of Development) was going to be at a wedding in Mexico for her cousin. So our Director of Marketing and Communication and I ran the fairgrounds portion of the ride. Granted, I would have also been running part of the ride if our DOD was still there, but not as the go-to girl. I am proud to say that I think Dan (our DOMC) and I did a good job and things went very smoothly especially considering he jumped in to help at the 11th hour. The entire staff busted their butts all weekend and it made things SO much easier. I was so proud to work with them. We had a few issues over the weekend (like a storm that took out 11 of our 10x10 pop up tents that had to be replaced Friday night and a lack of a volunteers at a few key times) but overall things went well. No one knocked me out and locked me in the Tiger Ice trailer so I think this can be counted as a win (Stacey totally had the opportunity too.)
I was thrilled when Krystal invited me to come down to Goose Creek with her this weekend. I am a water-loving girl so a few days at the lake is always a "yes" in my book! Unfortunately, it was a bit of a chilly weekend and rained a bunch (no rain most of the summer but of course this weekend) but we still had fun. We went down Saturday morning and were able to even get in the lake for a little bit on Saturday. The lake is really super low thought - we went down to Sherry & Rick's lake lot and were able to stand by the dock where the boat would normally be - so the water there was less than 5 feet deep. SHALLOW! I don't know if we would have been able to get the boat in the water if it was sunny and warm because the water was so low! Anyway, we swam for a bit and had yummy kabobs for dinner.
Before dinner we were able to take the 4 wheelers out for a bit of fun. This seemed to be a popular activity this weekend as there were hardly any boats on the lake but we saw tons of people on their 4 wheelers. This is def. my kind of outdoor fun!
