The church auction this past Saturday went EXTREMELY well.  Things came together nicely.  Volunteers showed up, we organized things, food was made and then people showed up to attend.  By the end of the night we had eighty attendees, which I was told is more than last year or the year before.  Many items got at least one bid.  The bands we had played well and were very well-received.  The kids auction, a new feature this year, was a lot of fun and brought in almost $100.  We didn’t expect much from it, so that was great.  The live auction started a few minutes late, but the auctioneer we hired was absolutely fantastic.  He was funny and he knew how to sell stuff.

When it was all over, I checked the results.  This was an awesome thing we couldn’t do in years past.  The software we used to track things gave us instantaneous results.  We grossed almost $13,000, which is about $4,000 more than last year.  Tonight is our post-auction meeting, and I look forward to thanking the awesome people who helped make this year’s auction such a grand success.

Meanwhile, I am doing an unusual thing:  I am saving money.  I have a toy I want to get for myself for Christmas, and it costs more than I can spare from one paycheck.  So I am saving a few to do it.  I have high hopes of success; I will let you know when I manage to get it.

It’s not a good year to be a part of my family, I guess.  My mom’s sister found out she has stage three lung cancer.  She’ll be going through chemo and radiation therapy for about six months with a high chance of being rid of the cancer completely.  She’s been a smoker most of her life; I hope this gets her to quit.  On top of this, she fell and broke a bone and had to spend a night or two in the hospital.  Yuck.

Those are the big ups and downs of the last week.  Tomorrow…will have a sad poem.  It would have been Daniel’s twenty-first birthday.  See you then.