Fundraising Complete, on to Adventure!

Hello all you gentlemen and ladies out there!  This last blog post before I leave Albuquerque is meant to be a huge "THANK YOU!!" to all my supporters who have helped me raise money for my YAV year, whether it was through their donations of money, time, or effort!  As of Sunday the 14th, my fundraising goal is complete!!!  (You can still donate if you wish, the money will just go to the YAV program in general rather than directly to my total.)

I had four major fundraisers this year, all held at Covenant Presbyterian in Albuquerque, which is my home church since I was very young.  We kicked it off with a swing dance, the Spring Swing, which was a blast!  We had swing lessons the week before and right before the dance started, thanks go out to Seth Finch and Tiffany Lo-Finch for those.  We had a delightful spaghetti dinner and milkshakes to refresh us as we danced.  And of course, we had a live jazz quintet in the house, thanks to Russ and Jeff Jolly!!  I wish I had recorded some of it so I could embed some of the music here, but alas, I didn't.  We'll get to that in a couple of events.  It was great evening, and thanks go out to the fellowship and mission committees of the church for making the meal and the amazing decorations happen!

The second fundraising event was the Easter Pancake Breakfast.  Already a tradition at Covenant, the mission committee was kind enough to donate the proceeds to my YAV total this year.  Thanks again to the mission committee and the fellowship committee for making the food and serving it!

The third event was the more recent Covenant Voices concert.  Covenant Voices is a choir consisting of members of all ages, from middle school to those well into adulthood.  It has a few current youth group members, several former youth choir members who still like to sing, a couple parents, and a few who just joined because they like the songs!  The music itself is more contemporary, a bit more like pop than a standard church choir, I suppose.  About half of it is composed by our music director, Jeff Jolly (Listen below).  So thanks to him for making the music happen, thanks to all the performers, and thanks to all those I recruited to make and serve refreshments!

Here's the recording, in youtube playlist form:



As my last fundraiser, we had the talent show and silent auction last Saturday!  It was a lot of work to put together, but boy did it pay off in the end!  So many great acts to watch and items to bid on!  We ended up with 16 acts all together, hosted by our expert M.C., Chris Schueler.  In the silent auction happening at the same time in the next room, we had all sorts of items from art to tuba lessons to handmade board games to jewelry!  About half of it was handmade by Covenant members!  Thanks to everyone who helped pull this thing off: the mission committee for making and serving refreshments, manning the silent auction, planning everything; the performers for their wonderful showmanship and hours of practice; the silent auction donors for their generosity and the amazing skill of those who crafted something to auction!

Here's the recording, also in youtube playlist form (thanks to Ed Cole for filming):



Finally, a giant, enormous, monolithic, and quite large THANK YOU to all of you who have donated money to support my YAV year through whatever method!!  I could not go on this adventure without you and your astounding generosity!

It's less than a week now before I leave Albuquerque and less than two before I'm on the other side of the world!  It's crazy, and exciting, and sad, and unbelievable!  I'll try to get up another blog post before I go, but I don't know if it will happen.  Thanks for reading!