On Friday night, I attended our weekly English Conversation Time. As I believe I've mentioned before, my church does a lot of work with the international student community at UW-Madison and other Madison schools, and every Friday we host a session at which internationals and native speakers of English get together to talk. Most week, we break into small groups and go over a few idioms and vocabulary words, and talk about our respective lives and cultures.
This week, my group spent a lot of time talking about, believe it or not, fishing licenses. Some of them seems sort of baffled by the idea that a fishing license was available to anyone with five bucks, and wondered why the state bothered to issue licenses if they were going to give them to anyone who asked for one. Which is a good question, frankly. Anyway, the first Friday of each month is pizza night. Pizza and chicken wing night, more specifically, so I had some of each. At the end of the evening, there were still a ton of chicken, so I was sent home with a dozen wings, which I ate for dinner last night.
Today's meals I had to work a bit harder for. This morning after the worship service, we held our annual end-of-the-summer picnic. The church provided the meat -- brats, burgers, and veggie patties -- drinks, and green salad, while chips, fruit, and dessert was provided potluck by the members. I was unable to just sit down and enjoy myself, because I'm a Deacon and putting together the picnic each year is something the Deacons always do. I was on the clean-up crew, partly because I couldn't get there early to set up because of my choir commitment, and partly because I know it's always harder to find people to clean up than to set up.
Once I left the park, I went straight to Pres House to host our monthly communal meal. Other people had prepared and delivered the food; all I had to do was set it out, keep the table replenished, and clean up afterward. Not tremendously difficult, but it involved a lot of running back and forth. But for my trouble I got a delicious soft taco with all the fixings, plus containers of leftover taco meat and refried beans to take home. Score!
