EXHAUSTED!

I set my alarm today to get up at 6am. I had two teachers out today, plus the other youth leader who was supposed to go with me, taking the junior high kids to their Youth Spectacular in Portland, called before I left this morning, and cancelled, since she had a cold. I really can't blame her, since it was going to be a long, long day. At least it was in Portland for the first time, not in Corpus Christi, at Selena Auditorium/American Bank Center like it always has before.
It was a good day, with the kids behaving and enjoying themselves, and I hope learning and growing, too. There were games, activities, huge airfilled outdoor and in-gym ...well, games and activities, too, I guess you'd call them. That's one of them above - the Bungee Run, where you run to the end of a big elastic cord and try to slap your marker onto the velcroed side of your lane before the cord snaps you back and you fly back to the beginning. Whoever's two markers (in two runs) are farther away from the start, wins. That was one of the smaller 'games'. They had sumo suit wrestling in an inflated ring, gigantic inflated twister for about 20 kids at once, two different kinds of obstacle course/climbing/race contraptions that reached up to about 20 ft. tall, and about a dozen other things. If I was about 10 years younger and 50 lbs. lighter .....or if no one else was around (HA!)....I would have tried them.
Then they had music from a really good Christian Rock band, lots of icebreaker games, lots of singing, presentations and some talks, Mass with Bishop Carmody, and pizza, pizza, pizza.
We got back to the church at 7pm tonight, not much worse for the wear. I mananged to still be mobile, in spite of my recent back problems, even after sitting on the ground with the kids during lunch break. And I managed to get up too.
One thing: this morning, arriving at the church to meet and load up before leaving, I saw that someone had apparently dumped a dog overnight. Poor thing. Actually, Zachary saw it first. But it was so scared that it ran from him, and ran through the iron gate in front of the hall, where we couldn't follow. Trying to coax it out, I noticed someone had cut a milk bottle off and put water in it for the dog. I tossed a ham and cheese sandwich through the gate to it. What was disturbing was that it had a leather collar on that looked pretty tight. That collar needs to come off before long...although I guess the dog was full grown, but smallish. It's ribs were really showing.
When we got back to the church tonight, I looked for it, but it was nowhere to be found. I guess whoever dumped it, hoped someone coming to Mass would take it home with them, but I doubt that happened because of it being so skittish to where it would run from us, and not let anyone close to it. I did notice that he/she had eaten the sandwich, and also noticed that there were two of those cut milk jugs by the gate - presumably one held food when it was dumped. And there was a t-shirt/rag put down by the wall. So I guess it could sleep on it. Both containers were empty, so I filled one with our leftover ice that would melt and fill it with water. I hope the dog is going to be okay wherever it is.