You don't know how to make crab cakes

Was the first line out of their mouth when I told them that they always sold out when I made Maryland Crab Cakes as a special at one of my restaurants when I was a chef. I will give them a little bit of credit though, seeing as they were from Maryland. It is not very often that the mission gets a servant event group from the east coast. In order to convince them that I knew what I was talking about, I had to take them through my recipe, and finally, after I mentioned lump crap meat, jumbo lump crab meat, and Old Bay Seasoning, they accepted me as one of their own.

I believe this was the first time that they had ever done a servant event, and they chose us because we were flexible with dates and they could come when it worked for everyone. By the time they left, they were trying to figure out how to come back again soon. This was a great group, I have never seen so many people willing to do whatever is thrown at them. They were a huge asset to our "Fixin' Up The Place" campaign and as the photos below will show you, they went CRAZY!!!!

One of the leaders and I hit it off really well as they came down the escalator at the airport and I was holding my shirt out from my chest like a big tent, so they could see it said Ysleta Lutheran Mission. They all came down in matching shirts (which makes it very easy to find them in the airport, hint to future groups :), so I told them that they must be who I was looking for. Erin was parking the car, so when Melch (Dave) came up to me and introduced himself, I said I was Erin, and his wife busted me because she had talked to Erin on the phone and knew she was female. Oops. So from there, we hit it off and gave each other a hard time (pretty much always joking) for the rest of the week. On the car ride back, there was a girl in the group who was super smart, but had no common sense, and he decided that I was her mentor and she had to be with me all week. I had a good time telling her that the ice cream trucks were free in El Paso, and telling the server at Cattleman's it was her birthday.

Overall, it was a good, but busy week. The crazy weeks are calming down, so hopefully I will get up this long list of blogs I want to write soon. Have a great weekend.

Tiling in the dorms

Team Tile

Cutting the last piece

Cove base

New sound booth in the church

Coming together

Painted, tiled, and that is the trap door to reach the wires once we run them for the music ministry

Over roof on building 8

Plywood

Roofing felt and flashing

Nothing quite like tarring in 100 degree heat

Painting the outside of the dorms

Picture of the paint team, taken by the roof team

More painting of number 12

More dorm painting

You should see it live

Painting the church

Ladder picture

Isn't it fantastic. Check out the new cross.

They also built a new ramp from the front part to the toilets/showers in the men's bathroom in the dorms, but no one thought to take a picture of that.