The Snake

I finished the video collage I was working on after finally getting a group photo.  Here we are...

And here is the video:

Today wasn’t quite so rainy as yesterday, for which we were grateful. We could get around without getting soaked if you avoided the big puddles all over the place.

A couple guys used the opportunity to redistribute all of the benches that the women had refinished. Our master plumber, Daniel, worked on plumbing (of course). Seems like there’s always plumbing to work on in a place like this.

Troy and I set about trying to figure out why the outlet behind the drinking fountain in the Tabernacle was shorted.  We pulled the entire unit off the wall, pulled out the outlet that was behind it and then I received a nasty poke when trying to take a wire off.  Turns out this was on an entirely different circuit and I had foolishly assumed this wire was dead.  I should have tested it first.

So the mystery electrical problem still remains at the Tabernacle.  One wire that goes somewhere that is shorted.  We don’t know where it goes and everything we looked at in this part of the building works.  We finally buttoned everything up and moved on.  Next task, The Snake.

We now had a scissor lift at our disposal, so I drove it, at a blistering two miles per hour, across the entire camp from the Tabernacle to the Thibodeaux Conference Center, hoping I wouldn’t get it stuck in the many puddles on the way.

The snake, a thick cable for the sound system, ran through the ceiling rafters from the front of the auditorium to the back.  I had already pulled the section from its hiding place above the women’s restroom into the attic, we just needed something tall enough to pull it off the rafters all the way to the front.  That was easy enough and soon we had it nearly completely out of the ceiling except for the very front where it disappeared into the wall.  Since that was above the stage and we couldn’t get the lift on the stage, we couldn’t reach it.

The camp also had a bunch of scaffolding which we hauled out of storage, setting up three sections on top of each other on the stage to get at the last portion running down inside the wall.  That last section proved to be the most difficult.  For some reason, whoever installed this decided to loop several feet of cable up and down inside the wall, making it impossible to just pull the cable through.  We had to peel the video screen off the wall and cut a hole in the wall to get at it.  And even then, because of other stuff, both plumbing and electrical, in the same wall cavity, the cable did not come through easy.  And all 200 feet had to come down that wall.

It took us the rest of the day to get it out.  Now there’s another task to do: patching up the holes.  Some projects just grow way beyond original estimates.

Some of the women finished the kitchen pantry.  It was a thing of beauty once it was done.

Deb and Lisa went around the camp and picked up some of the sticks and old palm fronds that had blown down the last several days.  I think that was an excuse to drive the golf cart around.  They were having way too much fun.

We all gathered for our potluck dinner this evening and enjoyed each other’s cooking and fellowship.  Having the camp kitchen available for warming stuff and serving up helped greatly as RV kitchen facilities are very limited.

We took a walk after dinner to walk of some of the mountains of food we had just eaten.  It was kind of like walking through the scene of some scary movie.  The mist hanging over the water with the lights shining through it gave kind of an other-worldly feel.  Main Street was completely deserted and was itself a little spooky.  Big wide road and absolutely no traffic.

The Christmas decorations in this town are rather unique.  Sharks.   Don’t know if I have ever seen anything quite like it.