I’m not the type of person who claims “This was the best Feast ever!” each year. I think it’s overused, and yes, we should be striving for it, but sometimes it just doesn’t happen.
This Feast, though, may just have been the best Feast ever.
This Feast was different in a lot of ways. For one, I’m engaged. I have a fiancé. Suddenly singles’ events and church dances seem much less scary. 
Being engaged gives you something of an identity, a role to play. Now all of a sudden you’re not just a lone person floating out there in the crowd. You’re attached to that guy. And that’s wonderful.
At the very beginning of the Feast I suggested that we get to know more young married couples, since apparently once you’re married the only people you talk to are also married. We don’t want to be quite like that, but I’m sure it’ll happen to some extent. I felt like we were in a transition stage: not quite as single and carefree as our single friends, and not quite married. The whole having to go to different rooms at the end of the day was a real drag.
I ended up forgetting about my mission to spend time with young married couples, but as it turns out that’s pretty much exactly what we did. Mark and Amanda, David and Jennifer, John and Audrey. Hot tub. That pretty much sums up our Feast.
It was wonderful. I really wanted this Feast to be more spiritual than most of my Feasts have been in the past, and while I don’t think that I made as much progress as I would have liked (and maybe you never do), I think I did make progress. We had deep spiritual talks in that there tub. We bonded. We learned about each other. We determined that we all need to make more of an effort to express love in the church. Sometimes that’s the best thing you can do for someone who’s going through a difficult time.
Mr. Sena is awesome. He’s lurked on my blog for months (hi Mr. Sena!), but this was our first opportunity to meet him. In some ways he reminds me of Mr. Smith. Mr. Sena put on an awesome Feast. Everything was very well organized and put together. The Feast brochures, thanks to John, were pretty fantastic.
Mr. Sena asked Charlie to teach a dance class on Family Day, and that was a lot of fun. It was Charlie’s first time playing dance instructor (and my first time playing lovely assistant 
), but I think it went well overall. He taught foxtrot, and then Mrs. Brown taught two-step, tango and samba afterwards.
Mr. Sena helped me become more involved in the Feast by asking me to coordinate the set up and clean up of the tables for the dinner. He suggested we recruit the teens, so that’s exactly what I did. I went into counsellor mode and rounded up all the girls that I’ve had in my dorm, plus the guys I knew, and all of their friends. We ended up having a pretty sizeable group that helped out. And man, they were awesome. It wasn’t totally fun to have to leave the dance floor partway through the night and wipe down tables, but so many of the teens did it without complaining, and they really busted their butts about it. I was really impressed with them.
The dance that night was really awesome. Mr. Sena did a great job of that, too. It was especially fun for me because Charlie has taught me several of the dances he’s learned in ballroom dance club, in addition to the ones we know from camp. That allowed us to actually dance during the dance instead of swaying back and forth like a couple of kids at the prom. It made it much more fun and interesting. PLUS Mr. Sena tried to kill us with an “uber swing competition” (three fast swing songs played back to back, and you had to dance to all three without stopping), which Charlie and I won/tied with the Lyons. That was really fun. I was totally huffing and puffing after the first dance because we were totally busting our butts, and all Charlie had to say to me was, “Pace yourself, pace yourself!”
I did some serious shopping this Feast. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to do a better job of buying elegant womanly clothes (having Charlie around has turned me into a girl…strange), so Amanda and I hit the stores and made some pretty fantastic purchases. Good times.
Then there was also tubing with Karl and Charlie, and me getting stuck in the whirlpools at the ends of the tube chutes. Multiple time. That wasn’t so much fun.
Charlie and I also took one day to drive over to Houston. When I arrived in Houston to do my internship two years ago, my mom’s friend Joy and her family picked me up and took care of me throughout the summer. Joy was diagnosed with breast cancer soon after I left, and it has since metastasized to other areas of her body. This was the first Feast that she wasn’t able to go to (they attend with United), and since we were so close we thought we should go pay her and her husband a visit. We had a good talk with her and Jim, and they even brought us home some real Texas brisket. Mmm.
The messages, of course, were also good. It was interesting to see how different Charlie and I are when it comes to taking notes and getting things out of a sermon. He tends to think on a much deeper level than I do, and really got and appreciated the same sermons that went right over my head.
Quote of the Feast -
John: Everybody but me has a blog and Crocs!
