Convention; Day 4 (D.C.)

Monday morning, Kari and I got up to share an American Breakfast in the hotel café. I met Steve, Molly, Jeff and Mike in the ballroom at 9 o’clock. We took care of some cleanup stuff and I spent most of my day fine-tuning the MediaShout countdown clock for displaying to the speakers/singers on stage.

Various performers rehearsed throughout the day while the technical and production teams ironed out all the kinks. I was really impressed at how well the sound engineers tamed the crazy acoustics in the International Ballroom. It’s a giant oval room with a concave roof that has elliptical recesses in it. If you stand in the right spot under the recessions, it’s a great echo chamber. But, by the time the worship band rehearsed, things sounded great.

The evening session included some great patriotic Memorial Day elements like a fife and drum corps, a choir who led us in the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance, and Taps. My timer was highly effective and helped pastor Jack [Hayford] trim his teaching time by 15 minutes so we ended just about on time. I did spend some time with the hotel’s A/V staff to try to get the video and sound in the rooms cleaned up, but everything in the ballroom went very smoothly.

We tried several Italian restaurants to find some dinner, but struck out so we went back to Open City, where we’d eaten on Friday night. Debbie, Steve, Jeff, Edwin and myself piled into the white Jeep Cherokee while Mike and Molly helped wrap up a ‘post-mortem’ meeting. After we got seated, I ordered a Cuban coffee and Kari followed Debbie’s lead with a Iced green tea. This was the perfect opportunity for me to try the Open City Cubano sandwich I had passed up for on Friday; It was worth the wait .

Kari and I grabbed a cab back to the hotel to make room for Mike and Molly to ride back in the Jeep. I was really tired and not even remotely enthusiastic about showing up in the ballroom at 6am.