A Great Success! (Loganfest: story & pictures)

Note: I wrote this last night, but Blogger was acting up & wouldn't let me post it.

I survived Loganfest today! Barely tho, haha! It was NON-STOP all the way till the very end... after going to bed at 2:30 a.m., I got up this morning at somewhere between 5:30 & 5:50, stumbled out the door, got ice for the cooler and a tent from a friend for my Soldiers' Angels & Operation Love From Home (Christamas Card Drive) booth, and finally arrived at Main Street in Loganville around 7 or 7:15ish. Two friends of mine helped out tremendously...would have totally be lost without them there!!!!! (Thanks guys!) From then on, it was a flurry of non-stop activity all day long! For the most part, people stopping by the Soldiers' Angels/Operation Love From Home booth were overwhelmingly supportive... there were a couple who tried to get into political discussions, but I deflected it with, "Well, as long as our guys are over there, I'm going to do everything I can to send them cheer from home & get them through it!" I always emphasize that supporting our troops has NOTHING to do with politics...it has everything to do with the fact that these men & women are voluntarily serving our country - and that regardless of politics, they deserve to be honored and know we haven't forgotten them! There was one man who was EXTREMELY negative... he was practically bristling with anti-support... he said a few mean, anti-soldier things & stalked off before I could throw something at him (kidding, kidding... I woulda just ignored him or asked him to move on if he stayed & tried to cause trouble...but he slithered away on his own, thankfully...*whew*). Thankfully, he was the only truly ICKY person that I encountered... the other several hundred people that came by were sooo supportive and excited to be able to send a Christmas card to the troops, and so happy to learn about Soldiers' Angels, etc!

I finally got home tonight at around 6 or 6:30 p.m. to read, sort & count all the Christmas cards that people signed today. After weeding out 3 or 4 cards that couldn't be sent for various reasons (one being thinly-veiled negativity, the others being kids saying things that were very honestly well-intentioned, but not morale-lifting... like, "Please don't die, your family would be sad!" type thing), I counted 'em up... and today's grand total for Christmas cards collected at Loganfest is EXACTLY 300! Add that to the 673 I had here at home that have been mailed in over the past three weeks, and the grand total is so far, 973 holiday cards towards this year's goal of 3,000. Oh, wait...that's not including the 3 or 4 big, fat envelopes I picked up from my p.o. box after Loganfest today, haha --- Honestly, I got about 3 or maybe 4 hours of sleep last night, and I'm too wiped out to even bother with reading, sorting & counting those! I'm certain I'm just over the 1,000 mark altogether. Yay!

Anyway, here's a link to the pictures from today: http://s21.photobucket.com/albums/b269/jeffskat/LOGANFEST%202006/

Thanks to everyone for their help and support! Totally could NOT have done or continue to do this without y'all!!!! We're one-third of the way there - only need a minimum of 2,000 more to reach our goal of at least 3,000 Christmas cards to ship to the troops!!!!!