Season of Lifetree Groups
June is the month of Lifetree groups. We just finished up our first week of 33 people. During one night this past week, the power at the Guest House was going off and tripping the inverter even though we had EDH (city power).
As an aside, we have this happen pretty often every morning with a maxed out house. Once we start the coffee maker and toaster in the morning, it is usually the straw that breaks the camels back. At that point, the inverter can’t handle the load and we begin shutting other items off. This last week we had to resort to flipping the breakers for the the upstairs rooms. This included forcing everyone’s fans off. We felt bad but if people want breakfast we had to do it.
Back to the story – now it’s close to midnight and everyone is trying to sleep. The power is flipping on and off. This means fans in the rooms are flipping on and off. People are uncomfortable as they begin to sweat from the heat. Some make their way downstairs to ask what’s going on.
We began diagnoses by trying to turn all non-essential stuff off (internet, water coolers, lights, phone chargers, etc). Eventually we came to the conclusion that the inventer had gone bad. Did this mean that the guests wouldn’t have power all night? No fans?! They weren’t happy with that. Eek.
Finally, with Frank and a handful of other tired guests gathered around, I looked at them, pretending to know what I am talking about, and said, “We could bypass the inverter and go straight from the generator to the house. Does that even make sense?”
The others agreed.
We just needed to find some way to do it. Unfortunately, looking in the back tool room we have no supplies for this sort of thing. I couldn’t even find a flat head screw driver. So we made our own!
Frank and I did find some electrical tape and basically jammed wires together to bypass the inverter. Of course, being overly tired at this point, we were just laughing about how we were going to blow up the house.
Amazingly, after a few tries, we did it – by “did it” I mean we had electricity again and we didn’t blow the house up :-D. The power was back on and all the fans functioning for the guests to sleep the night away :-D.
Womens Center Graduation
The graduation was successful. We got to see some of the amazing decorations made with plastic forks. Haitian are amazing!
Bakery
Josh has been making bread, bread, and more bread! I have been overcoming issues with configuration of our point of sale system. I think we got almost all the kinks worked out though! I am pretty excited about it.
Next Group…
Who knows what will happen this week :-D. The group this week is from TX, NC, VA, and MI. All of the projects are out at the property.
Nothing shapes your life more than the commitments you choose to make. – Rick Warren (thx John McHoul)