8:00am: Once again, we met for a group breakfast at the buffet (note to parents – you may have to cook differently when we get back home as it will be important at each meal to have about 30 selections of what to eat). 
8:30am: Load up the vans and head out to St. Jude’s Children’s Ranch in Boulder City, NV where we moved rocks, pulled weeds, removed invasive plants, repaired some irrigation lines and addressed several other landscaping needs.
Since it was HOT (about 107 on the sign I saw on the way back), they let us take our shoes off and jump in the swimming pool during one of our breaks!!
After three & half hours of this, all of us were beat and beet red. 
12:30pm: SLY sponsored a Pizza & Root Beer Float lunch for the residents. This is a rare event for them since most of the 40 residents (ages 6 to 18 and one infant) are wards of the state and this kind of expenditure does not fit into the meal budget requirements allowed by the state guidelines. 1:00pm: SLY planned interactive games to play and had a game time with the residents. It was a great time of fun, chasing each other around playing Blob Tag, musical chairs, finger nail painting, and dancing. We got to interact with a bunch of the kids and some of their house parents and the staff. We also gave them the quilt with the quilt squares our VBS kids made and they were delighted!
2:30pm: We set up a row of tables there at St. Jude’s and broke out the boxes of food we purchased at Walmart the night before (actually it was earlier that morning because we were in line checking out when the clock turned from midnight to 12:01 and the checker stopped right before our order to put in the money tray for the next day! – just another of the really interesting & different experiences we have had). Oh, back to the story. So we set up our prep line and made 300 sack lunches of PB&J sandwiches, a snack bar, banana, bottle of water and a pair of socks, packed them in boxes and loaded them into our vans.
3:45pm: We grabbed something to drink our of our cooler (again) and loaded ourselves back into the vans and zipped off to the Las Vegas City Rescue Mission. We got there about 4:20, washed up, put on aprons and hair nets (parents – I wish you could have been there to see your kids wearing hair nets!! I am laughing even now as I write this).
Each of us were assigned a meal task and at 5:00pm some of the most destitute of society streamed through the doors to get the only hot meal they were going to eat on this day. 
As they came out of the dining hall, we handed out the sack lunches we had made so they would have at least one more meal later that night or the next day. The most desired item – the socks! I cannot tell you how many times we heard “Thank You” and “Bless You” for the socks. One gentleman exclaimed, “Socks! Today is Christmas. Bless you, bless you.”
6:30pm: We were all too hot and tired to eat and the vote was an hour of pool time THEN eat our own dinner. 8:05pm We met at our traditional spot – the elevator lobby on the first floor and headed across the street to Red Robin for a fun and enjoyable dinner.
9:30pm Back to our hotel and to Scott & Judy’s living room area for D&D (stands for Devotions & Debriefing) led by Lizzie and Brandon. This has been one of the most meaningful times each day where we get to share with each other the things we have experienced, observed, learned, what impacted us, what has changed for us, and what we will be taking back to Portland. 10:30pm Judy, Debbi, Scott, Dick and Pastor David are very, very tired and ready for bed. The kids – well I think a bunch of them went bowling here in the hotel!
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