We had special guest speakers for both the Ignited and adult services at church last Wednesday night: former University of Michigan Defensive Tackle Shawn Lazarus and former Ohio State University Defensive Tackle Joel Penton. In the spirit of college football rivalry, we were encouraged to wear the colors of our favorite teams. Not being a big sports fan, my choices were limited to Detroit Red Wings or my Orrville Football shirt from when we all came to see Tom's game against Wooster.

Here is the link to the neato animated "jib-jab" sorta kinda thing that our awesome committee created for the recent Chamber Banquet.
Ric Snyder did most of the work. Kerry Weeman-Pickett wrote the lyrics. Andy Vernon came up with the Green Acres idea. Everyone contributed ideas and we had a ton of fun. The crowd loved it!
We're holding back on posting it elsewhere due to licensing issues. We did buy the song, but from what I understand it would cost us about $1,000 annual fee to post it for sharing with the public at large.

Anyhow - here it is . Hope you can open and enjoy one more reason to love Orrville.

I tagged this page on del.icio.us last week, but haven't had time to blog about it until now. This map of the Eisenhower Interstate System is one of the most interesting maps I've ever seen.

When you disregard the actual distances between cities on the map, the relationships between the different Interstates becomes immediately clear. Thanks to some history bits on the radio, I recently learned about Henry Joy and his relationship to the Interstate 80 transcontinental route between New York and San Francisco.

This is the story behind the nativity scene that was displayed in the window of the OrrViews office in Orrville, Ohio during the 2003 Christmas Season.

On Behalf of Harrold and Ethel

Some of you will remember, and some of you probably never knew, that after Harrold died in 1984, mom used the church memorial fund money that was given in his name to buy a lovely nativity scene. She took the figurines and the wooden stable to a local florist who designed and built a wonderful setting for it. It's about 4' x 2' and quite lovely, with wood and greenery resembling an outdoorsy setting.

Every year Paul and I would get it out of her basement, load it in the car and take it out to the church in time for the first Sunday in Advent. I'm sure Molly and Tish often got involved in the process, too. Sometimes our kids would come along. After awhile we figured out that it would be easier to just keep it in our basement and carry it back and forth rather than loading it into the car.

So since 1985 the manger scene has been on the altar in the Chapel at the church. I had been thinking about it this fall, knowing that it needed a little repair work and some freshening of pieces that were getting a bit beat up. I kept putting off taking it somewhere to have that done.