Pheasants Forever

So, many of you asked about the benefit dinner we went to tonight. I thought I'd recap the event for anyone who was interested. This was a benefit for Pheasants Forever. The group basically tries to educate farmers about keeping up the habitats for local wildlife (so they can be hunted w/out losing too much of the population) and getting youth involved in outdoorsy hunting/fishing activities. We expected it to be a smallish community thing where we could meet some people and hang out...WRONG! Let's all remember that this is opening weekend for hunting season (found this out today). So hunters from everywhere (I saw New Jersey tags) are here to get their hunt on, and were so kind to join us at the dinner. It was held at the Vesper Gym. Built prior to 1920, it's a quaint old building with a stage on one end that still has the beautiful ruby curtains with a huge golden V embroidered on them. Mostly it's used for old ladies to play bingo together, but tonight it was almost bursting with people of all ages, men and women; almost 350 in all! It was a sea of camo and blaze orange with dots of plaid here and there. I only counted 4 rifles and 5 knives in the building, but who can guess how many there were in all the trucks outside? There were raffles and games(a virtual shooting thing for the kids), and of course all of the prizes had pictures of a bird or dog on them with camo accents. In the middle of all this...me. I wasn't wearing pink (thank goodness), so maybe I blended in a little. One cool thing is, it's really fun to see people in small towns organize things and then have most of the community come out to support it. Whether you're into it or not, you just go because it's good for the community. That's really cool. Plus there was a pretty good bbq dinner, so what more could you really ask for? Come visit me sometime, and I'll take you to see the gym.
*Random Vesper fact of the day (maybe 5 miles from our town, was a bustling town and now just the gym and a few houses): The post office was established in 1873 out of a man's house, and they actually passed the duty around from house to house for several years until they were able to build a building for it. Can you imagine?