Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Memorial Day Cookout 2015

14 heathens joined Paul and I out at our house in the boonies for our annual Memorial Day cookout. The amount of food was amazing! Leigh Anne made a spicy homemade guacamole, Chase brought some deliciously savory roasted potatoes, Charlie brought corn-on-the-cob and his ever popular potato salad, and I made a fruit salad baby for our dining pleasure. There were pies, cookies, chips and dips of every sort and a macaroni-shrimp salad. To say that everyone was stuffed afterwards would be an understatement!

Spirited discussions of various topics went on inside and outside. From politics, to vaccinations and of course, religious intrusion into government. Our group enjoys discussions, no matter what the subject is! We had a kiddie pool set up, but alas, there were no children this year. There were games to play, and a table of free atheist books and magazines for our members to take home and enjoy. As the afternoon wound down, there was a drawing for door prizes. We had enough that everybody won something!

We also discussed our summer school supply fund-raiser for Ferguson-Easley Elementary school. Due to the changes in the Coke Rewards program that request the school's financial info and the school being understandably reluctant to provide that info to Coke's 3rd party, we have discontinued the Coke Rewards collection. We are still collecting Box-Tops for education, I send those to the school on a regular basis. Starting with our next meetup. Anyone who would like to donate is encouraged to donate to the pot that will be used to purchase school supplies for Ferguson-Easley in August (when all the supplies go on sale really cheap, so we get the most bang for our buck!) Last year we were able to amass a notebook and pencil for every child in the school and then some!

One of our members brought a bunch of phoney money she had found in a book at the library. After she found the first one, she made a treasure hunt of it to see how many she could find. She ended up with 4 total. Know what the phoney money really was? Proselytizing religious tracts. Congrats to our member for removing them!

There must have been something in the air of late, this same member also found a 4 page printout of bible verses that indicate that "all are saved" stuffed in her newspaper box. She wasn't sure if she was targeted or not, but she didn't see other newspaper boxes similarly stuffed. I suspect we'll see more of this sort of activity after the recent polls showing religion and especially Xtianity declining. You can see our mascots wanted to check out these oddities.

We had a great time with interesting heathens and look forward to all the meetups the rest of the year offers. I hope we'll see you there!