David's blog: Yellow Springs

Saturday, October 11th, 2003

I had a busy day today. First I went to the seventh annual National Coming Out Day Prayer Breakfast, organized by Eternal Joy MCC. The speaker this year was the Rev. Dr. John McNeill, a priest who got in trouble with the Roman Catholic hierarchy for ministering to gay people without also teaching that gay sex is wrong.

Next I went to Yellow Springs to wander through the Street Fair. I didn't buy anything except for some food --

two shishkabobs, a spring roll, a fruit smoothie and a creme soda. The weather was great, and there were lots of interesting people to see.

As you can see from the pictures, some of the interesting people were making music.

Then I went to the annual Cross Creek Community Church fall festival. I took lots of pictures there, too many to organize right now. They will be posted on the church's web site in a few days, and I'm going to add some to my galleries here too.

Friday, July 4th, 2003

Today, obviously, is the Fourth of July, and I celebrated it in a few ways.

The first was here in the Oregon District, participating in the annual neighborhood parade. It takes a while to get everyone ready. Normally the Dayton Fire Department sends a fire truck but they didn't show this year (a fire somewhere?) so we made do with a toy one.

Later in the day I went to Yellow Springs. I'm taking TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) classes this quarter at Wright State, and

Dr. MacDonald, one of the program's professors, invited us all out to her place for the Fourth. We have some grad students from South Korea in the program as well as a professor from Korea (Dr. Sung), and this was their chance to experience not only an American Independence Day but also life in the wild but wonderful village of Yellow Springs.

There was good food, including apple pies made by Sharon and her boyfriend Doug. Peter brought his unicycles, showed off a little on them, and let others try to ride them.

We took some group pictures and then went for a group walk through the village, stopping at the playground and some stores and then heading to Glen Helen to see the spring from which the village takes its name. Some of us partook of the sulfurous water. Amazingly for a town known for letting people do what they want, there's a rule, as you can see on the sign in the photo, that groups of ten or more must apply for a permit to enjoy the Glen. We took another group picture to document our flagrant violation of this rule.

Later it was back for more food and some musical entertainment before we played with some tame fireworks and then headed out to see the official ones, which got rained out. Although we got a little wet, we still had fun and got to see the kitchen belonging to the famous Carol of the old Carol's Kitchen restaurant.