National Night Out at Ferry Road Park

This event is hosted by public safety, mostly police & fire, but the Coast Guard did a fly by. We have fun stuff for the kids, a magician, live band, jump for fun, some other similar type inflatable equipment, free hot dogs, free ice cream...and face painting. My boss (thank you Tia) signed me up to do face painting. She thought that since I do crafty stuff that meant I could draw/paint. She is wrong, but what the heck I'm game for most stuff, or so I thought. I probably painted about 100 kids' faces in the 2.5 hrs I was there. Mostly it was butterflies, kitty faces, lady bugs, suns, moons & stars...I did one set of cherries that didn't turn out awful-on Riley, did one clown face, did a couple of kids that I'm not sure what they were aiming for, but they looked silly when they were finished, one flower, a couple of tiger faces, several dogs, had a request for a unicorn, but felt that was well beyond my capabilities. I even did one babies face-at the parent's request and a couple of adults...whatever.

Clean up was the fun part. Getting the garbage up was easy...collapsing & folding up the jump for fun was another story. How many cops & dispatchers does it take to do this you may ask? Well, I don't know for sure. We had three dispatchers, 5 cops, 1 records personnel, and a couple of at large citizens helping & I'm pretty sure we didn't get done right...but we did get it loaded onto the trailer in a bundle of sorts.

The worst part was I had to park very far away from the park proper over by the frisbee golf course. I cut through the woods on my way to the park, but since it was getting dark when I was leaving I decided to stick to the lighted streets. I couldn't find my car! I called Gregg whining that I'd be home as soon as I found my car & he said he knew where it was & would come get me & take me to it. No way in heck was I going to do that. I told him I'd find the damn thing or walk home...as I was walking home 10 minutes later, I hit the alarm on my key fob...fortunately the thing has good range & I was able to determine the direction of my car from the couple of beeps I allowed it & find it. Next time, I will just keep driving until I can find something closer.