Who stole my bowling ball?

Monday night I landed in Atlanta around midnight after an amazing long weekend in the northeast. It included so highlights:

• A fantastic Broadway show in NYC Thursday night, as I wrote about in my last blog post.
• Huge chunks of time hanging with friends from this summer's Africa mission team - I love those guys!
• A tour of "Chocolate World" at the Hershey plant in, yes, Hershey, PA. I even got to do a taste test.
• Getting to stay with the Swank family, who I think at some point in their lives must have gone into some sort of top secret hospitality training.
• An awesome morning of worship with my friends, as we shared our love for Ethiopia with their church family.
• Surviving the edges of Hurricane Irene, including a two-day power outage. I love adventure, so that turned out to be one of the most fun things about the trip. Check out the downed trees, one of which happened right before our eyes through the kitchen window, and the other being what we encountered trying to find a route to church:

All that was amazing! And enough to help me gloss over my one goofy, "Donnie" moment of the weekend. I don't know why I'm going to admit this...except that the urge to tell a funny story seems to always overshadow any embarrassment I might feel.

I was at the Palmyra bowling alley Friday night with David, Ashton, and Sarah, three of my friends from the Ethiopia trip. We had bowled 3+ games and we were having a great time hanging out even though none of us (well, maybe David) really were bowlers.

Rewind to the beginning of the evening. Despite being a terrible bowler, I had followed my usual pattern whenever I'm involved in a competitive sport. I had looked all over the alley and finally found a perfect color crimson bowling ball. Roll Tide...I was ready to go!

Well, as we were bowling the fourth game, they turned on the black light for their version of what we in Montgomery call "cosmic bowling". When it came my turn, I stepped up the rack and...dang! Where is my ball? Who took it? I looked at every ball in the rack and there was no sign of it. I turned to my friends and yeah, I think they would say I was kinda freaking out. All of them begin to tell me, "It's right there!" "Where?" "Right in front of your eyes!" I looked again - no crimson bowling ball. Finally, they pointed out that the black light had made it look purple all of a sudden. At which point I blurted out, "Great! Now I've got an LSU ball!"

How goofy is that?

And yes, it's football season in less than 24 hours. And it's just a little bit on my mind, don't you think? Let's get it kicked off.

And oh yeah, one last little adventure: my Sunday flight got canceled and so I spent an extra day there. But that just meant more time with my new friends, which was very cool.