Jamestown Conference

Last weekend was our third annual Jamestown NY Stake YSA conference. We keep trying to plan things early and each year planning goes awry, but things went really well this weekend. It's just hard planning when you have the holidays and planning sessions canceled due to snow right when it's crunch time. Laura and I were the most consistent YSA planners, a few others helped but not as much. Let's just say I slept really well when it was all done!

Instead of having things at the stake center and farming people out to member's homes, this year we decided to try having everyone camping in cabins, which worked out well. Camp Hawthorne Ridge is not far from school so I was happy to have a short commute. It also didn't make sense to have everyone drivel up to Jamestown when they are coming from the South- no one would be coming from Buffalo or someplace like that. Everyone rolled in from Pittsburgh, Ohio and West Virginia.

Friday night was spent playing board games, we served yummy food and just wanted people to have fun chatting and relaxing. People roll in at all hours of the night, so it's hard to do much else. People had fun, they stayed up late chatting and playing.

On to Saturday:

We had breakfast and then classes, I taught about easy things to improve your photography. I put together a Powerpoint presentation that I'll share more about soon. It was a lot of fun to teach and I got a good response. We had another good class about Cooking on a Budget and then then Brother Trusel taught about Dry-Pach Canning with the help of his lovely assistant, Bertha (aka Betsy his wife, she does this bag lady bit that is hysterical!).

We didn't know if everyone would be excited to do their own can of rice but they were!

The Strassbergs from the Palmyra temple also came and spoke, they were great. I've gotten to know them from my recent trips to the temple (for Rene and then Dan & Sissy's sealing) so I really enjoyed having them there.


We had an ice carving demo from Bro Alexander, I didn't know if people would care but they loved it!

Had fun at freetime, went to Presque Isle, which is just so lovely anytime of the year. I tried out my new DSLR. Part of Lake Erie was frozen!

Cute houseboats:


Gotta love lighthouses:

Ice dunes were neat!

Then we rushed back for dinner and our 80's dance! I wished the dance had gone a bit better (I think I would have been a better dj) but it was still fun!

All of my outfit is new, it's hysterical to me how 80's influenced everything is these days!

Me and my friend Anne:

After the dance, the boys had built a bonfire by their cabin and invited us girls, I had to laugh at their macho attempt to impress us. Because being a pyro is so attractive, lol.

On Sunday, we had sacrament meeting in the main cabin, which was interesting. The Strassbergs spoke more about temples (very lovely) and then we had a really nice testimony meeting. Then it was time to grab some food and go home!


Me and my friend Levi (I tease him about being a vampire, lol)

I did not get much sleep this weekend- all us girls were crammed in our cabin and it was not restful! I came home, slept like a log for hours, ate dinner and then went right back to bed! And I was still tired come Monday morning!

In all, everyone gave us rave reviews, which was great. I tried really hard to make things more fun/better than the other conferences that I've traveled to. We had some spoilsport girls from our stake who couldn't just have fun (Odds are you will *not* meet Mr. Right at this shindig, get over it! Like they're gonna want you anyhow when you three were so snotty!) and went home early but they were the only ones and really nothing would please them. Other people who left early did so for callings, baptisms, etc, not because they weren't having fun. In all we had about 50 YSA, a great number. I don't know how we'll top it but we'll try next year!

Stay tuned for my Photo 101 class!