LIMPING OVER THE FINISH LINE

After a year and a half of planning, the official Blessing of the new Saint Theresa Family Life Center down in my home parish is scheduled for tomorrow! After overcoming one supply chain problem after another, after surmounting the assumption that we had enough funds to complete the project only to find out about a 40% inflation rate on building materials, the big day is here - ready or not!  

Our new Family Life Center will not be "operational ready" yet, but thanks to an all-out effort by our construction people, our guests will have a lot to see and celebrate. Most of the unfinished items will not be visible, but will surely be finished in the next several weeks. 

I will certainly be working in the programming of new Saint Theresa Family Life Center, but I have made a pledge that my St. Theresa project will be my last building project! Such continuous stress can't be good for an old man like me! I have a lot of friends who laugh at me when I say that, telling me that I am actually "addicted to projects!" We'll see about that!!!!!

A VERY SPECIAL THANK YOU

Mr. Tim Schoenbachler has been right there with me from the beginning of this project.  Sharing our ideas back and forth, he was able to use his amazing computer design skills to turn our ideas into drawings so that the people of Prodigy Construction Company could "make them work" in reality. From there, they were able to produce construction drawings and blue prints. The whole process took hours and hours of back-and-forth corrections and refinements (often having to overcome inevitable conflicting tastes and solutions). We shopped for bargain furnishings, picked out the wall colors and chose the flooring, appliances and decorations. His amazing visual drawings (and even a video) made it possible for people to "see" where we were going and what it was going to look like! In reality, we could not have accomplished what we accomplished so soon and so inexpensively without his help and dedication. 

This was not our first project. We worked to design the renovations of the Pastoral Centre, a retreat house and a church down in the Diocese of Kingstown in the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean Missions.

Before that, we worked together on the design of  several areas at St. Meinrad Seminary especially the teaching kitchen and the guests room in Bede Hall. Before that, we created the designs for Jack's in the Commons, a coffee shop in the main building.  We even worked on the original rough drawings of the new Unstable, a campus pizza and beer pub. 

We even collaborated on a cookbook for priests living alone - called DAILY BREAD: A Handbook for Priests Learning to Cook for Themselves. He has designed the covers of twenty-four of my books, laid out the texts and had them printed, published and advertised. We collaborated on starting this blog and on many printed advertising materials including the souvenir booklet that will be given out at the Blessing of our new Saint Theresa Family Life Center.