01 June 2008

Year end activities (as measured by the school calendar) are always full. Katherine performed in her senior recital, Benjamin won an award as voted by the students for best ________. (Go ahead and take a guess then look at the end of the email for the answer). Spencer is on track break and loving it. The first day he woke up at 6:00 am when he typically wakes about 7:15 - 7:30. I guess there is always something about wasting such valuable break time. However, the most interesting activity of the week came as a band fund raiser.

Green Valley Band parents and students serve as vault security helpers for the annual JCK jewelry show in Las Vegas. Wholesalers from all over the world bring in watches, pearls, diamonds and all sorts of other high priced special jewelry. Each morning, the wholesalers check out there jewels from a "vault" and each evening, they deposit it back in the vault. This show has several vaults. When the jewelry is inside, so are the armed guards. They sleep with these jewels all night. The armed guards are from several metropolitan police forces.

We got to work with Bobby and Mark from New Orleans. These guys were characters and had a million stories of NO and Mardi Gras. For example, Mardi Gras lasts two weeks. If you are a family person do the first week. The second week is too decadent.

Vicki, Ben and I moved bags from the corridor to the vault. As things were slowing down,
I asked Bobby and Mark what they thought the value of the bags would be. With 145 tickets issued, they calculated the value at approximately $1 billion. Funny thing is that you would see these types of bags and boxes in an airport or Fed-ex drop-off and not give it a second thought. One guy had a soft sided briefcase that was filled with nothing but loose diamonds. Another group had taped together five card board boxes on a dolly and another group didn't even bother to put the cardboard boxes on a dolly. We saw plastic containers from home depot with the fold over lids like we all store our Christmas stuff in. These just had a pad lock on them. Seems like a person would go through the plastic instead of the steel.

When we were all finished, Vicki Ben and I went to return our vests. As we walked through the Venetian, I had thought of an older Jewish man and his wife were conflicted because they chose to sell goods on their sabbath. But with a good day of sales, they justified that God would be okay with it because "they had to feed their children."

As we walked, we watched thousands of people inside the casino. The artwork and construction was exceeding fine. As Vicki and I looked at eachother, we felt that we were in "the large and spacious building." We felt that billions and billions of dollars of jewels were brought in so that people could impress other people. Honestly, the amount of jewels had no value to me.

Then I had another interesting thought. If we were to take the volume of jewels in that building, and replace it with water and that was all the water available in the world, What would the value of the jewels be then when compared to the water?

I guess it helps me to understand what really is important. Now if I can just live it.

-Ron