2nd Mile Missions Banquet

This past Friday (4/19/2013) was the annual Second Mile Missions banquet and silent auction.  This is a major fundraising event for Sheena’s work.  I’ve always heard Sheena speak of it, and when it comes around, she’s always super busy prepping for it… but I’ve never attended until now.

This year, we decided to invite some friends to join us at the banquet.

Mom, Shane, Sherene, Lisa, Sheena, Siju, Earl and Asha came out and really made our table fun!  Sheena wanted to build some awareness among our friends, so she felt that this would be a great way to expose them as to what Second Mile is and what they do to serve the community.

Walking in the doors at Safari Texas, you step right into a registration area and are surrounded by pretty cool items to bid on for the silent auction.  

Since I’m married to Sheena, I apparently am not able to bid on anything, but our friends did… Siju/Sheena won their bid for a trip to Mexico!  Earl won his bid for a hair cut!  Now, I know what you’re thinking… Why would Earl even bid on a hair cut, right?  He shaves his head!  But he cares soo much about Second Mile, that he would buy something so useless to him as a haircut in an effort to support the cause… Or the haircut was really for Asha… come to think of it… that makes more sense.

Around 7pm, the doors opened for the banquet.  We all took our seats and started to be served some pretty good grub.  While we were eating, there were special guests and speakers coming up to the stage to speak about Second Mile and what great things they are doing for the community.  One of the guests was a former American Idol Contestant, Jimmy McNeal.  He sang a few songs and spoke as well.  If you don’t already know, I really encourage you to get to know Second Mile and see how you can get plugged in.  At the very least, check out their new facility off of Hwy 90, near Beltway 8.  They’ll give you a tour and explain things in detail.  Check out their site here:  http://www.secondmile.org/

Shortly after we sat down, I’d say around 7:45ish, Lisa and Sherene stroll in.  Now, if you’ve read my previous blogs, I’ve mentioned “Late Lisa” and “No Hugs Sherene”.  These are those 2 characters.  Sherene stepped up to the plate and took full blame for being late.  Lisa’s really working hard on lose her nickname.  It wasn’t a huge deal that they were late since we weren’t really waiting on them to do stuff, but it’s still fun to make them feel bad…

After they’ve taken their seats, Sherene decides that things aren’t as fun as she’d like it to be.  So, she proceeds to burn a cloth napkin

Luckily, Earl and Asha were there to notice her crime and stopped it before things got worse.  I tried to capture a shot of the culprit immediately after she was caught.

After the dust settled on that, we started to notice Siju on a flip phone for a work related call.  You can imagine how many jokes we cracked about the flip phone…(photo credit:  Lisa Varughese)

Overall, it was a really great night!  Sheena is one of the leads that organizes this event, and I think it went really well.  I’ve seen how much work is done to put this together by way of the time and efforts put out by Sheena and her co-workers, and I hope that because of it, they met their goal.

Sheena was understandably busy throughout the night, but I was able to snap a quick shot of her with some of our friends: