My Church's Oktoberfest 2026

Hey everyone, it's that time of the year again, where my church has their weekend long Oktoberfest celebration. Last year mskate and I basically ran the basket raffle tickets all the time, and this year wasn't that different. Mskate and I each made a basket, each based on some things we really enjoy. Mskate made a basket of Disney princess soaps from bath and bodyworks and some other accessories like tumblers and ear rings from TJ Maxx. I made a backet of Chuck E Cheese fun, with 2 reusable drink cups, a play card with 3000 points pre-loaded onto it (that I won myself), some chuck e cheese brand prizes, and a $60 gift card which is enough to buy a 2 month bronze pass. Mskate's mom also had a brand new loungefly bag that she didn't want, so she made a basket with it. For the past month or so mskate has been selling tickets before and after mass, and then my  job was to enter the names in a spreadsheet to make it easier to look up the winner when it came time to draw the winner. In total there were 136 baskets, and some highlights of ones we were interested in was this new American Girl Doll basket, lottery tickets, a cedar chest bench, some sports memorabilia (gift for IRA), an ice cream Sunday kit thing (a gift for my mom), squishy things that are super popular right now, and a bird feeder thing (gift for dad-in-law).

I took Friday off to help with some set-up, and that helped with a thing I wanted to do at the new house; just wanted to drop some food and drink at the house while we're getting it set-up before getting the certificate of occupancy. It's about mid-afternoon and I went over to the church where I helped move baskets from the social hall to the tent. Basically go to the catechism room where the baskets were being stored, carry them out to the tent where the tables were being set-up, occasionally loading them onto the flat bed golf cart we had. The big challenge was how do we get 136 baskets of various size onto 7-9 tables. I did some good organizing utilizing my tetris packing skills. One of the guys who was helping said something like "I know how to organize for maximum space because my dad was military and that was a skill he drilled into me," and I said "I just played a lot of tetris" and he got a laugh.

Some hours later and it was getting close to event time. All of the volunteers were there and ready, and they wanted to buy raffle tickets before the official start time because that would be their only time to do it. Unfortunately for them, our register hadn't been set-up yet, which meant I couldn't sell yet. I told them to ask person responsible for setting up the cash registers. We got ours set-up like 10 minutes before the official start of the event, so I was able to sell some tickets to volunteers before it started. Friday night is family night, where they have costume characters taking pictures and putting on shows, a minigolf course, pumpkin painting, pony rides, face painting, balloon animals, and a videogame truck. Last year I was a bouncer for the videogame truck, making sure people were taking turns and playing nicely. This year though I just sold tickets, occasionally getting food from the food vendors. I had a pretzel and Italian sausage, and nutrl drinks. I brought my laptop to fill in some tickets the night of. A fun thing about this night was the DJ who does or music bingo was DJing the night, and the guy is really good and was able to keep the energy going well. The walk around characters were really good, it was Glinda and the wicked witch of the west (I asked if they were original or wicked, and they said original, so that wasn't Elbatha) from the Wizard of Oz, Jack Skellington and Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas, and the 3 witches from Hocus Pocus. They're not like "professional theme park" costumes, but they were pretty good and they were really playing into it well, which is what really made it work. I think they're like a local theater troop or party actors, which is why they're so good at it. Later in the night the Hocus Pocus witches did the song they did in the movie, which was pretty cool. Then at the real end of the night there was a "Taylor Swift and K-pop Demon Hunters concert," basically actors like before dressed as the singers and lip synching to some songs. Last year we did the Taylor Swift concert and it went really well, but it did get a little weird when they started playing Katty Perry songs. I don't know K-pop Demon Hunters at all (I don't have Netflix), but I do know their one song since the kids bop version was played at chuck e cheese all the time, so that was kind of fun. At the end of the night we got security to watch the baskets all night so we didn't need to move them all into the social hall again, which was really great since that's really annoying. At the end of the night our register made $3K or something crazy like that. During the night one of our old lady friends helped us sell tickets, and she and mskate shared a chicken dinner, and gave me the bread. The air bubbles in the slice looked like a mask, I'm breadman.

It's now Saturday, the BIG Oktoberfest day. Saturday morning was pretty low key, basically just entering the tickets in the spreadsheet while watching Ranma 1/2. Around 4PM we went to the church and set-up. Again, people were asking for us to sell them tickets, but again they didn't set-up our register until about 15 minutes before the event started. This is when a lot of people wear their leiderhozen and durndles, and there's live polka music, and some competitions. I noticed the beer stein holding contest, which I was a part of last year but not this year because I was busy with the tickets, but I'm assuming there were others. When they did the zikki zakki I chanted along since I love doing that. Once again I had some pretzels and brats, and mskate had the Vietnamize meat skewers, and we had a couple Nutrls. Since we were going to be up pretty late we brought a couple caffeinated cokes, and those helped, but we needed to buy some more in the night. We kind of rotated between entering tickets and selling tickets, and it went well. While we were selling someone wanted 50/50 tickets and our register could take credit card. We also had to tell kids to stop squeezing the squishies in the basket, so I did get to be a bouncer again. There was also a girl that wanted to put all her tickets in the squishy basket, but she accidentally put them all in the WWE bucket, so I told her mom about it and she was like "oh man, you didn't pay attention." All just a bunch of fun. Near the end of the night we had to get some people to buy the golden backet raffles, one for the video game grand prize of a switch 2, large screen TV, and I think some games, and another was a trip to Cancoon with a $1200 gift card to help with travel and resort fees, and there are only 100 entries and we need to sell all 100. I bought at least 1 for the videogame (maybe 2), but had no real interest in the vacation. Mskate, one of her friends, and I were going around with the big board trying to sell people on the trip, and I had lots of fun being the salesman. We ended up selling the last 6 tickets, and one person was quite happy. We also had our grand raffle for big money, and the wrist band raffle (which had a prize of a vacation to our little Bavaria, which mskate and I won last year). At the end of the night we had to bring the baskets in since we were drawing the winner Sunday morning, and because there was something going on in the catechism room we had to put the baskets in one of the other rooms. Thankfully we had a lot of people ready to help us, so it didn't take too long to move it all, and we had some young men who were able to move the cedar chest and the back relief machine.

It's Sunday, and I don't remember what it's called, but it's just a little family day again. Mskate and I watched mass at home so we could enter the tickets didn't get entered the night before; wake up, watch TV mass, then spend the next 2.5 hours entering names and numbers into the spreadsheet. Not the most traditional way to do Sunday mass for a Catholic couple, but since it's in service to the church we decided it would be the best way to do it. After entering the tickets and organizing them by number so it would be easier to find if there was a problem, we went to the church and set-up our laptops in the social hall for us to do the raffle lookup. I also set-up my laptop on the TV they put by our station for presenting. Well, we would do that, but my 15 foot HDMI cable from college called it quits, but thankfully had an extra one we could use. Mskate's mom and IRA also came for the fun, which was kind of cool. As we were drawing the tickets and looking up the numbers, some people kept asking us when we were going to get the baskets drawn. I told them "tell them 'the more they ask, the longer it takes,'" and we got some privacy after that. 136 tickets, only 1 problem where the person didn't turn in their stub and we had to redraw. Mskate and I won the sports stuff (that we then put in IRA's name so he could see his name on the winning board and not make it look like we won everything), and the bird feeders. Unfortunately we didn't get the doll or cedar chest, or the legos that I entered, or ice cream thing, or other things, but at least we won something. Mskate's family took it all home with them, with holding the bird feeder stuff for dad-in-law while hiding in IRA's room. We put all the winners in a slide show that I put on a loop on the TV, and I just sat by it to let people know where to go. One lady said "my name is on there, but it's spelled wrong." I told her "yeah there were a lot of misspelled names in the list, it was all what I was able to read, just go in there and see if they can tell you how to verify it's you." We were able to get 30-40 baskets picked up, so that makes things a little easier. I packed up our laptops and power chords right at the end and went home. Well, actually I went to the grocery store first since it's kind of close to church and I wanted to get some ingredients to make chili this week (needed a can of pork and beans, an onion, and tomato sauce, and in the clearance section I found canned hot peppers so I picked those up for a little extra heat), and then I found some tortilla chips in clearance as well so I got those and a jar of salsa, and mskate wanted eggs so I got a dozen as well.

That was my weekend. It was pretty fun albeit kind of exhausting. Now I'm just sitting here writing this blog watching Animation Domination on FOX. Well this has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.

Laboring on a Funeral Day

Hey everyone, not exactly a "big adventure" here, but it is kind of a crazy set of sequences that happened over labor day weekend. First on Thursday there was a major storm where I live, super rain and tornado warnings, all while I was at the doctor. Right after I finished my appointment and checked out, everyone's cell phones went off with emergency alerts, so I hung out at the doctors and pulled up my local news channels on my phone. It was kind of crazy. I didn't suffer any damage, but a lot of people did, which will lead into big things of the weekend.

The main thing for the weekend was mskate's great aunt's funeral. She had dementia and was failing. One of my favorite memories of her is Easter 2024 where she and my grandma, who also had dementia, just talked the entire time and had a lot of fun together, enjoying each other's confused company. She passed earlier this week and her funeral was held on Friday. After my doctor's appointment I went up to mskate's parent's area and went to the church where we were having the funeral. Everyone was setting up the social area for the luncheon and my job was to scope out and test out the live streaming set-up (because live streaming funerals for the family has kind of become my thing). Well, they had a lot of storms and it took out the power at the church, which meant everyone was setting up the decorations in the dark by flash light. The funny thing is her daughter took her to the dollar store before she went to assisted living to pick out the decorations she wanted for her funeral, and everyone was putting those up. For my thing I took my laptop up to the balcony of the church to see if it would work, and it was a good place to do a set-up, but the lack of power meant I wasn't able to get on the church wifi, or see what I was REALLY doing. I did some tests using different hot spots and they worked, but we were hoping that the power would come back in time for the funeral. After the test things were pretty low key, just watching movies with IRA.

OK, it's funeral day Friday, and the power is still out. I get to the church and there's no power, so I said "OK, I guess we can do this off battery," but my batteries were kind of low for some reason, so I went back to mskate's parents house and charged my laptop and video camera. Here's where things got weird, my video camera had 40 minutes of charge when I checked while it was charging and then let it charge another 20 minutes or so, but then when I got to the church it said 17 minutes of battery, which was really weird. I ask vikingpolak to see if he can get a battery backup, and our dad has one for his cpap, so both of them go to my parents house and get the battery backup like 10 minutes before the service starts. So because my video camera is basically dead I'm running the live stream off of my built in web cam, which being in the back row balcony seat is not great for the start of the funeral, but thankfully they get back quickly so I'm able to set up my camera and do a good feed. The funeral itself was pretty basic, but then right at the end my laptop battery decides to give out, so I have to plug my laptop into the power inverter on the battery backup and because the power draw was so great the power inverter was kind of whaling. In general though, it went off pretty well, just was a rather frustrating process of live streaming due to the lack of power.

The luncheon was pretty good, we had chicken, ribs, sausage and kraut, macaroni and cheese, potato wedges, bumpy cake, cookies, and some other thing. The funny thing is I had 2 plates of food because I kept hearing my grandma saying "you need to eat more." I guess one of the great aunt's things was punch bowls, so they had that. Can't say I've had "authentic punch" before, so that was kind of neat. Everyone else had a good time as well, and everyone was thanking me for the live stream. I didn't know a lot of people there, but there was one guy I went to high school with who kind of knew me and knew vikingpolak better (because they were the same age).

The afternoon was pretty low key, but around 3PM we went to see the Cars rerelease. For the 20th anniversary Disney gave it a wide rerelease, and IRA really wanted to see it because they had special popcorn buckets and drink cups; the popcorn bucket was Lightning McQueen and the drink cup was the Piston Cup. I'm pretty sure I saw this movie back when it was first released, but it's been so long and wasn't like a "core memory" so I don't remember seeing it in theaters. Since there was a local festival going on by our normal theater we went to one that used to be a cheap last run movie theater by my grandparents. We got to the theater and they only had the popcorn bucket. We still saw the movie, and got the jumbo bucket of popcorn that came with the novelty bucket, and I ended up eating most of the popcorn since IRA and mskate didn't want much. It was pretty fun watching the movie on the big screen. After the movie we went to another theater (one my grandparents took us to frequently and mom-in-law would take after school care kids too on field trips) to see if they had the cup, but they didn't. In a last ditch effort we went to the normal theater but with a twist. Because of the festival the parking lot was closed to normal parking (but you could park for $25), so I dropped IRA and mskate off close to the theater by pulling into a blocked off area so they could go in while I could get moving without causing , and then I drove around the square mile of where it's located so they could have enough time to wait in line. Thankfully they had the cup, so I drove around and got back to the same place I dropped them off, and got them to jump back in the van and got home. I had a single taco for dinner since I had so much popcorn earlier.

Saturday would have been a simple "go home" day, but I don't know if I would be writing this for pokematic's blog and not your 3 minutes if this didn't also happen. With all the storming, something must have hit the windshield of the company lease car, which caused a chip on the top of the windshield, that became quite the crack as it grew down the windshield that I first noticed after the funeral and just grew throughout the day. Since it's a company lease with full insurance, including windshield replacement with Safelite, I called and set up an appointment at my in-laws, so we're hanging out until the tech comes and replaces the windshield and calibrates the safe driving features.

After getting home mskate went to sell raffle tickets for our church's Oktoberfest, and I went to chuck e cheese to use our fun pass. Recently they removed some games and put up signs saying "new games coming soon." Well, they added the new games, and they're really fun. There's a minions land the token game, a "knock the balls in the holes" game, an elephant ball drop game, the fidget spinner game, a "bounce the balls in the dog's mouth" game, a paw patrol "stop the spinner on a location" game, and my grandma's favorite "spin the pirate wheel and land on the jackpot like wheel of fortune" game (she loved wheel of fortune, and when we took her to chuck e cheese for an outing she loved that one). I played all the new games and some older ones, and got 2 cards from the minions game.

Sunday was really low key, pretty normal Sunday for us. Mskate sold raffle tickets since it's Oktoberfest at our church and we have basket raffles. Mskate and I each made one; I made a chuck e cheese basket, she made a disney bath and bodyworks basket, and mskate's mom donated a loungefly backpack that she didn't want. Our baskets aren't going super well, but her mom's is doing well, and hopefully we win a couple of things we could use for our new house. I bought some things we need for the new house from Lowes. We went to CEC and mskate really liked the new games. I watched a fair amount of cartoon network and adult swim, didn't really plan to but good to use my sling subscription. I especially "needed" to do that because there weren't cartoons on FOX tonight, so I watched Bob's Burgers on Adult Swim.

Now for Monday Labor Day. Mskate and I spent the day doing some furniture shopping, since Labor Day is when furniture stores do their sales and we have a new house that needs some furniture, and we just like going to IKEA and the chuck e cheese that's close by. We got a Billy media shelf, Trofast cabinet thing, an as-is Kallax (came from the display sections or something, fully built), and some containers for the Kallax and Trofast. We were going to get a couple of other things, but they didn't have them. We also got lunch at the cafe, and I really liked their pasta and marinara, and the sparkling raspberry drink. IKEA is fun because the display sections are so well crafted, and some of the things are so fake. Like, they had a gaming set-up, and it was an empty XBOX 360 shell.

Chuck e cheese was fun. They have some games that we don't have at our local CEC, and those are fun to play. I got a couple jackpots, and our pass had 500 free tickets for labor day. We used some of our tickets to buy unique prizes for the easter egg fundraiser we do every year. On our way back we stopped at BJ's Wholesale and got gas and frozen broccoli. It was a fun time. Once we got home I unloaded the stuff to our garage to move later.

Labor day is normally a day for grilling. However, I grill very often so it's not too special of a thing; plus, I want clear out my freezer which means my tenderloin, and when I grilled that last time it didn't turn out great. I "slow" cooked it over a period of about 1.5 hours in the oven, and it turned out really good. I made some of the broccoli while I waited for the tenderloin to cook. I also made mskate an omelet. It was a good dinner. Now I'm just enjoying some TV and calm night stuff. Overall a pretty good weekend. This has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.