As If It Wasn't Gonna Be Crowded Enough...

This from stltoday.com; the online version of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for anyone who doesn't know. I have edited this down considerably, so for the full article, you might want to head to here.

Seventh-day Adventists will pack downtown
By Tim Townsend
Of the Post-Dispatch
06/27/2005

Beginning Thursday, 70,000 members of the Seventh-day Adventist church will visit St. Louis for a 10-day meeting. In terms of sheer numbers, the gathering will be the largest event in the city in 2005, according to the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission.

The Adventists will use about 59,000 hotel rooms during their stay, said Nancy Milton, vice president of marketing communications for the commission.

By comparison, the 54,000 visitors to St. Louis for the Final Four used 39,500 rooms over four nights. The next two biggest business conventions each will use about 15,000 rooms.

The worldwide conference, which is part business meeting and part spiritual rally, is held once every five years. It will be based at America's Center and the Edward Jones Dome, but also will spread out into the city for events including film, music and Bible festivals. Pastor Don Schneider, the president of Seventh-day Adventist in North America, which is based in Silver Spring, Md., said "the vast majority of people come for fellowship and to worship with others from around the world."

While the visitors will have an effect on Fair St. Louis and places like Soulard, Union Station and Laclede's Landing, Adventists won't be spending extra money on beer and burgers. The denomination focuses on physical health and members do not drink alcohol or use tobacco. Caffeine is discouraged, and vegetarianism is encouraged.

As the church's own newsletter said in August, sometimes residents of the cities where the church holds its meetings are left thinking that Adventists "come to town with 10 commandments and 10 dollars and break neither ..."

Good health, to Adventists, is part of their faith. "It's related to the belief about being prepared for the return of Christ," said Douglas Morgan, a professor of history at Columbia Union College, a Seventh-day Adventist school in Maryland. "It's about the integration between soul and body - what we do with our body is part of our spiritual growth."

Adventists have one of the oldest programs in the country to help smokers quit, and they run nearly 700 hospitals, health clinics and nursing homes around the world. The Adventist diet means catering the event will take special attention. Sunnydale Academy, a church boarding school in Centralia, Mo., and Achieve Foods in Columbia, Mo., were contracted by the church to supply vegetarian entrees for the delegates and visitors at America's Center...

Anyone who knows St. Louis knows that this is a city people work in and then get the hell out of! Show up in downtown St. Louis, during the week, after, say 6pm and you'll see a ghost town. The city is bleeding residents faster than most anywhere else in the nation; in fact a recent study showed St. Louis, Cincinatti and Detroit leading the charge in cities losing residents! So while many of us work downtown, you wouldn't catch us dead around here after the workday ends... and if you did, there's a good chance you'd catch us dead around here for real.

So this weekend is Fair St. Louis, our annual Fourth of July celebration. Twenty-Five years strong and the Black-Eyed Peas will be there this year. It is expected to bring about a million people to the riverfront. And now we've got 70,000 Adventists thrown into the mix. This could be the most crowded weekend this city has seen since the World's Fair of 1904.

Why do you care? Why do I care? I'll tell you why. Because I just found out I have to work this weekend. Yep, to take advantage of the extended holiday weekend, we've scheduled some server upgrade and general system maintenance. We'll start bright and early on Saturday and hopefully be done by Sunday (with Monday as wiggle room for the inevitable things that go wrong). I swear to god, I think we're our own worst enemies sometimes. We cause more problems when we try and upgrade and fix things here than when we leave them alone... I wonder if it's like that everywhere, though.

Oh, yeah, in case I didn't mention it, I work in IT, Information Technology, Info Tech, nerdsville, yeah, yeah, I know. But, hey, I'm married with children so there's hope for you yet :).

Besides, didn't you know. It's fine and dandy to party with the bad boys, but everyone knows when you get that out of your system you marry a nerd if you want a good long-lasting relationship. It's true... or at least that's what the nerds say.