My dad visited recently and somehow we got on the subject of assemblies. He's been in the truth 37 years and figured he'd been to 3 assemblies a year. That meant he had been to 111 assemblies in his life! Then he tells my wife, "So you're just getting started." Boy, what a lot to look forward to! Really made the end seem near.
It got me thinking, too, about how potentially dangerous some assemblies were. I remember going to one in an open air stadium during a killer heat wave (people in the city were literally dying). The assemblies lasted at least four days then and me and my brother were little kids. Seat belt laws were not enforced and sometimes we rode around the big city in the hatchback of the station wagon while my Dad would get frustrated trying to navigate somewhere he'd never been long before GPS was invented. Good times!