Hewers of Wood and Fetchers of Water

This weekend we finished off the last of the Transitionals and are in the home stretch for Instructionals. So I am trying to get my home ducks in a line. This week will be the final planning stage for my service group, soon to be the Keepers of the Castle, ramping up for that group's first meeting in a couple of weeks. Service Groups seem to me to be a relatively recent thing, starting in the last decade or so. I think they were invented out of pure necessity and it seems impossible to get through nowadays without one. In the before time, as it has been explained to me, when a lady became a Grand Line Officer, it was expected that her Chapter would raise money to pay for the various events that have to be held, receptions, revealings, schools, etc., and the Chapter members would do all the hewing of wood and fetching of water necessary to make those events happen. But the amount of work has grown, as has the expense, and it can take many more people and a lot more effort than any one Chapter can manage to get everything done. Thus entered the Service Group. This is a group of amazing volunteers who help with the fund raising and cooking and greeting and hewing and fetching that just has to get done. In California, a Grand Line Officer will have a Reception and Revealing in the summer of her second year (the Grand Conductress year) and a Revelation of her Grand Officers in September before she steps up to Worthy Grand Matron, and a Homecoming Reception towards the end of her term of office, and workshops along the way, all of which is expected to be done by local people. There are also state dinners every year at the Grand Chapter session, but one of the associations usually does those, and there is a Pre-Revealing during the day before the GC Reception, but her Grand Marshal year Grand Family usually does that, and there is Grand Installation itself, which is also usually done by that same Grand Family, and there is. . . . and so on and so forth. All these things have to be put together and presented and often funds have to be raised to hold them too. That's a lot of work and a lot of money. A Grand Line Officer also has to put on schools, but those are at least paid for, usually, so those usually involve getting people to make a weekend's worth of meals and stuffing registration packets. There are also all the little things along the way, like getting help to stuff my spring letter envelopes and things like that. It is both gratifying and humbling to see the enthusiasm and willingness on the part of the people who have come forward to say they will help with all this stuff for me. A dozen people have already said that they will be at the meeting and a bunch more have said that they can't come, but they want to help. It is gratifying because it really makes you feel like people think you are doing a good job and want to help you do it and that helps make the time and the effort and the money and the lack of sleep all worthwhile. And it is humbling because it is hard to imagine that you are worthy of all this time, effort and fuss, especially when you know that you can never repay all their love, effort and service. All you can do is try to say thank you as often as possible and try to find ways to show your appreciation for all that these outstanding volunteers do for you. I am very excited about getting this group up and running with the help of some of my Chapter members who are taking the lead on putting everything together. I will be relying on them to keep the train moving down the tracks, even when I am off in the hinterland of California. It is a constant reminder that you cannot possibly serve all by yourself and your ability to serve is entirely dependent on the good will and efforts of your Sisters and Brothers. Wow! How did I get so lucky? Next weekend, I will be in San Jose, Morgan Hill and Salinas.

To Mail or Not To Mail, That is the Question

I spent the long weekend finishing getting my first packets out and contemplating my spring letter to my girls, the one that is going to ask about the dresses and the workshop and such. And I found myself considering the odd conundrum of e-mail and what is now quaintly called snail mail, that I admit I still think of as just mail or regular mail. There are still a fair number of active members in Eastern Star that do not have e-mail or if they have it, they check it so seldom that it is no faster than regular mail. Then there are those that are so connected that you've barely hit the send key and your reply is already pinging for your attention. In one of those rare twists of fate, I am both of these people. I have no internet connection at home (listen to the roar of the dinosaur as she sinks back into the mucky tar pit from which she arose) but during the work week, usually from about 8:45 am to 6:30 pm, my e-mail runs on my computer constantly, so I can get answers back pretty quickly. Since I am seldom if ever home on evenings or weekends, this has worked well for me. But now I am trying to build a communication network with my girls all over the state and the ugly problem of cost v. communication is rearing its ugly head. Each time I mail out to all my girls (approximately 200 letters, assuming less than five pages in the envelope), it costs me about $200, between stamps, copies and of course, envelopes. With e-mail, I can send out those same letters for free. So with e-mail, I can send stuff out every month or so and with regular mail, I am limited to about once a quarter because of the cost. The problem is that if you send stuff out by e-mail, the people who don't have it feel left out, and if you stick to regular mail, you can't communicate as often as you want to. It has been suggested to me that I see who is willing to accept e-mail and send to them that way, and then mail copies to the others who don't have e-mail and I may try that, but it does make for a bit of bother sorting the one from the other all the time and making sure that the right envelopes get addressed. What a puzzlement! I was thinking about this particularly this weekend because I got the most delightful love gift with the most interesting note in it. Love gifts are token gifts that most Grand Officers get from their subordinate officers at the local Official Visit or other occasion when the Grand Family comes to visit an area. Usually each subordinate officer signs the card and puts a couple or a few dollars in the card. Former Grand Officers also often give love gifts to the current Grand Family at the Official Visits as well. Those gifts tend to be things like cards, stamps, bottles of water and other stuff that former Grand Officers know you can always use. The tradition is that you send a thank you note to each person whose name is on the card unless the card says No Thank You Note or NTYN on it. Former Grand Officers are really good about writing this on their gifts because they remember what it was like to get home and write fifteen thank you cards for the weekend. The funny backward situation that this can create is that you can have what are sometimes referred to as negative presents, as odd as that sounds. It happens when, for example, you have a district of seven Chapters and you get a card signed "From all the [Your Office Here] Officers of District X" and it has five dollars in it. So you send a thank you note to each of the seven subordinate officers, which costs you about seven dollars when you add the cost of the stamp to the cost of the card, and you find yourself two dollars behind. It is actually a bit amusing, at least the first dozen times or so. :-) But what these amazingly clever sisters did in the love gift they provided is that they gave me an e-mail address and asked me to send any reply to them by an e-mail that could go to all of them. This was Awesome! I was able to send all of them a very prompt thank you, and could put in more words and details than fit in a card and I didn't have to worry about running out of cards. I had never had anyone suggest that an e-mail thank you was okay before and I wonder if such a thing could catch on because right now I am thinking that I really ought to buy stock in Current, for all the dozens of thank you cards I am constantly buying from them. I do know that many people find e-mail to be impersonal, so I doubt that many people will want to get their thanks this way and I know that the value of the cards I send is far more than the cost of the paper and the stamp because I believe that people appreciate the personal touch of getting a card that they can keep from their Grand Officer, which is why I still hand write my cards instead of typing them, (although with the lack of quality in my handwriting, I am not sure that they wouldn't be happier with the typed card), but I must say that an e-mail allows me to have a more personal conversation than the cards do, simply because I can write more and can have a dialogue follow up. So it will be interesting to see how e-mail will (or won't) change the face of the Eastern Star communication world, including the thank you card. Next weekend, I am in Yorba Linda and Ventura.

It's All About The Dress

This past weekend, I attended three Transitionals in different parts of the state and got to attend a meeting of one of my area Associations. The ladies in the Association were choosing a fabric for an Association dress and they all wanted to know about my dress choice. There is an old tradition in many area associations (which is a group of all of my Dragon Rider ladies in a particular defined area), that the association members make dresses so that they can be identified as part of that particular Association when they go visiting and at state wide events. Sometimes the group picks a fabric and everyone makes their own dress. Sometimes they also pick a pattern and everyone wears the same dress. The ladies wear these dresses for three years, until their Worthy Matron year, when they wear a dress that I get to choose for them. The dress I pick is their "forever" dress and they would wear it to special events forever, or until they become a Deputy or something else that gives them a different "forever" dress. I still have my "forever" dresses from my Worthy Matron years and if someone who was in my Association gets picked as a Deputy or something, I would wear that dress (if it still fits of course :-). Well the fabric selection went very well at the meeting. Some lovely prints had been brought to the meeting but there was a fairly clear overall winner in a beautiful pattern. I can't wait to see how the dresses look. The girls were kind enough to let me have a set of the patterns and there were several that they did not pick, but that I did like, so I might use one or more of them for something else. However, in every one of the three groups I met with this weekend, they all wanted to ask me if I had chosen their "forever" dress yet. I had to tell them that by tradition, I cannot pick a dress, or even a color for sure, until after the person ahead of me in line chooses her dress and color because you never want two years in a row to have the same color dresses. So the person ahead of me will reveal her dress in July, and I can start picking after that. But the discussion did raise some interesting issues about the selection of a dress. In my experience, picking a forever dress for your Worthy Matrons is as fraught with danger as choosing bridesmaid's dresses. Here you have two hundred ladies of every shape, size and coloring and you are going to stuff all of them into one dress. Let's be realistic about this. No matter what you pick, no matter what style, what color, etc., about a quarter of the ladies will look absolutely phenomenal, about half will look okay, but not great, because the color is good but the style is bad or because the style is good but the color is bad, and the last quarter are going to put on the dress and wish they were dead, or at least pray desperately for a stylish paper bag to complete the outfit. It is inevitable. One year, to try to minimize the problem, the WGM just chose a fabric and let everyone pick their own pattern and have their own dress made. You would think that the number of happy people would go up and maybe it did, but then you have some people who say how hard it was to find someone to make the dress or they couldn't find a pattern they liked, or they didn't think it looked as good when their dresses didn't match, so maybe this is a good solution and maybe it is not such a good idea. The other problem is that someone has to buy enough yards of the chosen fabric and then sell it back out to the members and this can involve quite a bit of an outlay of up front money and you could end up with a lot of leftover material too, because the last thing in the world you want is to run out. Still it is an option. Another concern I have heard running around is that lots of people like that I have black as one of my colors and a bunch of them want a black dress, but I have a whole 'nother bunch of people who do not think that it is proper to wear a black dress, so they want anything other than a black dress. Then some people want a skirt and top instead of a dress because that is easier for them and then other people don't like the way a skirt and top look and they want a dress. Oh! The madness! AAAHHH! Deep breath, remember you can't please everyone, deep breath, the same numbers will like it or hate it no matter what you pick, deep breath, is there a cave close by somewhere that no one will ever find me, deep breath, no, probably they would find me anyway, deep breath, okay, maybe we can tackle this mountain of a problem with a strong rope and lots of really good pitons and carabiners, deep breath, okay, we can do this, really, really, calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean, palm trees swaying in the breeze. Whew! In what is probably another radical break in tradition on my part, in my next letter to my girls, I am going to send them a question sheet, asking for feedback on all of the above issues, among other things, and give them a chance to tell me their thoughts. I will still have to make a decision and it still won't please everyone, but at least everyone will have had a chance to have had a say. That will give me some information on people's thoughts well before I have to start looking at dresses and deciding, since that can't happen before July at the earliest. Who knew the hardest part was going to be picking the dress? Next weekend, I am going to work on the annual inspection for my airplane and try to catch up with some of the rest of my life that I have been ignoring for the past eight weeks. Maybe I will even have time to sleep.

You Want Me To What?

This past weekend we had one of our Deputy Grand Matron Brush Up Schools where we go over how to perform our ceremonies with the ladies who are supposed to be the "ritual resource" for their area. You have to admire the bravery of each of these ladies. We take good, hard working members who are deserving of recognition, we give them a three day school of instruction in October and then a Brush Up School for one day in January and they get to go back to their home area and be "The Source of All Knowledge" regarding our Ritual work. I know that it was ulcer making when I did it and I don't think that has changed. You go to the Chapters in your District and they have ten thousand questions and you are supposed to have ten thousand answers. I think the one sentence that saved me was, "I think I know the answer, but I want to make sure to give you correct information, so let me look at that and get right back to you." It is a wonderful honor to hold and a very, very important service to our Chapters and our Order. For many people, your year as Deputy is the best ever. I loved mine. It is your first chance to be in a position that is recognized state wide and it is often your first impetus to really travel outside your own area. I know that for normal, outgoing people, you can travel anytime, but, although no one ever believes me, I am really very shy. I was raised not to talk to strangers and that a lady does not approach a stranger and introduce herself, so doing those things is really hard for me, but I force myself to do it and have a good time doing it because I really do want to meet all these new and wonderful people and there just isn't any other way. When I was Deputy though, it gave me an excuse to be able to speak to strangers and a likelihood that they would respond to me, just because of my position. So that made it a lot easier to get to meet people and a lot more comfortable to travel to where no one knew me. That year, which was 2003 for me, I attended ten Official Visits outside of my own area and everyone was so welcoming that it made it really, really easy, even for a shy person like me. I am told that in some areas, it is hard to find someone to serve as a Deputy because of the expense. That puzzled me until I looked at the map and realized that for some of these ladies, the Chapters in their district are a hundred miles apart or more. When I was Deputy, the farthest Chapter from my house was actually my own Chapter and it is only twenty minutes away. Also, I had a delightful conversation with several of the Deputies who explained to me how different the expectations are in different parts of the state, mostly broken down along Association lines. According to our Constitution, a Deputy is only requred to hold a practice for each Chapter in her District and to attend her Deputy's Official Visit to each Chapter, so the minimum requirement is to go twice. However, no one does just that. But how much over that standard they go varies widely. In some areas, what I thought of as typical, but perhaps is not, for each Chapter in her District, the Deputy holds a first meeting practice, then attends the first meeting, holds an initiation practice and attends the meeting with initiation, holds a district wide practice for memorial, attends her Deputy's Official Visit, and comes out for one or two party nights, for a total of about five or six meeting visits for each Chapter. Since most Chapters now meet once a month, that comes to about half the Chapter meetings plus of course all the meetings of her own Chapter. But in some areas, they expect the Deputy to come to every single meeting of every single Chapter in her District. Wow! In a District of five or six Chapters, that's a minimum of half a dozen meetings each and every month. I don't know how these differences got started but I have heard that if you are in one of these "come to everything" areas and you don't come to everything, people are very, very disappointed. And since the last thing any Deputy wants to do is disappoint the members of her District, people in those areas know that if you say yes to being a Deputy, you need to go to everything. I am thinking about collecting the information to figure out which areas are which way to see if geography has anything to do with this split in belief. That might be interesting to figure out. It is sad that some people have to say no when asked because it truly is a wonderful time and it would be nice if every deserving Sister had the opportunity to serve. Next weekend I am in Tracy, Oroville and Los Altos.