This past weekend was the Grand Lodge session in San Francisco. Because we do not schedule opposite Grand Lodge, and ladies are not allowed in until the Sunday morning public session, we had Saturday free.
The problem was that I had so many things to do, I of course got none of them done. I spent the morning scrubbing the belly of one of my airplanes, the nastiest job there is in airplane maintenance (followed in a close second place by packing bearings with grease as a close second, but at least the packing grease is clean grease). You have to get your rags and your diluted Simple Green and lie down on a creeper and then slide yourself under the plane and clean by reaching up. One secret is to spray the rag, not the plane, so less cleaner drips on you. Another secret is to use three rags in a reverse osmosis on each section. You use one rag for getting the really thick black stuff off the plane, which completely saturates the rag, then you use another rag to get the residue off, and then you use a finishing rag that wipes away any little streaks or bits. Then you scoot yourself on the creeper down to another piece of airplane and you toss the first rag in the used pile, your residue rag becomes your thick stuff off rag, your finishing rag becomes your residue rag and you start a new finishing rag, and so on and so on, over and over again. We had an oil leak recently, so the belly was real mess. The only plusses to the job is that it is good for triple work hours because it is such a grind, so I got five hours credit for a bit under two hours of work, and I can do it alone and unsupervised. I have GOT to learn to do more stuff on my own!!!
Then I went target shooting with a bunch of friends who wanted confirmation that rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated and then we had a late lunch. Then I came home and continued working on my Chapter/Lodge/Youth Group lists.
One of the ideas that we are considering for 2013 is having Masonic Family events where the Chapters invite all the local lodges and youth groups to an event for everyone together. It can be a social event or a community service event or even a Relay For Life day. But one of the stumbling blocks is to make sure everyone gets an invite from some Chapter or District. So we are cutting up lists of the Chapters, Lodges and youth groups by Eastern Star District so that we can give people the groups that need to be invited in their area. And for right now, I do mean cutting, and pasting!
Sunday morning, I went up to the Grand Lodge public ceremonies, which includes the youth groups and the Grand Lodge Installation. What is interesting to me is that the Installation takes about two hours, same as one of ours, but the Ritual portion for Grand Lodge is a lot shorter because they install all but the seven top offices in one big group, then the next three in a group, and then the last four individually. Grand Chapter's Installation has twelve installations, not six, and lots more floor area to cover too. But Grand Lodge fills in the extra time pretty well. It is a nice ceremony with some very touching and meaningful bits in it.
The thing about going up to Grand Lodge on Sunday is that there is NO parking! People staying at the hotels can park there, but the parking garage next to the Grand Lodge gets full on Thursday and that is that for the weekend. Taking BART doesn't work so well unless you take a cab or a cable car up the hill. How such a big building can have so little parking confuses me. The hall was only half full Sunday, so what do they do when it is all full?
I also enjoyed the chance to see the rooms on the Exhibit level because we are hoping to do a Ladies' Welcome Tea with goodie bags and door prizes on the Sunday of Grand Lodge in 2013. About half the Brothers bring their ladies with them, but usually there is only an organized activity for them on Saturday, even though Grand Lodge starts on Friday afternoon. So we are thinking it would be nice to have a welcome set up, with maps for shopping and tour info, maybe water and sunscreen wipes and kleenex and of course our trifold and maybe door prizes. The rooms look great for that, so I hope we will be able to make it happen.
Next weekend, I am in Riverside for the Deputy Grand Matron's School of Instruction.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Left, Left, Left Right Left in Riverside
This past weekend was the revealing of the 2012 Grand Family and our Grand Officers' School of Instruction in Riverside.
The hall at which we practiced is very close to the University, so I was struck by how much is different and how few things are the same. Granted that it has been decades since I went to college there, but it's not just that there are whole new sets of buildings, there are whole new roads and roads that are missing too! I remember the first time I came to the school and as you drove down University Avenue towards the campus, Carillion Tower in the middle of the student plaza was the big, obvious landmark of the school. Now, you can't even see it because there are building and athletic fields in the way and the road that used to go right or left now only goes right. If you look right as you turn left, you can see the straight, wide pedestrian walk that marks where the road used to be. At least many of my favorite spots are still there and my most favorite part of campus, the botanical gardens, are still there and seem to be doing well. I spent a great many hours there, where there are cool, shady spots even when the mercury hits 100 everywhere else.
It was very exciting to get to find out who we would be traveling with next year and of course, to find out who I had to cross off my list of Grand Officer candidates because they got taken already. I will never tell how many people that is! :-) Most of the people chosen were people I already knew and some of them, I know very well. Yay!
So the next morning we started having School. The purpose of the School is for the new family to perfect their Ritual work so that, as we demonstrate the work all over the State and especially to the new Deputy Grand Matrons, we will demonstrate the work correctly. It is not too difficult to do our work well, but it is fiendishly difficult to do it perfectly, especially in terms of spacing, timing, placement and so on. In years past, we would have run through certain parts that require all the officers to come together or leave together over and over and over, but this year, it didn't seem like we did that many run throughs so that was certainly less stressful. It was very obvious from the beginning that all of the officers had put in a lot of time preparing before the school so that we could really concentrate on fine tuning rather than learning the work when we got there. That was great and I will have to try to ask my family next year to do just as good a job at preparing for school as this year's bunch did. They did great on that!
So now that all the choices are known, my man and I have to start looking at creating our own short list of candidates. Oh boy! As soon as Grand Chapter is over, we get to send out a letter asking the Past Grands for recommendations though, so I hope we get a lot of good ones, especially for the Deputy Grand Matrons. I was told that you don't ask for these names until after Grand Chapter so I have a stack of letters that will go in just a few weeks. How exciting!
Next weekend, I am going up to San Francisco for Grand Lodge.
The hall at which we practiced is very close to the University, so I was struck by how much is different and how few things are the same. Granted that it has been decades since I went to college there, but it's not just that there are whole new sets of buildings, there are whole new roads and roads that are missing too! I remember the first time I came to the school and as you drove down University Avenue towards the campus, Carillion Tower in the middle of the student plaza was the big, obvious landmark of the school. Now, you can't even see it because there are building and athletic fields in the way and the road that used to go right or left now only goes right. If you look right as you turn left, you can see the straight, wide pedestrian walk that marks where the road used to be. At least many of my favorite spots are still there and my most favorite part of campus, the botanical gardens, are still there and seem to be doing well. I spent a great many hours there, where there are cool, shady spots even when the mercury hits 100 everywhere else.
It was very exciting to get to find out who we would be traveling with next year and of course, to find out who I had to cross off my list of Grand Officer candidates because they got taken already. I will never tell how many people that is! :-) Most of the people chosen were people I already knew and some of them, I know very well. Yay!
So the next morning we started having School. The purpose of the School is for the new family to perfect their Ritual work so that, as we demonstrate the work all over the State and especially to the new Deputy Grand Matrons, we will demonstrate the work correctly. It is not too difficult to do our work well, but it is fiendishly difficult to do it perfectly, especially in terms of spacing, timing, placement and so on. In years past, we would have run through certain parts that require all the officers to come together or leave together over and over and over, but this year, it didn't seem like we did that many run throughs so that was certainly less stressful. It was very obvious from the beginning that all of the officers had put in a lot of time preparing before the school so that we could really concentrate on fine tuning rather than learning the work when we got there. That was great and I will have to try to ask my family next year to do just as good a job at preparing for school as this year's bunch did. They did great on that!
So now that all the choices are known, my man and I have to start looking at creating our own short list of candidates. Oh boy! As soon as Grand Chapter is over, we get to send out a letter asking the Past Grands for recommendations though, so I hope we get a lot of good ones, especially for the Deputy Grand Matrons. I was told that you don't ask for these names until after Grand Chapter so I have a stack of letters that will go in just a few weeks. How exciting!
Next weekend, I am going up to San Francisco for Grand Lodge.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Bittersweet Chocolate
This past weekend was the joint reception for the Worthy Grand Matron and Worthy Grand Patron, an event that is usually considered the last big hurrah of an Eastern Star year, leaving only the Grand Chapter session itself to close out 2011. The Grand Officers were in chocolate brown matching formals in honor of our WGM and WGP.
September and October are interesting sort of blended months for Grand Line Officers. We are all, of course, still holding our 2011 offices, but next weekend, we will meet our 2012 Grand Family and have a school of instruction on our soon to be new offices that we will hold after Grand Installation next month. And we will also have a school of instruction for the soon to be 2012 Deputy Grand Matrons, where we will show the work of our next year offices. But we are still this year's officers! It feels sort of weird every year at this time.
I call it bittersweet because it is hard to say good bye each year to your family and start learning to be part of a new family. Even though you didn't choose these Sisters and Brothers, and even though in many years, they don't consider you to "really" be part of "their family" (and boy does this vary WIDELY from year to year!!), you've traveled with them for a year, shared happy times and hardships with them, and gotten to know them and now they are leaving and you are moving on to make new friends with a new group. I have made special friendships out of each of my years of service so far and have missed those friends each time the year turns.
It is particularly hard for me because I really am very shy around strangers. No one believes me when I tell them that, but it is true. It takes me a while to get used to new people and I am terrible with learning names so that takes me a while too. In fact, it is one of the things that I try to spend serious amounts of time at Grand Officer School doing, learning the names of all the new officers and escorts. It is also hard because lots more people know my name than I know theirs. I am great with faces and I can look at a person and know that I know them and I can often remember when I met them and sometimes even where we were or what they were wearing at the time, but the names just don't stick and since it is awkward not to remember people's names, strangers are hard for me. I work at it every day at every event, to get out there and shake hands and meet strangers, but it is tough. Maybe that is why I like events with meals, because if I am sitting at a table with people, I have time to get to know them and get their names in my head.
The irony of the idea of the reception as the last hurrah is that the thing that almost everyone remembers the most about a Worthy Grand Matron is how smoothly her session went, even though it is the very last thing we do. People forget the receptions but the remember the session. If you had a smooth session, they remember you as doing a great job and if you have a rocky session, then not so much.
The joint reception is a "recent" (in Eastern Star terms where you need twenty years to be "not recent") innovation, primarily designed I believe, to save travel for the WMs and WPs and to save money for the Chapters of the WGM and WGP. It used to be in California, unlike other states, that wives and husbands were discouraged from going to the East in their Chapter together because that way there were two couples to share the time and the work. When it was that way, the WPs and their spouses could go to the WGP reception and the WMs and their spouses could go to the WGMs reception. But in recent times, there have been so many couples going to the East together, that separate receptions meant they had to travel twice instead of once.
I did consider trying something new here and having a WGP reception in the South, which the southern WMs and WPs would attend, and a WGM reception in the North, which the northern WMs and WPs would attend, but once I started looking at the 2013 calendar, I discovered that there weren't two weekends available to use so it would have to be a joint reception because there was only one Saturday open. Ah well!
Next weekend, I will be in Riverside, finding out who will be in the 2012 Grand Family.
September and October are interesting sort of blended months for Grand Line Officers. We are all, of course, still holding our 2011 offices, but next weekend, we will meet our 2012 Grand Family and have a school of instruction on our soon to be new offices that we will hold after Grand Installation next month. And we will also have a school of instruction for the soon to be 2012 Deputy Grand Matrons, where we will show the work of our next year offices. But we are still this year's officers! It feels sort of weird every year at this time.
I call it bittersweet because it is hard to say good bye each year to your family and start learning to be part of a new family. Even though you didn't choose these Sisters and Brothers, and even though in many years, they don't consider you to "really" be part of "their family" (and boy does this vary WIDELY from year to year!!), you've traveled with them for a year, shared happy times and hardships with them, and gotten to know them and now they are leaving and you are moving on to make new friends with a new group. I have made special friendships out of each of my years of service so far and have missed those friends each time the year turns.
It is particularly hard for me because I really am very shy around strangers. No one believes me when I tell them that, but it is true. It takes me a while to get used to new people and I am terrible with learning names so that takes me a while too. In fact, it is one of the things that I try to spend serious amounts of time at Grand Officer School doing, learning the names of all the new officers and escorts. It is also hard because lots more people know my name than I know theirs. I am great with faces and I can look at a person and know that I know them and I can often remember when I met them and sometimes even where we were or what they were wearing at the time, but the names just don't stick and since it is awkward not to remember people's names, strangers are hard for me. I work at it every day at every event, to get out there and shake hands and meet strangers, but it is tough. Maybe that is why I like events with meals, because if I am sitting at a table with people, I have time to get to know them and get their names in my head.
The irony of the idea of the reception as the last hurrah is that the thing that almost everyone remembers the most about a Worthy Grand Matron is how smoothly her session went, even though it is the very last thing we do. People forget the receptions but the remember the session. If you had a smooth session, they remember you as doing a great job and if you have a rocky session, then not so much.
The joint reception is a "recent" (in Eastern Star terms where you need twenty years to be "not recent") innovation, primarily designed I believe, to save travel for the WMs and WPs and to save money for the Chapters of the WGM and WGP. It used to be in California, unlike other states, that wives and husbands were discouraged from going to the East in their Chapter together because that way there were two couples to share the time and the work. When it was that way, the WPs and their spouses could go to the WGP reception and the WMs and their spouses could go to the WGMs reception. But in recent times, there have been so many couples going to the East together, that separate receptions meant they had to travel twice instead of once.
I did consider trying something new here and having a WGP reception in the South, which the southern WMs and WPs would attend, and a WGM reception in the North, which the northern WMs and WPs would attend, but once I started looking at the 2013 calendar, I discovered that there weren't two weekends available to use so it would have to be a joint reception because there was only one Saturday open. Ah well!
Next weekend, I will be in Riverside, finding out who will be in the 2012 Grand Family.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
New England Style
This past weekend, since there were no events on the Grand Chapter calendar, I was able to attend the wedding of my cousin which was held in Connecticut. A long time ago I lived in Massachussetts and my father was actually raised a Mason there and had his Shrine membership there as well, all the years until he passed away, but I haven't been back to any New England state in the past twenty years or so. Mostly, I remember how there are two or three nice weeks in the spring and two or three nice weeks in the fall and the rest of the time the weather is unpleasant for one reason or another, especially to California weather wimps like me.
Yes, there was a time when I would stride happily down the snow lined sidewalks in a T-shirt and jeans, but those days are gone and not coming back. Now I want the weather to be higher than 60 and less than 85 at all times, with rain only while I am indoors and don't have to be out in it, preferably from midnight to 6:00 am so that it has dried out by the time I go outside, and snow is something that I love to see on the mountain tops because it makes them so pretty from a distance. I like the relative humidity to be high enough that I don't feel dried out but low enough that I don't feel like I just stepped into the bathroom after someone took a hot shower for thirty minutes without the window open or the ceiling fan going. Okay, I know how to handle weather outside of those conditions, but I also know how to handle snakebites and poison oak - that doesn't mean I want to have to deal with those things, okay? So most of the time weather in the San Francisco Bay Area stays within parameters and most of the time in New England, the weather is outside of parameters. I did get lucky, I am told however, because it didn't rain until the day I was leaving and it lulled long enough for me to get in and out of the rental car and into the airport, so four days and no rain I had to be out in. Yay!
As long as I was out there visiting, I made arrangements to visit with my counterpart, the lady who will be serving as Worthy Grand Matron in Connecticut when I am serving in California. That was totally cool. It was a lot of fun to learn how they do things differently there and of course, some of why they can. To begin with, the whole state is only about two hours from corner to corner, so by California measures, every event is local. They have only thirty Chapters, so they can make an Official Visit to each one and usually those visits are during the week on the Chapters regular meeting night, with a couple of exceptions for Chapters that meet in places where the parking would be difficult. The entire Grand Family makes all the visits, possible because everything is local, and they seldom if ever need to stay in a hotel room. That part sounded pretty cool.
However, the less cool part was that at these visits, the Chapter does the entire Initiation ceremony and demonstrates balloting procedures on top of Opening, Closing and regular Chapter business, plus the WGM has to review the books and records of the Chapter, so these visits can take three hours or more and all on a work night, so those who work have to drive an hour home and then go to work the next morning. They try not to schedule these things on consecutive days, but that length of visit would tire me out completely. But I understand why they do it. They don't have districts and deputies there, so the Worthy Grand Matron has to do herself all the inspecting and viewing that we have our Deputies perform. Yay for Deputies!!!
Another thing I found interesting there was that they introduce their legislation at their Grand Chapter session and it then lies over for a whole year before being voted on at the following year's session. Then, after the session when it was introduced, the WGM has three informational meetings to discuss the items and the reasoning behind them. Of course that is more practical when anyone in the state can probably get to all three meetings, so they can pick based on schedule. We have trouble covering the whole state in ten to twelve Transitionals or Instructionals and even then we can't get to everywhere.
I also found out that the Grand Line officers have a New England Association where the six states, and a couple of Candian provinces also, get together at intervals to discuss problems and issues and plans, just as we do in some areas of the state. They get to visit each other's sessions and share ideas. That would be nice, but not practical when the entire six state area would fit in California with land leftover. Still it was interesting to hear about.
All in all, visiting with my counterpart was totally awesome and it really gives a person a great opportunity to see how differerently our governing documents can be interpreted and implemented. They started from the same place, but ended up somewhere totally different and maybe we need to remember sometimes that different does not equal bad.
Next weekend, I will be in Fresno for lots of stuff.
Yes, there was a time when I would stride happily down the snow lined sidewalks in a T-shirt and jeans, but those days are gone and not coming back. Now I want the weather to be higher than 60 and less than 85 at all times, with rain only while I am indoors and don't have to be out in it, preferably from midnight to 6:00 am so that it has dried out by the time I go outside, and snow is something that I love to see on the mountain tops because it makes them so pretty from a distance. I like the relative humidity to be high enough that I don't feel dried out but low enough that I don't feel like I just stepped into the bathroom after someone took a hot shower for thirty minutes without the window open or the ceiling fan going. Okay, I know how to handle weather outside of those conditions, but I also know how to handle snakebites and poison oak - that doesn't mean I want to have to deal with those things, okay? So most of the time weather in the San Francisco Bay Area stays within parameters and most of the time in New England, the weather is outside of parameters. I did get lucky, I am told however, because it didn't rain until the day I was leaving and it lulled long enough for me to get in and out of the rental car and into the airport, so four days and no rain I had to be out in. Yay!
As long as I was out there visiting, I made arrangements to visit with my counterpart, the lady who will be serving as Worthy Grand Matron in Connecticut when I am serving in California. That was totally cool. It was a lot of fun to learn how they do things differently there and of course, some of why they can. To begin with, the whole state is only about two hours from corner to corner, so by California measures, every event is local. They have only thirty Chapters, so they can make an Official Visit to each one and usually those visits are during the week on the Chapters regular meeting night, with a couple of exceptions for Chapters that meet in places where the parking would be difficult. The entire Grand Family makes all the visits, possible because everything is local, and they seldom if ever need to stay in a hotel room. That part sounded pretty cool.
However, the less cool part was that at these visits, the Chapter does the entire Initiation ceremony and demonstrates balloting procedures on top of Opening, Closing and regular Chapter business, plus the WGM has to review the books and records of the Chapter, so these visits can take three hours or more and all on a work night, so those who work have to drive an hour home and then go to work the next morning. They try not to schedule these things on consecutive days, but that length of visit would tire me out completely. But I understand why they do it. They don't have districts and deputies there, so the Worthy Grand Matron has to do herself all the inspecting and viewing that we have our Deputies perform. Yay for Deputies!!!
Another thing I found interesting there was that they introduce their legislation at their Grand Chapter session and it then lies over for a whole year before being voted on at the following year's session. Then, after the session when it was introduced, the WGM has three informational meetings to discuss the items and the reasoning behind them. Of course that is more practical when anyone in the state can probably get to all three meetings, so they can pick based on schedule. We have trouble covering the whole state in ten to twelve Transitionals or Instructionals and even then we can't get to everywhere.
I also found out that the Grand Line officers have a New England Association where the six states, and a couple of Candian provinces also, get together at intervals to discuss problems and issues and plans, just as we do in some areas of the state. They get to visit each other's sessions and share ideas. That would be nice, but not practical when the entire six state area would fit in California with land leftover. Still it was interesting to hear about.
All in all, visiting with my counterpart was totally awesome and it really gives a person a great opportunity to see how differerently our governing documents can be interpreted and implemented. They started from the same place, but ended up somewhere totally different and maybe we need to remember sometimes that different does not equal bad.
Next weekend, I will be in Fresno for lots of stuff.
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