Filing and Typing

Since I was home this past weekend, it was time to get caught up on a hundred things that need to happen and on which I had gotten a little behind.

So last week, I finished up the proposed revisions for the books that every Worthy Grand Matron prepares and uses for her Grand Officers, Deputys and Worthy Matrons and Worthy Patrons.  A few years ago, the idea was bounced around about making a generic version of these books and then letting each Grand Line Officer put together their own packet of special information and sheets each year, instead of doing the whole book from scratch.  We had drafts of two of the books, the Deputy book and the Worthy Matron book, to look at last year, but they got distributed too late for us to make all the edits and revisions and the other two books didn't make it for last year, so by getting the proposed edits done now, I am hopeful that we will have time between now and April to go through the proposed changes and agree on generic books that the next three or four years will be able to use without having to rewrite their own.  While I like to get things done that will help not only me, but the years to come, it is a relief for me to have these drafts done because if for some reason, they do not get reviewed, I can always just hit the magic "Accept All Changes" button and have my stuff ready to burn onto CDs.  But I would really prefer that we get to go through these and make any changes that those following after me think are beneficial or useful, so that the books will really represent our combined efforts and collective wisdom.  It will make all our books better.

This past week was devoted to getting out my winter packets to all my Dragon Riders.  I got the letter and all the inserts written and all the attachments done and scanned, which took a good few hours, but then I was faced with Lack Of List Syndrome.  This is a truly dreaded condition where you need to get stuff out to a group of people and you know who they are, but you don't have a list with contact information for them.  The snag is that not everyone who was with me last year is going on and with me this year and there are a bunch of Chapters, about thirty, in fact, who didn't have anyone last year, but may (or may not) have someone this year.  But since there are deadlines in the packet for the end of this month, I didn't want to wait too long, so I sent the packet out to everyone who was on my e-mail list last year and asked them to let me know if they were not going on and if they knew who was.

I got a bunch of responses and then had to spend about two hours fixing information and adding e-mail addresses for new people and some people who I had on my list but no e-mail before and sent out another e-mail to all the new people and addresses.  That left me with about forty packets to mail and about twenty Chapters where I didn't know if I had a person.

So then I sent in to the Grand Chapter office to see how we were doing on a list and got one which included all the Chapters that had sent in their officer forms, although I am not sure that all of them have done so.  That meant going through all 179 Chapters to see if any of the information had changed and put any new information into my Spread Sheet of All Dragon Riders.  Some people had changed and some same people had new or different snail mail or e-mail addresses.  For each new e-mail, I had to make up a contact in my Outlook directory and then add them to my All 2013 Worthy Matrons list.  When I was saving the list after the changes, about three hours after I started this nice task, Outlook warned me that I had exceeded the group size for any lesser version of Outlook and that my list would not work with any of these lesser versions.  So I guess it is a good thing that our software was upgraded last spring.

The cool part is that I have now got everyone on the e-mail list except thirty-one people, some of whom have requested no e-mail communications and some of whom I just don't have addresses for.  And I still have ten Chapters that don't have a person listed, but that is way better than before.  The sad part is that I now have to have mailing labels made up for the thirty-one people and make copies of all the information for them, so they will not get their packets until next week, when everyone else got theirs last week or earlier this week.  But that is the price I guess you pay for choosing snail mail.  At least my costs for copies and postage is hugely better than when I was mailing to everyone and only stuffing 31 instead of 179 - Woo Hoo!!!

So all that, plus about three hours of filing on which I had gotten behind ate up last weekend nicely.

Next weekend we are not traveling, it being a holiday, so I will continue to catch up on drafting tasks and secretarial stuff.  The weekend after that is also a holiday, so that will be the weekend to lock the calendar and start getting event information together.