Seventeen weeks down, thirty-five left to make a difference.
This past weekend, I attended the reception for the Grand Worthy Advisor for California Rainbow.
For me, there was a little bit of a stroll down memory lane involved because the event was held in Oakland at the Scottish Rite Center. The last time I was in that hall was for a Coronation event that my medieval group held there. It was very interesting being back up on that stage with the honored member. The only part that was new, and not necessarily good, was that they had set up spotlights on one side of the stage to shine down on the microphone and those darned things shined right in the eyes of everyone on the stage. When I got called on to do introductions, it was a good thing that I had memorized which of my officers and escorts were there and could just introduce them in protocol order, so it didn't matter the order in which they were sitting because you couldn't hardly see anything at all! I've never wanted so badly to be wearing sunglasses indoors at an event before.
Of course my memory of the hall was not perfect. I couldn't remember if the main floor was three or four and I confess that the parking lot was bigger than I remembered, but it still was far too small for all the attendees. Of course, the cool part for me is that I got saved a parking space, so one of my Grand Officers was happy to give me a ride since that meant that he could use my spot. The jury is still out on whether I would have gotten a ride otherwise, but since I always try to consider my Sisters and Brothers in the best light, I will choose to believe that he would have given me the ride anyway. And we had a lovely dinner afterwards, so that is good too.
It was also nice to be just visiting because going to a Rainbow function meant that I just got to sit in a chair and look pretty, wave when introduced, introduce a few people that I already know and sit down - no remarks and no worries about whether the program was going correctly or not. It was a nice change, but then I do like having the chance to give remarks some times, so all things in their proper place, I suppose.
It also provided an interesting contrast because there was a 180 shift from the weekend before. That previous weekend, we attended our first Official Visits in the South, a social one and a traditional one, and made our own Official Visit to our Senior Living Community. The social had a great program of musical entertainment with a tasty lunch and the traditional had a very fun theme of medieval romance. I wore one of my favorite medieval dresses and had a lovely dinner too. And when we made our Official Visit to the SLC, the Grand Officers got to perform their Ritual work for the residents, so I had to do all the traditional Worthy Matron duties. It was really nice though to be able to present fifty-year membership pins to two of our Residents. The ceremony is quite lovely and having the chance to honor these members was touching. So going from all that to "sit and look pretty" was a nice break, almost like a vacation. But of course, there is no rest for the wicked, I mean, weary, yes weary is what I meant! :-)
This weekend, we are excited to go to Mountain View for our IMPACT 2013 session put on by our Leadership Committee and our Northern Home Festival in Richmond and our Official Visit in Salinas.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Friday, February 8, 2013
Meetingful
Fifteen weeks down, thirty-seven left to make a difference!
This past weekend was our meeting/administrative weekend and boy was there a lot of administering to do! I was never so grateful that we don't have ceremonial events on our admin weekends!
We started out with our usual Home Board meeting and that was fine, but at the same time that we were doing that, selected members of our Finance Committee were meeting with our pool of candidates to become our new Controller. As we had sent out in our February letter to our Chapters, our Controller is retiring as of April 30, so we want to get someone hired with good overlap to learn this very complicated job. I did try my very best not to be distracted during the Home Board meeting as I wondered how things were going in the initial interviews.
We got done with that meeting in time to have a working lunch start to our Finance Committee meeting. Just because we were doing interviewing didn't mean that the regular work of the committee could slide - oh no! There is lots of regular work to get done, including the start of our budget season. So we ate lunch at our Senior Living Community and got into our regular business.
I must digress here to say that I have eaten at our SLC a number of times and I have enjoyed my meals, but I confess that I like my salt (and my spices too), so sometimes all that healthy stuff makes me desire a salt shaker, preferably one with some nice garlic salt or herb salt in it. I know that the healthy stuff is better for me and I know that when you cook for a larger number, you have to tone down the spicy because some people like spices and some people HATE them, but I do like some salty flavor. My bad! At least I am not as bad as my escort, who add salt to things that I think are already too salty. He'll add salt to almost anything! Of course this is also a guy who eats his pineapple upside down cake by putting pats of butter on it and sticking it in the microwave so the butter melts into the cake, so what can I say? :-)
So I had a lovely lamb stew for lunch and we dug in for work. We ended up with three final candidates for afternoon interviews and interspersed those with the rest of our work. We still ended up adjourning for dinner and picking up the budget work after that back at the hotel. So we probably weren't "done done" until well into the night.
One day of this is tough enough, but wait, there was more! On Sunday morning, we had a speaker with our Home and Foundation Boards to discuss strategic planning issues. We want new five year strategic plans in place for both these Boards by this summer and that morning was the start of those discussions. So we sat in that for four hours, including another lunch. (This one was fried chicken - it was tasty, but still no salt shaker, darn it!). Then we had to have our Grand Line meeting. I confess that we were all pretty tired by then, so we did punt off to next month a few things, but we got most everything done that we still had energy to do and by then, the Superbowl had started.
That didn't turn out so good for my team, so the less said on that the better. However, I did learn how to get live sports streamed on my iPad so I was able to watch a fair bit of the game in the car on the way to the airport for my flight home. It takes a lot of battery, but it does work. It worked in the airport too and that is a good thing because the Burbank airport gets its free WiFi from ABC 7, so that is the only channel ever on the TVs in the terminal and the game was on CBS. Of course, God was toying with me because they had us board the plan with two minutes left in the game, which anyone who watched the game knows was the most critical time and once I was on the plane, I lost the WiFi feed, so I had to use my Blackberry to get the game page and there's no video on that. It automatically updates, but there I was, staring at a score and time board, waiting to see what would happen after each play. They took long enough boarding the plane though for me to know that my team had lost before I had to turn my phone off for taxiing. Sigh!
Next weekend we have our first Official Visits in the South and on President's Day weekend, we are going to the Grand Worthy Advisor's reception for Rainbow.
This past weekend was our meeting/administrative weekend and boy was there a lot of administering to do! I was never so grateful that we don't have ceremonial events on our admin weekends!
We started out with our usual Home Board meeting and that was fine, but at the same time that we were doing that, selected members of our Finance Committee were meeting with our pool of candidates to become our new Controller. As we had sent out in our February letter to our Chapters, our Controller is retiring as of April 30, so we want to get someone hired with good overlap to learn this very complicated job. I did try my very best not to be distracted during the Home Board meeting as I wondered how things were going in the initial interviews.
We got done with that meeting in time to have a working lunch start to our Finance Committee meeting. Just because we were doing interviewing didn't mean that the regular work of the committee could slide - oh no! There is lots of regular work to get done, including the start of our budget season. So we ate lunch at our Senior Living Community and got into our regular business.
I must digress here to say that I have eaten at our SLC a number of times and I have enjoyed my meals, but I confess that I like my salt (and my spices too), so sometimes all that healthy stuff makes me desire a salt shaker, preferably one with some nice garlic salt or herb salt in it. I know that the healthy stuff is better for me and I know that when you cook for a larger number, you have to tone down the spicy because some people like spices and some people HATE them, but I do like some salty flavor. My bad! At least I am not as bad as my escort, who add salt to things that I think are already too salty. He'll add salt to almost anything! Of course this is also a guy who eats his pineapple upside down cake by putting pats of butter on it and sticking it in the microwave so the butter melts into the cake, so what can I say? :-)
So I had a lovely lamb stew for lunch and we dug in for work. We ended up with three final candidates for afternoon interviews and interspersed those with the rest of our work. We still ended up adjourning for dinner and picking up the budget work after that back at the hotel. So we probably weren't "done done" until well into the night.
One day of this is tough enough, but wait, there was more! On Sunday morning, we had a speaker with our Home and Foundation Boards to discuss strategic planning issues. We want new five year strategic plans in place for both these Boards by this summer and that morning was the start of those discussions. So we sat in that for four hours, including another lunch. (This one was fried chicken - it was tasty, but still no salt shaker, darn it!). Then we had to have our Grand Line meeting. I confess that we were all pretty tired by then, so we did punt off to next month a few things, but we got most everything done that we still had energy to do and by then, the Superbowl had started.
That didn't turn out so good for my team, so the less said on that the better. However, I did learn how to get live sports streamed on my iPad so I was able to watch a fair bit of the game in the car on the way to the airport for my flight home. It takes a lot of battery, but it does work. It worked in the airport too and that is a good thing because the Burbank airport gets its free WiFi from ABC 7, so that is the only channel ever on the TVs in the terminal and the game was on CBS. Of course, God was toying with me because they had us board the plan with two minutes left in the game, which anyone who watched the game knows was the most critical time and once I was on the plane, I lost the WiFi feed, so I had to use my Blackberry to get the game page and there's no video on that. It automatically updates, but there I was, staring at a score and time board, waiting to see what would happen after each play. They took long enough boarding the plane though for me to know that my team had lost before I had to turn my phone off for taxiing. Sigh!
Next weekend we have our first Official Visits in the South and on President's Day weekend, we are going to the Grand Worthy Advisor's reception for Rainbow.
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