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.