2007-10-13

Ah, Saturdays! Mick and I sleep in until a sinful 8:30! And it is so good to sleep with this cooler weather. Fall is proceeding gracefully and very slowly this year, probably because of all the late warmth. And the color is beautiful, which rather surprises me. I would have thought the severe draught would have caused the leaves to go brown. But oranges and yellows abound, and red upon the maples.

After a leisurely Morning Offering, Mick prepared a turkey to bake. I wrote the blurb for our operating funds campaign. We hope to raise enough to pay our bills for all of 2008. If we can do that, then when donations other than that come in, we can earmark them for the many new projects in the works that are awaiting funding. Our Board has offered to match funds, so we only need to raise $15,000.00 from general donations. Our overhead, with Gary at the admin helm, Pam at the bookkeeping desk and Melissa caretaking Avalon, plus all other office expenses, is $30,000.00. I am told that this is a tiny budget for doing all that we do, and of course that is due to all our volunteers!

At noon, Carmen arrived and I took her to Ruby Tuesday’s for her birthday gift – the meal. And it was soooo delicious. She topped her meal off with an amazing chocolate cake, without a candle but with all my best wishes for a happy year ahead. That is a challenge, as she was fired this week, and must again seek employment. We’ll be praying for that!

I spent the rest of the afternoon, and a short one it was, as Carmen and I had lingered over lunch, catching up e-mail.
• I let Janet I know that the OLOROMO exercises were on their way.
• I tried several times to send Carol C Romi’s contact information but that feature is not working on my computer. I ended up cutting and pasting his e-mail address and sending it to her that way. She has promised to help Romi learn about how to find and apply for grants.
• I talked with Dianne about her husband, who is an invalid, and we set another luncheon date for the day after she talks to his doctor.
• Wynn F had written a thoughtful letter about future collaboration possibilities. He still thinks it would be grand if he, David W and I could get together on a project, as we all love the Law of One. I wrote back that David is uninterested in any project besides his hoped-for movie, so we needed to count him out. However, I offered him a couple of possibilities. I suggested that we collaborate on a Q and A show on BBS, or that we collaborate musically. Wynn is a good musician, plays the guitar and has many original songs that he has created through the years.

Mick called up to say that the bath was ready, so I put Jenny Traveller, my beloved laptop, to rest for the night and sailed into the evening. We bathed, relaxed and had dinner together with Romi and Carmen before having our regular public meeting. That was slightly delayed because the Kentucky-LSU football game went into three overtimes and was such a gripping game that we needed to watch. Our patience was rewarded when Kentucky won over # 1-ranked LSU. It was a beautiful thing!

As we talked around the circle, we found that there were challenges for some of us in the group, and so our group question was about how to remain inspired in challenging times. It felt like a good session – of course one can see for sure only when the transcript is ready to edit!

However, we are very sad to find that our chat room failed for the second meeting in a row. This is unacceptable and I asked Romi to look into buying a private chat room for these modest webcasts, as we did last year. Steve E had assured us that this freeware did a good job, but it’s been a real loser and we want those few who tune in faithfully to the live webcast to be rewarded with hearing the session. Romi said, “I’m on it!”

The meeting ended around 10:30 and Romi took off immediately to get some sleep. Carmen stayed a bit longer, watching the football wrap-up program with us, and then she too left. We stayed up until midnight enjoying the many mentions of Kentucky’s upset before saying good night.