Now to shoe the horse!
Coming back south it felt like six months away. It truly was only three on the calendar. The rest was emotional, since so much happened over the summer . We decided to move back north this next spring, spent time mourning the losses from leaving Sun City, had much more time with family than previous years since more family had returned to the area. Then there was fishing.
Oh Hallelujah! was there fishing! I never dropped a line in the water over the summer. Out of state licenses are too expensive. But Steve did. And he needed assistance. At 80 his body is showing his age. Last year there was a fall alongside the river and he needed assistance getting up, so there is great reluctance in going fishing alone. Part of the fall was that his chair tilted into the mud along the shore, so an equipment improvement was in order, in the form of a sheet of plywood with a rim around it (provided by Paul's expert carpentry skills) which was the exact size to hold his chair in place. It turned out, coupled with the chair legs, it was also perfect to hook his rod/reel combo behind while he did anything else. The river he mostly fished as is a state boundary so two poles are legal, but you put one down to bait another at the risk of having one of the large fish taking your rig away, never to be found again.
Well, except for that once a long ago time, but I'll let Steve tell that story.
The upshot of course is that I spent several days hauling Steve and stuff to and from the river, sticking around with my camera to take advantage of the show. There are previous posts here with pictures, no need to retell those stories, just to mention their effect on my seeming to have been gone for twice as long as we actually were. Other events helped as well, culminating with the birth of our latest great grandson.
Arriving down here, I was simply worn out. Traveling is starting to get to me more than anticipated. Upsetting my internal clock doesn't help and it wasn't where it needed to be since we left to head north in the summer. One might think the two balanced out, two hours lost, two hours gained, but the sleeping patterns in between were totally fubar. The bed in Minnesota is high and hard, the way Steve likes and bought it. The increasing arthritis in my shoulders means that I, as a side sleeper, can't get a full night's comfortable, uninterrupted sleep. Nearly every night I'd wind up in the living room in a recliner, taking the pressure off my shoulders. I suspect Paul was beginning to wonder if Steve and I were fighting or something.
We weren't. We did however have discussions about mattresses in our new location when we moved up north to stay. We had planned not to move my bed, but rather leave it here to fit the built-in storage wall surrounding it. Instead, it's definitely getting packed and coming along. It's the perfect height, perfect softness, and I can spend a full night in it. It just needs a headboard. On the other hand, Steve doesn't like his bed down here very much, so it'll be on the garage sale list, and he'll be shopping for a replacement for the new place. Still a storage bed like both are now, but something better, whatever he decides that is.
All of this is to explain why, when I walked into the club, it felt both familiar but not home any longer. It was my job to open the first morning, and I whipped through those duties, waiting for somebody to show up. It was the first week of winter hours, meaning 5 days instead of 3, and 6 hours instead of 4. Nobody showed up for over an hour. The summer members weren't used to the schedule and the snowbirds are slow in arriving, unwinding, and turning their attention to the club. So many more hours to use it before it gets crowded and you have to wait your turn for some of the equipment, what's not to love now?
I pretty much just sat and waited to figure out just what I wanted to do with that time. I knew what I needed to do. The fall festival - my last one! - is coming up and I need to make more jewelry to sell there. It's big money-making time! Of course everything at home is chaos, and the things I had set my mind on making required special wire and beads and findings - gotta make the GOOD stuff here - were nowhere to be found in all the places I searched for them. I admit it was a hurried search, and scattered as I am right now, I could well have looked right past some of them. For an example of how scattered, while in the club, working on second choice projects, I set a small bag of very specific pieces down and two minutes later absolutely could not find it again! Still haven't, though I have not done a pull-everything-out-of-the-box-one-at-a-time proper search. Nor have I done a better search in the library/hobby room, since sorting the library for the few MUST KEEP books we won't be selling has taken up spare time and energy. There are three walls of built in shelves there! Rich is a great help but still.... He can only guess what's still deemed important, and while he can reach top shelves, I am the one doing the packing. So far we're nearly out of boxes already. Then there's bundling the rest, mostly by authors as we stick with ones whose work we like.
Anyway, nothing really got done while waiting in the club for somebody to show up. When somebody did, I was finally free to head into the back office to check out a summer's worth of emails, and send out a couple of my own to the whole club, including the reminder we were now on expanded days/hours.
Nothing has gotten made yet (by me) for the Festival, since other board duties were on the calendar. First Friday is the Board meeting. I needed to pull my brain back together to write out and send out the agenda. That first meant finding the template on my laptop, then locating the last month's minutes, meaning April's. I happen to have those stored, knowing ahead that I'd have to start seeing where we were then, figure what's been done or not, and basically figure out what the questions were before hunting for the answers. I was "lucky" in that last April our club secretary had a family emergency so I had to take minutes as well as run the meeting. I can do that. Just for the Board, however, not the full Membership meetings, where much of my duties switch to gatekeeper, keeping discussions on topic and coming from one mouth at a time. That I can't manage while trying to write it all down.
I mention this because our secretary just resigned, both from her office and the club itself. It happens, especially among retirees with illnesses or spouses with illnesses. So I get half of her duties, and our treasurer has volunteered to take on her other half, the big busy meetings, at least for this month. That means tomorrow.
I get to write the agenda for that too, meaning this afternoon. Again, luck hit. The previous secretary sent the last spring Membership Meeting minutes to me via email and - oh, foresight is wonderful! -I kept them in my email. Not so lucky is having to reformat them. Sure, they came in pdf format. But her computer's version of pdf isn't the same as mine, so they transfer to my software looking like somebody's software has been on a six-month bender. Margins are jagged, every line ends in an exclamation point, paragraph spacing is absent. Some of the corrections are impossible to do without a major workaround. I've done that before, but so long ago that it's like a whole new problem. But that part's done, and I can take the new pdf format to my older laptop which can still read that, and send it to my old printer so it comes out where others can read it.
Damn well better hope the club printer/copier is working tomorrow though!!!
So this afternoon, I get to read those in detail, work what needs it into the agenda, add items from Friday's Board meeting in as well, and print that out for copying tomorrow too. I already know I missed one important proposal from members for putting on the Board agenda Friday. And we have to beg members to volunteer to serve as officer for the next year, maybe fill in as secretary a couple month this year too, since there are now two official openings. We need to elect a new president too.
Nobody thinks they want that job! We've had a couple who burned out, particularly when one had to hang on through covid years and had few others to designate smaller jobs to. I knew that going in and made sure certain (computer, mostly) tasks got shared out. Others complain that EVERYBODY comes to them with all their questions, expecting a president to know everything. I instead learned who did have the answers and directed members to those people, able to get my own projects done that way. It also has the advantage of getting more members acquainted with other members. Hopefully more friendships get made that way too. Now I just have to pass those skills on, or at least inform reluctant members that it's possible to learn them, so we get volunteers. As a bonus for being an officer, I'm relieved of other duties in the club for the year, although I step in as monitor occasionally, and teach skills in workshops too. I had a lot of fun designing the new club sign/tablecloth, using photos I took of various stones, which (photos, not stones) got cut into letter shapes in the final result.
Elections are held at the November Membership Meeting. Most years the best we can get in October is a committee of arm twisters. The December one is mainly a pot luck holiday party, with festivities interrupted briefly for installation of next year's officers. There's little time to deal with this vacancy especially. (I did check with the rest of the board and they are all willing to continue, so just two vacancies.) I sent an email to them all in the summer once our decision to move was made. Nobody responded. After another month I sent it again, with a question of whether they'd gotten the earlier one. A couple of them answered that they hoped that not acknowledging it meant that they could persuade me to change my mind! Yes, I have thoroughly enjoyed the role for two years, and secretary for several years before that. I will deeply miss the club. But I can't do it from 1800 miles away.
Honest!
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