Monthly Archives: November 2013

I have been to my fair share of meetings over the years, some dull and boring, some stressful and in far too many cases they’ve concluded with me being assigned some new work. The monthly community hall board meetings are not like that at all and I have really come to enjoy them. Part of my enthusiasm is due to my role as vice-president which is by far the easiest position on practically any committee and certainly is for this one. I don’t have to chair the meeting, take minutes or report out on some activity.  All I do is show up and participate, which is a real treat.

Another thing is that the board members are all longtime residents of the community and comfortable enough with each other to joke a little, share some gentle banter and move the agenda along at good clip.  Some of the items tonight included thank you cards from the two recipients of student bursaries from last month and another bursary approved tonight. The lady in charge of hall rentals brought up a proposal to allow the non-profit urban gardening group to use the hall for free when they are holding workshops over at Rex Welland Park on heritage apples and mason bees and things of that nature. Approved.  Then we heard about the great leaf theft.  Most of the city gets leaves picked up by these trucks that have big suction hoses so all you have to do is pile them along the edge of the sidewalk or street.  Our municipality is different and requires residents to bag up their leaves in specially approved bags. Someone volunteered to rake the leaves which was great but they didn’t know about the bag requirement so the leaves didn’t get picked up.  And since last weekend the annual Craft Fair was on it became an issue. So the gentleman in charge of hall and grounds maintenance got the special bags from across town and bagged them all up and called someone at the municipal hall who said they’d get a crew out in the morning.  In the meantime, one of the volunteers for the weekly bingo saw the bagged leaves and thought they’d be great for mulch for his garden.  He called Joyce, the president, and since she was unaware of the other activity she gave him permission to take the leaves.  So the next morning the hall and grounds guy got a call asking where the heck were the bags of leaves!

Another item discussed was the new front stairs and hand railings which everyone is happy about. It took close to a year since we first started talking about doing something to fix the crumbling old ones but it is satisfying to see ideas come to fruition.  We decided to restore the annual funding of the local food bank back to the usual level, after a financial bind last year caused us to have to cut it back. Approved.  And we finished up talking about the Christmas party for kids in December.

I walked home in the chilly autumn night, warmed by the glow of community spirit I had come from.