It has been a crazy month!

After the chaos of the last post, we left on a 10 day cruise to Alaska on June 21st.  This was to be relaxing but on the 23rd the Montgomery County Woodturners president announces he was stepping down due to illness.  I had been thinking about this for some time but didn't think I was ready.  But on July 1st I announce to the officers that I will take it on and be president.  My son is headed off to college and daughter is in 11th grade so I will have some time.  Most of my child related sports have now gone south.  I still have a lot of anxiety for doing this.  I am not the natural leader, nor am I good talking to people but I can turn it on and I have some support from former presidents and officers.  I take the office with several other positions empty or soon to be empty and that concerns me a lot.


While we were gone a huge derecho cut a wide swath through the area and power was out for several days all around us.  I hear that we lost power for 4 hours.  We have been very lucky here!  On the way in the house @ 11:30 pm July 2 we notice that the mailbox is broken (later learned that vandal youths did it to several people).  We turned the porch lights on and 10 minutes later there is arc lightning coming out of one and trying to start a fire.  Oh my, what an omen.  I take the next 2 days to relax, process pictures from Alaska, finish the last post that I wrote on the trip, and prepare my plans for MCW.


I have decided that if I am going to do this I am going to do my best.  I made appointments with the two past presidents and took several emails from other officers.  We have a great relationship with the Woodworkers Club and they are going through a move to a bigger space and we (now me) need to make sure we do all that we can to keep them happy.  So I made a trip down there to make sure we are listening to them and supporting them.  Their move has been delayed, probably a month, because of the storms and building permits being suspended for emergency repairs.

The MCW website had moved to new platform and the update was coming close to the end of the first step.  I spend a lot of time qaing and checking out what it has to offer.  It reminded me of my software days... find a lot of things, get them fixed and find completely different things in the same place, how annoying. 


I held my first meeting on Thursday July 12th and it went well with 26 members and guests.  I had a lot of people presenting a bunch of items and I held it together pretty well.  


My son is completing his summer swimming carer so we spent time at the pool Wed. July 11th, and his final swim on Sat July 14th and he got to parade around in his Kingfish crown and robe.  And on the 22nd we made it to the swim team banquet, 2 1/2 hrs of talking about how much the kids want to swim and giving out crappy little trophies (they actually were pretty cheap this year).  This is followed by a great 30+ min video.  It is cool having professionals live in the neighborhood. 


On Monday July 16th I was presented with a coach of the year for coaching 11 teams over 8 years of kids volleyball.   I got a nice certificate and a very nice "participation trophy" (it is better because it is MINE!).  I am truly very touched.  I didn't plan out that one local web paper would have a story about it and then another local paper would have to do a story also.  


Finally last week my daughter was away at a hiking and leadership camp all week and I got a chance to get the chainsaw and lathe out, and rough out a some bowls from the few pieces of that storm wood that I found along the road.   Finally some Tim time.