5 days til the Auction

North County Rec Auction is Saturday in a new location and the weather is not cooperating. Donations are VERY VERY slowly trickling in and we're hitting the home stretch.. Hopefully, the Toutle football coach capitulates and they move up the game from 5:30 in Wahkiakum (1 hour down the coast) from here to 1pm in Castle Rock or Toutle. If not, it's going to be interesting seeing how many local parents come since those parents make up about 1/2 of the big supporters. Keep your fingers crossed and let me know if you want to buy a ticket to the dinner / auction / dance on October 3rd.

Today started with a 7am parent teacher conference and has been pretty non-stop til now. I've got scouts tomorrow night and I think I'm also supposed to work concessions out at the football stand. Wednesday night is a parks meeting and auction. I haven't even looked at Thursday yet, but I do know that Friday is a big football game (in the RAIN!!! - ugh!!) Saturday is setting up and actually having the auction. C is gone to webelo woods - weekend camping trip so I need to make sure he's ready and packed for a wet time in the woods. Sunday I'm in charge of the children's mass - The kids are doing all the 'jobs' - lectors, ushers, gifts, greeters and choir so I have to be up and at 'em very early.

I'm starting to get stressed. My life is so busy and hectic right now I can't even see straight. (I haven't even figured out anything for my daughter's birthday next week - including her party. sigh guess. I'll keep this short and get something figured out.)

Government Summit III

Government Summit is tonight.

It has been nearly 6 months since the first Government Summit and our Parks subcommittee reported back to the Summit leaders our progress and made our recommendation which is to pursue the option of consolidating. We have met nearly weekly all summer long and have come to the conclusion that a Metropolitan Parks District is probably the best option. Since the devil is in the details, we would like to explore this more thoroughly and report back with a plan. Whatever we do will take another year to 18 months before it’s ready to bring to the voters. Most of the people on the committee think that a Metropolitan Parks District is a great way to go, except the largest city which already has a very good parks system (actually they are one of top small town parks and recreation programs in country) and they don’t want lose anything (which is reasonable) but they have the most voters. So we have to devise a way that it is beneficial to the most people in the county and provides each community with as much of their own autonomy as possible. (There’s too much civic pride to truly consolidate into one big parks system.) It’s not insurmountable, but requires quite a bit of finesse and figuring out how to make it work. However we structure this, the overall agreement/financing must be approved by the voters and the largest block of voters that are sympathetic to parks is in Longview. And so we dance….

North County Recreation Association

Castle Rock is a small town. Offially the census says there's a little over 2,100 people in the city limits. But there's probably 5-10k people in the school district. Neighboring Toutle Lake is even smaller. Needless to say, the Castle Rock / Toutle areas are very tight knit communities and life revolves around school and kid activities. There was a huge need to replace our decrepit old baseball fields and create some new soccer fields. So a dedicated group of local business leaders and parents had a vision to create the North County Recreation Association. They raised money, negiotiated for land to be donated and use agreements with the school district and city, applied and received several large grants to build the North County Recreation / Sports Complex back behind CR's high school.

It is truly amazing what they have been able to accomplish with almost total volunteer labor (fairly recently they did hire a baseball concessions manager but other than that its all volunteer support). There is a awesome sports complex with a 2 story club house, 3 or 4 very nice little league baseball fields (part of the state tourney is held there for the last 2-3 years) and 2 girls softball fields. There is a huge area for the soccer fields. In a addition, there is a mile long path that circles this part of the complex and excercise equipment is being installed along it so that you can get a complete workout on the circuit. In addition, work on the new boat launch into the Cowlitz River is going at a frantic pace. (After several years of review, they finally got the necessary permits from the Corps of Engineers late last week. All 'in river' work must be completed by September 15th so not to affect the salmon. If they miss the deadline, they will have to wait until next August to resume.) I walk the loop most nights and it's been impressive to see the progress is going. (They truly are working dawn to dusk.) There are also plans for a campground and playground and paving the parking lot to be put in future phases.

Obviously, all this costs money. So every October, North County hosts a big dinner/dance auction event which raises a lot of money to support all upkeep and maintenance of everything we've built so far. (I've been helping with it for a couple years and it is a lot of fun and has a lot of great items.) So mark Saturday, October 3rd on your calendars. (Place TBD - which is the subject of another post.) So if you know anyone who would like to donate items for the auction or would like to attend, let me know. If you want to donate that would be even better. NCRA is a 501c3 non profit and its tax deductible.

Sleepy Head

So I did something this morning that I haven't had the opportunity / inclination to do for quite a while. I slept in....until the luxurious hour of 9am. I was really tired and the kids and dogs all slept in too. (It was a miracle - quite frankly.)

Thursday night, I stayed up until 1:30am canning...I got 7 quarts of apple butter done and made my first batch of jalapeno jelly. (I actually grew the jalapenos this year. Out of 7 bushes of jalepeno and bannana peppers the darn slugs got 4.) Although not huge, (peppers not slugs) they seemed to turn out alright. I also cut, seeded and pureed enough jalapeno's to make another 3 batches which I hope to do today after B's last rec soccer game ever. (small - yeah!! with lots of expounding on the topic later.)

Friday night was the homecoming football game and I had to work concessions again. I really admire all the work my friend Heather does to get everything organized and prepped. She has a job, three active kids, coaches soccer, is the scout leader for 2 packs of kids, and has a hubby whose work is in the Olympia area. She does a great job and doesn't get a lot of credit for it. Way to go! Anyway this game wasn't too bad - busy but not outrageous like it was against the Kalama game. (Last one was horrible!!! The local sports columnist featured our burgers in his article about the big grudge match. There were tons of people wanting to buy burgers and among other things - the propane valve on the big grill froze over. So very little propane got to the grill and so it took forever to cook the burgers. There were new people assembling the burgers and the whole setup was changed around so it was very disorganized. I've had people tell me that they had to wait up to an hour. So if I knew they had a bad experience last time, I made it up to them.... Like one guy always orders a couple double cheeseburgers, so this time I sold them at the regular cheeseburger price which made him happy (We "lost" $2 or 3 dollars on it, but he buys $25+ in food each game, so it was worth keeping one of the regulars happy.) Homecoming was a big game of course and we were up against the other undefeated team in the league - we killed them 30 something to zip. This means we will have at least one or two more home games due to playoffs. I guess this is good - more money for scout camp. Especially since C will be doing 2 week-long scout camps this summer, and M wants to do the 9 day horse trek in June. (She can do it because they open that one up to nonscouts. After she has that experience, the next year she will be old enough to be a "venture scout". Then she can work as a wrangler at Gilbert Ranch - the cub scout horse camp. Can you think of a better summer job for a 14 year old who LOVES horses - working at a horse camp. At least that's the plan / goal for now.)

Long story short... I was tired and I slept long and hard. Now we'll get to work on on the yard and finish up some more canning - B already is busily peeling and cutting apples as I write, because I promised her that I would make a batch of pale apple sauce.

Where did it go???

Some where and some how I lost at least a week this month. In my head ,it is only about September 15ish. Not September 25th! So it came a very huge surprise yesterday ,when I figured out that I had misread the calendar and this is the LAST weekend in September, and not the 3rd weekend. I had to call my sister in Portland and tell that "no this weekend would not be a good weekend to pick up C."

Magoo is awesome! She takes each kid for a weekend to have some one on one time with them. She and C have been trying to go camping or do something fun since July, but the timing has been horrible and they haven't been able to connect for one reason or another. Finally, it looked like this weekend would work....until I realized that I was looking at last weekend on the calendar and unfortunately this weekend he was booked pretty heavily. Scouts, football, church, scout hike to Ape Cave at Mt. St. Helen's. So I felt really bad having to tell them both that it would truly be a bad time and/or they wouldonly have 5 or 6 hours to do anything fun. (But maybe Oct 9th might work.)

This oh SH*% feeling came back again tonight. I volunteered a couple months ago to help with the North County Recreation Association Auction. This is the nonprofit group that created the new baseball, softball, and soccer fields. They are very nice. This is one of the major fundraisers North County has to do in order to do the matching funds for a number of large grants they have received. I went to one of the organizational meetings tonight to find out more info about how it is organized since I'll be helping with the checkout at the end of the autcion. At the meeting I found out that the lady in charge of checkout was admitted to the hospital today and won't be around. There are a couple others who have helped in the past, but wonn't available this year. So it looks like I'm it! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! I'm just supposed to be a little helpful worker bee. I'm not supposed to be in charge of it. (I know the other organizers were so impressed with how my friend Gayle (and I) did the checkout process for the Exhibit Hall auction that they asked if we could help them this year.) Gayle is super committed that weekend and can't. RATS! I guess I will be in charge of it. That's ok I thought - this thing isn't until October 4th - I've got lots of time (at least 2 -3 weeks to figure this stuff out.) Then it hit me.....

While I'm sitting in the bar at the Rose Tree (official committee meeting place of choice for most Castle Rock organizations) at this meeting, I realized I am going to be running the checkout of an auction I've never attended, the other organizers don't know what the other lady actually did to prep (They do know there are receipts - in triplicate for every item bought.) AND there's only a week until the auction. Oh dear lord!! Give me strength!!

Reflection

Thanks for all the kind words and thoughts.

My "reflection" speech during the planning meeting for the hospital went really well on Wednesday. I talked to a conference room of about 30-40 people. Most are VP's or higher for either the local hospital or Peacehealth chain, was the chief of staff / department head, or is a community leader, etc. My speech was sandwiched in between the Regional V.P.'s opening remarks and the kick off 'rah rah' speech by the CEO.

The speech was kinda challenging because: I was to "give voice to the patient experience", showing "an example the typical patient care received at the hospital" and "why I am an advocate for the hospital" through describing the absolute worst day of my life while creating the springboard mood for the new 'goal setting' process we're starting. - This all eloquently said in 5 minutes (or less) and without crying. There were a couple times when my voice reverberated with emotion, but it actually added power and impact to the message. I think I set the stage really well for developing a realistic, viable yet ambitious plan to create a culture / patient experience of compassion, dignity, safety and enabling our customers to be an active participant in their healthcare where people will recommend the hospital to their friends. I had 10-15 people come up to me afterwards and thank me for sharing my experiences and how much it impacted them. It was nice to have that validation after really putting my heart out there for public consumption.

The reason for this planning process is that the administration wants to build on previous strategic plans. (It's been 6-8 years since the last one-so we're due.) Even though we have a great little hospital (one of the top 100 small hospitals in the country), it suffers from what I call "ugly stepchild" syndrome. No one is truly respected and valued in their own home town. We're only 45 minutes from Portland and 2 hours from Seattle, so if it's REALLY serious, the patients are shipped there for treatment. So people think that only healthcare in one of the big cities is really good. That kind of thinking is really dangerous!! (I know I don't want to drive to Portland if my kid has a broken bone or someone was having a heartattck. - not to mention the economic damage that would happen around here if a major family-wage employer went belly up and most of the local medical community had to leave. I really respect the CEO to always be looking for ways to improve and develop good community relations.

All in all, a good meeting. There will be quite a few "virtual" meetings over the next couple months that I'll have to attend. (One of our retired community leaders is representing our patient advisory council since most the rest of us can't get off work to go to the rest of the meetings.)