Thursday, February 24, 2011

Opti-B-Bull 2-24-11

          Our Flag salute was led by Gene Grosse and Marv Doty gave the invocation. Our Chaplain Wally was missing because the doctors discovered an infection in his leg.  According to his Facebook they made him come in last night for an operation. He’s at St. V’s in room 904 and Linda says he can have visitors. Now he only has pain when putting pressure on it whereas before it hurt all the time. We all signed a get well card.
After a careful review of Bob’s roster dated Jan. 2011, as he implored me, I detected no birthdays for this week. Our numbers were pretty small because it snowed a little over the night and even Beaverton closed their schools. Dick S didn’t make it to the meeting to collect his raffle winnings…perhaps it was too slippery for his bike? And our Treasurer failed to show up so I took possession of the money. We skipped a raffle but Bob A paid for our speaker’s breakfast. He is my hero! Berry was here hoping Joe would bring a check because we need to send the Essay contest packet with our winner to the Pacific NW District Chairman. Berry enclosed his own check so he is my hero also. He has arranged to have her and her family come and read her Essay March 31st. Our members were so delighted with the publicity Marv T achieved by getting the Oregonian to publish the info on our Public Safety Scholarship, they hope we can also publicize our Essay contest. We all expressed our appreciation to Barry for his hard work.
A review of history revealed that in 1803 the chief justice of our supreme court decided in Marbury v. Madison that the court decides whether laws congress passes are constitutional. This drove Jefferson crazy because this power isn’t found in our Constitution. In fact, the Constitution says none of the three independent branches of government can interfere with any other branch. Oh well… A hundred years later our navy was delighted and obtained a new base (drum roll) Guantanamo! In 1991 a ground offensive began which we know as the Gulf War. This thing still lingers around. I forgot to mention to our group that in 1848 the Communist Manifesto was published. Let’s hear it for Feb 24…
We ran thru a quick review of upcoming activities: golf tournament with the Hillsboro Club, wood stacking, evening meeting hosted by Joan and Susan, yard sale in June, 5K walk for childhood cancer and serving food at the Faith Café. It turns out that our guest speaker was also involved with starting the Faith Café. Bob A introduced Joan Goldhammer who reminded us about Rebuilding Washington County. We have participated in their projects in the past. Our timing is off this year. The National Rebuilding Day is the last Saturday in April each year and they formed up the teams on the 17th. We could offer our services to help out sometime this summer and she promised to find us a project. In past years, we painted and repaired some trailers on a Saturday which enabled the invalids to remain in the trailer park.
It turns out that Rebuilding Together is a national, non-profit volunteer low-income housing preservation organization. I thought it was just local. It helps preserve affordable housing by repairing and rehabbing houses of homeowners in partnership with the community. They have been performing free repairs in Washington County since 1994. She was interested in our golf tournament as they also run one. Apparently it takes a lot of work so we may have our work cut out for us. We presented her with our new Speaker Gift Coffee Mug which Bob obtained from a secret Newberg source and then fled the state to warm his toes in Hawaii. But who are we to begrudge the man his sybaritic , sensuous pleasure while we must remain buried in snow?

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