Thursday, Oct. 18

Up at 8 a.m., and skipped my exercises again, so I could finish getting the house ready for company. As it happened, only one member was able to attend the scrapbook club meeting.

Funny: I called the Extension Services agent to invite her to our meeting today, and when the receptionist answered, she buzzed the agent's office, but the agent wasn't there.

"I don't know where she went," the receptionist said, puzzled. "She was standing right here at my desk just a minute ago."

Just then, the agent came in from the conference room. "Oh, here she is," the receptionist said.

"So-o-o, you have an agent with the ability to disappear and then suddenly reappear! Well it is nearly Halloween," I laughed.

The agent said she would try to be at our meeting, if nothing came up. But something must have come up, because she didn't "appear" at our meeting.

The three of us had a good meeting just the same. Mother completed a cute page featuring a photo of herself at the pumpkin patch, and then the two of us began work on pages featuring our newest great-granddaughter. It'll probably be January before we can complete the pages, though, since the club won't meet again until then, due to the upcoming holidays.

Around 2 p.m., I served pumpkin bars, with cups of hot flavored apple cider. The guest scrapbook member liked both, so I gave her the recipe for the bars, plus four packets of various flavors of the cider to take home with her.

While we worked on scrapbook pages, Hubbie ran a couple of errands, including going to the middle school to pick up two items I won at the silent auction last Friday night. a staff member at the school called this morning to inform me of my wins. I thought I'd won four items, but there were only two...but they were the two I was most interested in.

One item is a bicycle helmet that I wanted for my daughter, who rides her bike to work. The other is a small, round, wooden cutting board, which, when I bid on it, I didn't know includes several cheese serving implements. I don't think that the folks who set up the bidding area knew about the implements, either, or they'd have set a higher opening bid on the item.

Hubbie returned just as I was serving refreshments, so he joined us in the treats. The other scrapbook member left around 3 p.m. Mother was ready to go home shortly afterward, so I accompanied her, taking along a container of the Chinese soup for her supper, since we were scheduled to attend a dinner meeting at 6:30.

The meeting revolved around accessing available funding to promote the visual and performing arts. Hopes were that we might purchase a storefront building downtown to house both, since neither will be included in a proposed community center.

The local mayor, and a state representative talked to us about hitching our star to the idea of a new regional library, which could provide space for visual arts, and cooperate in visual arts workshops.

This idea completely left out the community theater, so that at the end of the discussion, a theater representative announced that since the theater group would have no vested interest in the proposed project, it would not feel compelled to assist in its realization.

So it appears things are just about where they were when we arrived at the meeting...nowhere.

Since we are accustomed to having supper around 5 p.m., we were getting really hungry by the time the waitress took our order near 7 p.m., and served it closer to 7:30. Hubbie settled for a burger and fries, while I had grilled chicken and a baked potato.

We were back home around 9 p.m., and finished the evening watching a one-hour TV show from DVR.