Wednesday, September 26, 2018
The rain has continued intermittently the past two days. When you are sure it is over, something else pops up. The quantity hasn’t amounted to much but enough to soak you if you get caught walking up to the meeting area. Temperatures have continued to be really mild. It’s currently 67 and really nice outside tonight.
Yesterday was an extremely busy day and we worked and walked on concrete floor all day. The Love Auction is the biggest way we raise money to give to agencies who need help with materials for projects. Yes, it seems crazy. Members bring items to auction. We register them in and put them out for all the members to pursue. We give everyone bid numbers and have a silent auction. A few items of special interest are held out for the live auction done by an auctioneer member of NOMADS. When we get the count tomorrow, we will have probably have raised over $38,000.00 from our members extravagant generosity. So we spend our own money to pay our expenses to projects and then spend our own money to buy things at the auction to have funds to give away. Some people think we are crazy. We think it is great. The entire amount of money raised by the auction goes to partially fund the materials needed for our various projects. It takes a lot of work to put on the auction, but it’s also lots of fun.
Today everyone paid for and picked up the items they won in the auction. That’s always fun because most of the time on the silent auction, you don’t know until you pay out exactly what you won of what you were placing bids on. We ended the day with a hammock, some home made jelly, salsa, and a drill bit set. One of the things Anne was most pleased about was that a hand crafted wooden bowl, made by Ralph, our deceased World War II fighter pilot friend, brought $550.00. Ralph would be so pleased that it was used to raise money for missions.
Today we also had the first half of the Board report to the membership. After that were the seminars presented for the membership. In one of the sessions we taught a 1.5 hour class on Disaster Preparedness for RVers. It was very well received and people stayed after so long we almost missed lunch. We hope it makes a difference in NOMADS members’ readiness for storms. Later in the day, we were taken on a tour of the Agricenter’s facility by a friend of our friend Melody. This is a very interesting place. We will share that information in another post.
Tonight we had a pot luck dinner that was wonderful. Anyone who left hungry has no one to blame but themselves. After dinner Elvis was in the building and sang us a few songs. We also got a nice visit with Pat and Clay, our dear some NOMADS friends from New York, after dinner.
Busy days but good days. We are tired!
RVing With a Purpose 