Category: Uncategorized

Greetings to all!

First, the good news: the 18^th Annual CONvergence Blood Drive is weeks away! We will be in the lobby greeting donors all day on Saturday, July 7^th and we hope you’ll join us. Due to popular demand the last few years, this will be our largest drive ever!

Please spread the word to friends and ask them to donate. They’ll get a special Red Cross t-shirt, plus the best (and hardest to get) badge ribbon at con!! Go to www.redcrossblood.org or contact First Officer Jane to sign up for your donation.

Now, on to the bad news:

I have some very disappointing news to share and I’m sorry about it. The Governing Board has been working behind the scenes for several weeks to avoid this situation, but we have been unable to come to a satisfactory solution.

We will not be having a hospitality room at CONvergence this year. There are a few reasons behind our decision, but the bottom line is that we don’t yet know the parameters of hosting a room. There are multiple factors in discussion that may change the prior rules, and these factors could significantly increase the cost to our group. The membership approved a budget at the September meeting and we are bound to honor it. The changes could have represented an increase of 100% over that budget.

The Board met at the anniversary picnic to discuss the issues and decided that we could wait until a particular drop-dead date, but no longer. That date has passed. We no longer have time to do the many tasks necessary to run the room. The truck has been cancelled and we will not be scheduling a work day to make repairs to the sets.

I want to stress that the CONvergence convention committee, and CONvergence itself, played no part in this outcome. I informed the convention of our decision this week and they are eager to have us back next year. We are excited, as always, to work with them.

We’ll talk at length about this at the September meeting, but that’s what you need to know right now to make your plans. We’ll still be at the convention and doing the blood drive, so we hope to see you there!

Mary

Greetings, crew!

We have a super summer coming up, so mark your calendars! We just lost the snow in our yard in the first week of May, so it really jumped on us. On top of that, our first summer event is on June 2nd this year, instead of the the customary second Saturday, so it seems like everything is moving very fast.

We held the election for Governing Board members at the May meeting. All of the incumbent officers accepted the nominations for their positions, and all were re-elected. We'll formally install these officers at the June meeting. We'll also have lots of picnic fun after the meeting is over, so plan to join us. Bring your family and friends, too, and let everybody from other clubs know so they can join us, too. As mentioned later in this newsletter, please RSVP so we know how many are coming.

Check out the item about CONvergence in this newsletter. Every time we do this may our last, so please come and help to make sure it's a big success!

See you around the galaxy!

Mary

Our June membership meeting is one week earlier than usual this year! Following the meeting we'll have a picnic and some fun. The meeting starts at noon as usual, and we anticipate the picnic starting about 1:30pm.

The festivities will take place at West Bush Lake Park in Shelter 1. The address is 9401 West Bush Lake Road in Bloomington. We'll be providing the sides, salads and desserts this year, so all you have to bring is any meat you'd like to grill and beverages of your choice. We'll also have some games to play and time for visiting and relaxing.

Please feel free to bring family and friends to this outing. Let us know how many will be attending be emailing or replying to the post on Facebook.

Hi All,

I have a friend Jennie, that is a volunteer at the Isanti County Jail. She works with the inmates (primarily women), in a library/reading program plus more. She has just started a reading tutoring program for males & females, & also helps provide the inmates children with books. She also collects used magazines & books for the libraries- there are 4. She is asking for donations of used (or new) books in all genres, for adults, but children’s books are also appreciated. I have been assisting her by asking friends if they have books they would like to get rid of/donate to a worthy cause.

I plan to be at the Nokomis Anniversary picnic & could collect them then. All genre are welcome-SciFi, Mystery, Romance, Historical, Etc. Men’s, Women’s, adult, youth, & children’s.

Thanks. Karen Uecker

Thanks to Scott for envisioning a great outing for our group of 16 on May 5th. We started at Surly Brewery, moved on to Lake Monster, traveled to Urban Growler and ended up at BANG! We found good food, good beer, and good visiting and fun. Muy bueno!

We'll be in at the Eagan facility packing food for Feed My Starving Children on July 24th from 6pm to 7:30pm. You can go to www.fmsc.org to sign up for a space. As of this writing there are 13 spaces left. After the packing, which always ends too soon, we'll head to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Please join us - it feels great to help others!

This years marks the 20th anniversary of CONvergence and we'll be there once again. We'll be in our favorite room 107 and we look forward to seeing everyone there. We hear all year long about how con-goers look forward to our room and consider it the best, so we're really excited!

As always, we need a lot of hands to get the room set up in time. We'll meet at 9am on Thursday, July 5th at Mary and Jack's to load the truck, then head down to the Bloomington DoubleTree at noon. We are scheduled to open the doors at 8pm, so this will be a precision operation. We need YOU to assist!

If you are attending the convention we'd like to sign you up for time in the room. We're open from 8pm to midnight on Thursday and 7pm to midnight on Friday and Saturday nights. A few hours or a whole evening is fine, and we'd like to know up front so we can schedule breaks for those who work the entire time. Besides, what's more fun at con than being in the best room of all?

We also need help to tear the sets and load the truck at 9am on Sunday, July 8th. We'll bring everything back to the cargo bay, load it up, and head to lunch to reflect on the fun we had all weekend.

This is a big job and it needs coordination, so please drop Mary a line at as soon as you can to share the times you can be there! Thanks in advance for your help.

Now, on to the costume plans. Since the convention theme is Natural 20, we're all going to be Number 20. Remember Harry Mudd's android planet in the episode "I, Mudd"? Every series has a 20, and we'll find them all. No matter what you choose to wear, you'll be Number 20 in your series. We have a few designated characters already, and some that we still need, so let Mary know if you're thinking of something specific and she'll clue you in to what others are doing.

It's going to be FUN!!

Mary

We're back for the 18th time, saving lives during the week of July 4th! For the last few years we have had to turn away blood donors due to a full schedule, so we're boldly going where no blood drive has gone before and running for 7 full hours on Saturday, July 7th. We'll be greeting donors in the lobby from 9:30am to 4:30pm and hope to end the day with 50 live-saving pints of blood!

You can sign up to donate at www.redcrossblood.org or call Jane at 651-283-6736. Please pass the word to your friends who'll be at the con so they can claim their appointment time right away!

Mary

Klingon: Some bloodwine to wash it down?
Alexander: Why are you laughing?
Klingon: Or perhaps the son of our illustrious First Officer would prefer an Earth beverage. 
A glass of root beer with a lump of ice cream? Mmm...
Alexander: Are you mocking me?

Seriously, this weekend we try four more great locations for the Drink de Mayo tour.  Join us for one or all of the stop.

We're just wrapping up the last days of April, so it might be good to take a look back.  We know what happened for the last meeting, and I hope nobody even ATTEMPTED to drive up and down the hills in Stillwater.  For the record, that was the heaviest snowfall on a club event day in at least 20 years. The only one close to that was one of the All-Ship's Holiday Parties, back in the mid 90's that topped out at 15".    For the record, we were one week short of six months of snow season. The first shoveled snow of the season was back during the week of ZooBoo.

May's forecast is conveniently warm and very likely one of the nicest days we could have.  64 degrees Fahrenheit and mostly sunny was a dream just two weeks ago, enjoy it while we can.