an active role in the community

Today seems to have been entirely taken up with Community Involvement.  I thought that I could finish counting up the cash from the wildlife fair and take it to the bank on the way home from the music society committee meeting and envelope stuffing fest, but ran out of time, and had to bundle it into a pile in a corner of the kitchen to be finished later.  Because I was concentrating on my bee treasurer role, I failed to read the time on the music society agenda when I printed it out, and so didn't notice that the meeting was for ten and not half past until it was ten to.  I had firmly believed it was at half past ten, a particularly embarrassing mistake given that I was supposed to be taking the minutes.

The sticking of  inserts inside leaflets had begun without me, as had the meeting, but the chairman gave me a brief resume of what had been discussed so far.  I scribble rapidly in meetings as the talk goes, a legacy of thirty years' of note taking at work and university.  My city notebooks were legendary, and the Systems Administrator tells me that one senior broker he sometimes sees still mentions them.  As I wrote it did seem to me that we were jumping around all over the place, and when I sat down later at the kitchen table to type up the scribbles, I realised that I was going to have to substantially reorder the sequence in which things were discussed if I wanted the minutes to have any relationship to the agenda at all.  We definitely didn't agree a date for the next meeting, and the Treasurer's Report seems to have been skipped over entirely.

I couldn't do the minutes until I'd finished counting the beekeepers' money, which took absolutely ages.  Yesterday I counted and double counted the contents both cash boxes, the tin containing tea money, and the two plastic bags of raffle proceeds, wrote down the totals and added them up, several times.  I even checked the contents of the cash boxes putting the amount of every type of note and coin into a spreadsheet.  I was as sure as you could be about what each individual container held and how much they added up to.  Today, when I tried to fill in the paying in slip and extract my float, they would not add up at all, but were ten pounds something out, and then twenty, while my eyes began to glaze over and I became thoroughly confused about how much was in the individual piles of coins.  Finally I got there, and my float was not twenty pounds short after all, but by then it was getting late to go to the bank.

Tonight brings more Community Involvement, as it's the beekeepers' monthly club meeting, which this month is about American twentieth century music.  As one of the long-standing members says, when you've been keeping bees for over forty years, it gets a bit dull listening to your umpteenth lecture on feeding for winter.  Twentieth century American music is a vast subject, and while I like quite a lot of it (Missisippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Hedy West, Chicago blues, Philip Glass, Lyle Lovett, Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, the Second South Carolina String Band, and Glenn Miller but only on barbecue nights), I suspect that tonight's lecture is not going to be on any of those.  Like I said, it's a vast subject.