in meetings

We had a beekeepers' committee meeting here this evening.  At the moment beekeeping meetings seem to be a weekly fixture, what with the Show Committee and the 2016 Conference Committee on top of the main committee and the monthly club meeting.  I have begun to loose track of the rationale of why which meetings were held where, but think this one ended up in my sitting room because we were bumped out of the hall we'd been using by the Parish Council, which had switched to a different Monday this month because of the bank holiday.

Wearing my Treasurer's hat I was anyway disturbed by the rate at which I was having to write cheques out for meeting rooms.  When members fork out for their strips of raffle tickets at the club meeting I imagine they intend the proceeds to go towards activities everybody can join in with, rather than the committee members sitting down in a series of meeting rooms.  And as fund raising efforts go, I would rather offer the hospitality of my house for a couple of hours than spend a day making cakes or candles that might or might not sell at a country show, since at least this way I get the spin-off benefit of having cleaned the house instead of having to take home slices of cake that have sat in a tent all day.

It must be the warmer weather, for the committee members like the cats are not eating so much as they did when it was colder, and there is quite a lot of cake left over.  It's just as well that yesterday, at the point when I was going to make some biscuits for us after doing the cakes for the beekeepers, I found that I'd run out of self raising flour and caster sugar.  As it is we shall be feasting on leftovers for several days, but fortunately the honey and sultana cake keeps fairly well.

Our Ginger was delighted with the committee meeting and came and sat on several laps, in between lying on his front on the hearthrug and snoring, and lying on his back on the hearthrug and purring.  He loves visitors, especially when they are sitting down and not paying him too much overt attention, what with all those lap-clambering opportunities at his discretion, and a room full of seated people being unlikely to tread on him.  The short indignant tabby loathes strangers, and went and shouted at the Systems Administrator in the study before stomping off into the garden.  She didn't reappear until three quarters of an hour after the coast was clear, just to be on the safe side, and was so overcome with emotion that she climbed on to the arm of my chair and purred. The short indignant tabby never, ever sits in anybody's lap, and rarely ventures on to a chair, having a sort of latent distrust of furniture, so that was a rare occurrence, a mark of how pleased she was to see the visitors go.

It was a productive meeting, and it sounds as though we are making progress with a potential site for a divisional apiary, which would also allow us the use of meeting rooms for committees.  If so that would be a useful saving, since I think we are paying twenty-eight pounds for the next meeting, which equates to an awful lot of raffle tickets.