Plano Early Lions Roar!

David Larrabee, Teacher of the Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing at Plano Senior High, brought several of his students to the March 1st meeting. They gave a presentation about their fund-raising efforts to pay for an educational trip to Washington, D.C., and they ’spoke’ (they signed, and Mr. Larrabee interpreted) about their experiences as hearing-impaired students, and their plans for the future.

Our club voted to give a $2000 grant to their trip fund, which enabled them to commit to the trip. They have agreed to come back and report on what they learned at a (near) future meeting.

It’s kinda hard to put into words the feelings that we experienced interacting with these young students. It was a “you had to be there” kind of moment. Here’s a snapshot I took of the group after the presentation (the ‘glare’ over the head of our illustrious 2nd VP is actually a halo…)

Lion Don Johnson’s mother passed away this week. Please take a bit of time in the coming week to include Lion Don’s family in your thoughts and prayers.

Good to see some participation from the other club members. Please have patience with me while I work out some of the details. One of the things some of you have run into already is that I have set the comments for moderation. The first comment that you enter will be ‘moderated’, so that I can make sure that you are really a member of the club, and not a forum-spammer. After that, the system is supposed to let you post comments without me having to approve them. Let me know if that is not the case!

By the way, anybody that wants author/edit privileges, and is willing to make an occasional post, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to set you up.

Lion Mike Marvel (whom I have mentioned before) gave me a call today, and did me the favor of pointing out a couple of typos on the website. Lion Mike is completely blind — and one of the typos that he found wasn’t even in a part of the site that is normally visible. He uses a program called “Jaws” that reads websites (and other documents) to him, and it picked up on the alternate text for the Lions International logo, which I had typo’d.

So a Lion who is completely blind read our website more thoroughly than the normally-sighted members who have skimmed over it. Ok, as I have put on the front page, you guys have until the first meeting in April 2008 to figure out how to comment on this blog, or get tail-twisted for it every meeting until you do figure it out. Enough of begging for participation; it’s gonna cost you not to, starting in April.

The reason Lion Mike called is that he is working on a website for his club, and he plans to put in a link to us. I have offered to host his club’s site for $12/year (which is a good deal cheaper than the hosting company that they were considering), as long as I didn’t have to do any of the website work. I should mention that I will make the same offer to any other Lions club in District 2X-1. I have enough surplus bandwidth that I should be able to handle 10 to 15 club websites. I currently donate hosting to the Plano Early Lions Club, and any fees I get for hosting other Lions Club sites will go to the PELC Administrative account.

A group of us went to Texarkana last year for the Bulldog 100 — and had a great time. We’re going again this year, and with what we’ve learned from out experience last year, we should be in a good position to recruit some racers for the Plano 5.0 (tentatively scheduled for November, but we’re still negotiating with the manager of the prospective site). So far the Lions that we know are planning to be there include me, Tom, and Gordon. We really need at least 10 members there. It’s the Thursday through Saturday after Memorial Day.

…Or as Lion Tom put it, the Phoenix Rising from the Ashes. We have a very promising lead on a site. The best part is that the site under consideration will greatly reduce our costs and the level of effort we will have to invest. If you want to learn more about this, you are just going to have to come to the BOD meeting on February 16th.

We got a really good presentation on HOBY today from Rich Honiball, who was himself a HOBY alumnus. I’m going to encourage the club to sponsor at least one student to this event this year.

Well, we did it. Another successful parade. This one was a bit more work than the Independence Day Parade, but we also had more folks working, and we were a little better organized. Not perfect, but we did a good job, and we have a list of lessons learned to make future parades even better.

The only thing I really regret is that the members of the club never get to actually SEE the parade. We get there at 5:30 in the morning, get things set up, provide help with parking & the route, and we are there until well after the last float gets all the way to the end, but we never see more than a tiny fraction of the parade. Oh, well, we are here to serve, and it is sufficient that our efforts allow others to see it.

As I have time later this month, I will be posting some pictures that were taken by members and friends. If I can figure out how to do the YouTube thing, I may get to post some videos.

This is going to be a BIG year for our Lions Club. We have established ourselves as the experts for running Parades in the city of Plano, and in addition to hosting the Independence Day Parades from now on, we will be joining forces with the Plano Santas to run the annual Plano Christmas Parade. This has enormous potential for our club.

Our own Lion Tom Siebert is an active member of Plano Santas, and, as an aside, I can personally vouch for the fact that Lion Tom is one of the very best Santas I have ever met.

This year’s Christmas parade will be held on December 1st, which means that we will not be having our regular meeting at Southfork on that Saturday. The second meeting in December is traditionally the Christmas party, so we won’t be having a regular meeting at all in December.

Thanks to Dr. Burket for an entertaining and educational presentation on heart disease this morning. I apologize for letting it go over time, but the presentation definitely struck a chord with the group, and there were lots of questions. Also present was a representative from the Fire Department, who gave a demo of the AED.  I would like to see a group of us sign up for the new CPR training (which now includes take-home study materials on DVD, and a CPR dummy for practice that is yours to keep).