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).
One of the members asked me today about whether I could tell who has visited our website. The short answer is “no”, but there are some things that I can tell about the visitors — one being what site they visited just before ours, if they came to our site as a result of clicking on a link. I was a bit surprised when I went to the usage logs today and found that the number of site visits per day (which has grown steadily for the past several months) suddenly just about tripled starting just after the 4th of July. A little investigation led me to the KAAM radio website, where I found a link to www.PlanoEarlyLions.ORG prominently displayed on their site (edit: the link is no longer active). The reference link was about their entry in our parade.
Some advertising you just can’t buy. I get the feeling that our club is crossing an important threshold in the Computer Age. You might want to call up the folks at KAAM and thank them for acknowledging our Lions Club.
One thing that I did not emphasize as strongly as I should have at the meeting this morning — this is not *MY* blog, it is *OUR* blog. I can help folks with how to enter stuff here, but there is no way that I can come up with all of the needed meaningful content by myself. If you want to make comments on the blog, or would like to write regular articles, please let me know, and I will set you up and get you started.
Lion Marvel gave us a very moving presentation yesterday. In addition to a bit of conscious-raising with regards to blind people, he posed the challenge to us to think about the sorts of things a blind person could do at our own companies.
In a similar vein, I saw a video of a fiddle-player on YouTube a few weeks ago. He wasn’t really great, but he played reasonably well to an appreciative audience. He had no left arm; he played with the bow stuck between his legs. The miracle wasn’t that he could play the fiddle so well, but that he could play at all.
Got me to thinking… I have two working eyes (not perfect, but they do work well enough), and two working arms (again not perfect, but ok). I have no excuse for not doing the very best that I can with what I have.
July 4th, 2007: The Plano Independence Day Parade went off fantastically well!! Mother Nature held off with the rain until the parade was over. AND THE WINNERS ARE…
Representatives from the winners were on hand at the July 7th meeting to receive their awards.
The parade was estimated to be over 2 miles long! We had lots of good media coverage (some things money just can’t buy!), and a great time was had by all. Now, it’s not too early to think about next year’s parade. We have learned a lot in the first two that we have run, and we can look forward to applying those lessons to make 2008′s parade even better.
We raced in Texarkana the first weekend in June! We got some excellent TV coverage, courtesy of KTBS. Here is a link to the wrap-up video on the KTBS.com site. The webmaster is working on getting copies of the videos.
Mark Marvel presented a program about his outreach program for the blind. Mark went completely blind 6 years ago due to complications of diabetes, and rather than dwell on his handicap, he concentrated on what he could do. Mark is an active Lion (Park Cities Lions Club), among other things — you might have seen his display at the convention. Mark left us with a challenge. If you didn’t get a change to hear his presentation, you will want to ask someone who did about it.
We’ve been invited by Lion Mark Marvel to attend a meeting of a support group for the blind, at First Baptist Church of Plano (1300 E 15th) in the Fellowship Hall. Meeting starts at 6pm, runs to 8pm (you are encouraged to bring food items to snack on and share). The support group meets on the 3rd Thursday of every month.
This is the initial post to the Plano Early Lions Club Roar. This is a place for the members of the club to post information on current events of interest to the club, and any member can comment on the posts. I haven’t quite figured out all the ins & outs of the Blog software we are using (WordPress), but as we go along, I hope to add features that make this a useful forum for the club. If you should find any problems with the Roar site, and I’m sure there will be some initial hiccups, please notify the webmaster.
If you wish to be a blog author, please notify the webmaster.
Only Plano Early Lions Club members will be allowed to add comments on this blog. I have set things up so that all comments are moderated, which means that your comment may not show up for several hours. Once I get all of the members entered into the database, I don’t think that I will need to use the moderation facility.