Back In The Swing

[Eamonn]

After the break for the holidays it seems that everything is happening all at once. While there is no real break, we have held the weekly key3 meetings. Even if one of them was a dinner meeting at my favorite french restaurants and we spend more time working on the menu then we did on the district. There has been one round table meeting but all in all things have been a little slow. Until this week. Then BAM - 3 meetings in 3 days. Last night was the Council Annual Meeting. A good meeting with seven new Executive Board Members voted on to the board.

While there was a lot of business covered the high point for me was that each of the three Eagle Scouts who were awarded a scholarship from the council for writing an essay got to read what they had wrote. These were three really fine young men. They are are credit to our council and to Scouting.When you see and hear young men like this you want to climb on the highest rooftop and blow raspberries at all those who knock or put Scouting down.

Tonight was the first District Committee Meeting of the new year. I was expecting some doom and gloom. We had failed to make Quality District in 2003 and some of the goals for 2004 are going to really put us to the test. I opened the meeting with something that Red Feather had posted about Frogs in the Scoutmaster Minute section. It kind of set the pace for a very upbeat meeting. Heck I even passed out the Disrict FOS cards and we blew that goal out of the water. We worked our way through a very heavy agenda. No one even complained when we ran twenty-five minutes over. I was amazed that some of the committees had already met and were reporting all kinds of neat stuff and great ideas. Sometimes being the District Chair. Is fun.

There is another meeting tomorrow a community FOS kick off. Our District has been chosen to make a presentation of how to run a community campaign. Maybe due to the fact that we were the only District to reach all of these goals last year. Our Community Chair is a wonderful chap.

So 2004 is now up and running. Tonight I feel that it is going to be a outstanding year. How long will the feeling last? I don't know. Maybe if I keep reminding myself that a Scout is cheerful it could last 345 days.

Eamonn