It’s time, folks, that I learn to relax with this whole FTCC production thing. And I found out at last Saturday’s meeting that one of the big ways to do this was to learn more about how things like ‘rules’ are defined. In other words, it’s the basic ground rule that I knew but forgot to use: learn the rules so you know when (and how) you can bend them.

Thanks, Mark H., for sharing your knowledge of Society attitudes. Just learning that we could push back the deadline by a couple of weeks was a huge help - because that let us extend the goal for publicity by a whole month. And your ’suggestion’ that we make these organizing and activity meetings more like social gatherings with some business thrown in sounds like a winner to me.

Michael and I are co-chairs this year for a good reason: everybody’s very busy. As you can see, we’re changing the approach already - making the ‘official’ information available on the chapter website so everyone can see it at their convenience (and not have to participate in a mailing list that makes way too many rounds as it is). Hopefully, you all will post comments, ideas, etc. for the rest of us to read (and act upon - operative word here is act, everybody, although positive energy via thought is a nice act in itself).

Thanks to Tom, we’re getting off to a great start. And as he assumed in his initial writeup of action items, we’ve made an executive decision that the $5 increase will happen.

Please keep James in the know with anybody you think might be interested in entering the competition. And if you have any leads on who might be approached for corporate sponsorships - publicity, postage, award costs, awards celebration and so on, please let James know. This is supposed to be a moneymaking event for the chapter, so any help we can get would be terrific and would help us keep our fees down.

Last year we had 13 entrants; in previous years this chapter has had over 100. Now that’s a worthy goal! Maybe this year, maybe next…the more, the merrier - and the bigger the ‘helping hands’ parties!

Later, ‘gators -

P.S. - You know, this is my first time posting, and it’s kind of fun. Thanks, Tom, for helping me learn a new skill!