Catching Up

As you may have noted, I have been remiss in writing much for the last few days. It has been an interesting week here abouts. Some of the things keeping me occupied include a spring blizzard, judging a contest, getting the notes for a committee to form an ambulance district done and ...

Tuesday was my last post and I was still a bit rushed. So here is where the time for the rest of the week went.

On Wednesday I did the radio show in the morning and then took care of some things between meetings. I still had the meeting notes from the preliminary meeting Monday of the EMS ambulance district campaign and finance group to put together and get distributed. (We are looking at forming a county wide EMS district. That effects us all and it in particular is something I can't be too involved with. The problem is that ambulance service is a responsibility of the county under the IGA's (Inter Governmental Agreements) between the city and the county. The county has been subsidizing a private ambulance service for years. The private service cannot survive on what the county can/will subsidize, so we need to form a county wide district that is a taxing entity to make sure we have the service.) The problem is that the county commissioners cannot be involved since they have to approve the operational plan before the ballot issue can even be considered for inclusion. Since the county would no longer be fulfilling a part of the IGAs, that drags the city in since we will have to set up new terms in the IGAs. Thus I have a secondary conflict of interest and cannot be heavily involved in the effort. So I agreed to chair the introductory meeting and then turn it over to whom ever was selected as chairperson.. That meeting was Monday night and I just today finally got through putting out the meeting notes and turning it all over to the new chairperson. (One item off the must do list.) And I also had to do some grocery shopping for Mom as well.

It turned cold and blowy here late Wednesday, and then went on to be a full scale blizzard Thursday. In fact it was a full scale spring blizzard that closed schools and roads throughout the region.  It snowed and blew for most of the day, so i didn't have to go out and shovel snow until Friday morning. It looked like this in the middle of the day (around noon) during the storm:

 

Needless to say, the days of 80 degrees we enjoyed less than a week prior were but a memory. It continued all day. Mom called and said don't bother coming over to bring in her paper and mail, just stay in out of he wind and snow. Another view out onto the back patio before we go:

At least it meant we got some much needed moisture at long last.

Friday I got up early and started shovelling the snow. I did our house, MIL's house, and Mom's house, then hurried home an got cleaned up for some more meetings. One meeting was with the parson from Prison Ministries because I am a panelist and speaker at their fund raising diner in April. He wanted to go over the questions that will be posed to the panelists so we can have our acts together. It should be an interesting panel since it will have the sheriff, the chief of police, the associate warden of the prison, myself, and a couple of ex-offenders. Maybe I'll post the questions here after the event. Then I had a meeting with our tax accountant to get our information turned over so it can be totalled. Along the way, I ran into the auditor doing the annual city audit and that took up a bit of time since the audit report is almost done and will be presented at a ouncil meeting in the next month. (I also had to tell him how cute his daughter was at the Girl Scout proclamation presentation from here. He reported that his daughter wanted to stay for the whole meeting and that they had come to the areement that his daughter could attend with him when he presents the audit report. We'll see if she finds it as interesting after sitting through the whole shebang. {*grin*})

In the mean time, I have been trying to get all the essays for the "If I Were Mayor" essay contest read. The Colorado Municipal League sponsors a statewide contest and we sponsor a local one with the winners going on to the state contest. Last year one of our students was a winner. We select the winner by panel. The panel consists of me, the city manager, and my writer friend. It is going slower for me this year since I don't perceive the same quality of writing that I saw last year. (You can read a bit more about our local version here.) Only about ten more essays  to go before we start comparing notes to home in on the winners. (BTW, the topic this year is:

Many youth are not aware of the valuable services that their municipalities (cities and towns) provide: bike paths, recreation centers, police officers, street lights,and crosswalks are all provided by municipal governement. If you were mayor, how would you explain the importance of municipal government to kids in your community?

The contest is for 7th graders and we have great participation here.)

So today I have been reading and pondering. I had to be tracked down by the Boy Scout Troop so I could issue the re-charter check. (I am on the committee and the treasurer.) Once that was handled, it was time to get cleaned up and head over to Mom's for supper and a round of "Can you get ...?" and "Can you move ...?" and ... Mom is feeling good and doing well - I have my doubts about how cantankerous she might be by the time she gets to go out in the world, but for right now it is going pretty well.

I promise to try to be more regular in the coming days. Thank you all for your emails and calls of concern. It's OK, I just had a bit too many things to do for a span there. I haven't even had time to do the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle yet!