GA, Monday

Quick, think of the longest, most boring meeting you've ever sat through. Now, double the length, but turn it around into a deeply meaningful, hilarious and wildly productive work session.

That's what today's LREDA Board meeting was like. Long. Deep, and a lot of fun.

We had reports from or about 20 committees and groups. We had reports from most of the board members about their specific "portfolios" or areas of responsibility: the treasurer, administrator, president, LREDA Fall Conference specialist, the General Assembly professional days specialist and the combined work on the Fahs lecture. There were so many details we could have spent hours on each item, but there is a full day of material to cover tomorrow. We had to keep going. Funny thing is, it never felt like we were in a rush, everything is valued and these amazing people remember during each minute just how important it is to support all Religious Educators in all sizes of congregations all across the Unitarian Universalist faith.

But there were some funny moments. In an effort to reduce paper many of us tried to read those 20 reports from emails sent over the last few weeks....with our laptops in front of us it sometimes looked like we were a table full of rabble rousers in a coffee shop trying to boss each other around. "I sent it last Tuesday, check last Tuesday's email" and trying to access google docs en masse with an odd patchwork of permissions to do so--then watching the numbers magically change before our eyes as someone else modified the document. At one point someone stuck their head in our little room--and there was Gini Courter giving us merciless grief because hotel staff had tried to deliver our extra chairs to her room at dawn-thirty.

There are great things happening, so much action and good work.

And there was also dinner out with our Board.


(front row: Anne Bancroft, me, Jennifer Halperin. back row: Kathy Seggel, Millie Rochester, Patti Withers and Cindy Leitner, not pictured: Lori Allen)
Yes, it does king of feel like flying, but not so scary because someone is holding on. It's good.