Sunday 13 February 2011

Is it the 13th already?

Here we are, nearly halfway through the month and already I'm falling behind. One of the small service activities undertaken by Brighton Lions Club is to send a letter or postcard to a lad discovered by our twin club in Maryland. Joe has cerebral palsy and we drop him a line every month in the hope that we might bring a little cheer into his life. I say "we" but it is actually "me". I have been doing this job for a couple of years now and nobody else is willing to take it on so I suppose I will have to keep on doing it. I usually try to write during the first week of the month but this month I seem to have been busy with other projects. I haven't even made a start on the next issue of Jungle Jottings, the monthly newsletter of the aforesaid Lions Club. There again, I usually manage to get started fairly early in the month and by the time our business meeting comes around on the third Wednesday (which is in only three days' time) it is pretty much finished.

What has been taking time is the production of large-print bingo cards. Once again I'm talking Lions matters and anyone reading this could be forgiven for thinking that my life is Lions, Lions and more Lions. Far from it, I assure you. There is much more to my life than Brighton Lions Club. It's just that the last couple of weeks seem to have been filled rather more than usual with matters Lionistic.

These bingo cards are for a blind people's social club for which Brighton Lions regularly provide transport. Like an idiot, I suggested to the organiser that a bingo session might go down well. What transpired was that she fixed a session during a fund-raising evening next month and I have the job of producing some 200-250 large-print bingo cards. I discovered that these can be bought, but the largest I have found are A5 size and I want to produce something in A4, ie twice as big. So I purloined some of the standard bingo cards the Lions use and have started copying them in large format. This involves setting a table to fill the sheet of A4 paper and typing in the appropriate numbers - 250 times! (They must each be different for some technical reason I can't explain.) This is all taking rather longer than I expected. But, hey ho, once it's done I will have those cards on computer to print off again at any time.

1 comment:

#1Nana said...

There are always a few Lions who are the goto people...the ones who take on the projects and make sure that they are done. I bet you are one of those people for your club. I try not to be one in our club. If all of our members were a little more active, it would lift the burden of responsibility from the few in our club who step up, project after project. I enjoy Lions and believe in our mission, but it is easy to burn out on the mundane tasks when there isn't enough support.