A MESSAGE FROM OUR SENIOR WARDEN

I hope everyone has had a restful and quiet week. No worries about upcoming Bazaars or Bluegrass Festivals should have kept any of us awake this past week, so I'm hoping everyone is getting back to normal with just the usual routine things to worry about. Looking back, I would have to say that this past October was really one for the books at St. Mary's! Who would have anticipated that our Bazaar would run for two weeks? But looking at the results, that particular decision certainly worked to our advantage with a very nice payoff for an extraordinary amount of hard work by many, many people. Once again, my sincere thanks to Sandy Bedard and Gail Voorhes for chairing this annual event. Your efforts cannot be applauded enough. Everyone involved in any way with the Bazaar really went above & beyond in all the effort that was put forth to make this year's sale such an huge success. On behalf of St. Mary's, my thanks to all of you. Your contribution is a huge part of our ability to remain financially viable, and it is a wonderful example of how many hands, working together, create a successful church.

The 9th Annual Bluegrass Festival has come and gone. We met last evening to "debrief" and talk about how we thought things went, and what we want to do in the future. As our faithful leader, Rob Lewallen, asked, "Did you all have fun?" The response was unanimous-we did! And according to the feedback we received from guests, bands, and other participants, everyone else did too. While we don't have a final financial picture, we think we at least managed to break even. We know that we "over bought & undersold"! But these are lessons learned from any undertaking the first time around. A lot of things are now in place and won't have to be done again, and since the committee really feels like we would like to do this again next year, much of the basic groundwork has already been completed to make that happen. Many thanks are in order for all of the work that the committee did, as well as all of the help provided by the volunteers. We heard many comments about how organized everything seemed to be, and while we certainly experienced a few glitches along the way, we've learned from our missteps, and we know what we need to do to make things better. It was a great day, we all did have a lot of fun, and we hope you did too. Thank you so much for all you did to make this event a success and to help put St. Mary's on the map!

The B.C. did not meet in October due to so many other things going on, so I would like to meet a week early in November on the second Tuesday which I think is November 13th. We'll meet at 6 pm, our usual time, so please let me know if this doesn't work for you or you can't be there.