September started off with a "thud". The A Hand Up email account got severely hacked. They not only stole all my addresses, they deleted them all and deleted all my sent mail. They also had redirected all my incoming mail to an account they had set up and stopped all my outgoing mail. Fortunately for me I had recently sent out an Evite to all the people on the A HandUP email list so I was able to recreate a list of email addresses. The bad news is that the att network doesn't bring over the names as well as the email addresses. It's been a laborious process to get all the names and emails re-established. I spent nearly 2 hours on the phone with a very nice tech person at AT&T who helped me get the email all cleaned up before I started setting up the email list again. We're back in business now which is a great thing as we have lots of new university volunteers signing up to help with the deliveries, pick-ups and warehouse clean-up.
The September food distribution was moved to the second Tuesday of the month - the elementary school's "minimum day". The Principal wanted it moved as there would be no conflict with the children and unrelated adults mixing. The change in the date only affected us slightly. The word still got out and we had 172 instead of the usual over 180 families show up for bags of food. We have been buying more and more of the individual grocery carts as the 2 bags of food (more like 4) weigh about 50 lbs and the clients just can't carry all that to their cars. The little carts are a big help. Only problem is the clients all want to use them and we don't have enough and then the line gets long with people waiting for a cart. Always interesting and always something to learn with each distribution.
Any chance we get when the weather cooperates ( not too windy and bright and sunny, perfect beach weather) we try to take advantage and go to the beach. The middle of September was another one of those perfect days. On the way back from Avila Beach we stopped at the Avila Barn where they have a petting zoo and also produce, prepared baked items and preserves. The sheep and all the other animals were happily munching on their dinner of hay that had just been set out for them.
September 30 was the last Monday of the month so guess what it was: Senior Luncheon day at the church. The menu was for spaghetti and meatballs with a salad and cookies. We had a great meal - the veggie alternative was raviolis with sauce and the cookies were ranger cookies - always a hit. Interestingly we had about 60 people signed up but only 45 showed up. Not to worry, the extra all got packaged up and sent home as leftovers for another meal during the week.
For my birthday cousin P&S cooked a wonderful dinner for me - barbecued spare ribs, very long Chinese noodles, kale salad, garlic bread, sauteed mushrooms and I baked my own version of the Rosemary dingdong cake. I think I've got the filling just about perfect. It's a chocolate cake with marzipan cream filling and a ganache frosting. It was all very delicious. I was especially impressed as P&S had had a housefull of company all weekend and still had the energy to prepare a wonderful meal.
T and I went out to dinner the next night to the Sea Venture with a generous gift card from brother M&O. We treated ourselves to a superb meal - that was two nights in a row. Time to work off some of those extra calories.
The Cypress Ridge Women's Golf group has a tournament every year to raise funds for cancer at our local hospital. Each year they raise more money. They always have a light finger food "breakfast" for the golfers (all ladies) but this year many of the usual baking contributors were out of town and didn't think to bake ahead and freeze things. I ended up making 4 items. Two of the items are requested every year - so it's a no brainer - French toast muffins and what I call Golfer's Gorp - basically my reindeer food. Then I made some brownie brittle, hashbrown, sausage, egg and cheese tarts. I always love it when folks tell me what they want as it takes away half the decision making process and then I just have to make whatever.
We received a $2500 grant from PG&E to buy reusable grocery bags for the food distribution. Each month we give away 360 bags and about half of them come back the next month. We were always worried about running out of bags. One of the team leaders talked to a friend at PG&E and she wrote a grant request to get us bags. They really came through. We could get them for .50 a piece at Walmart. We bit the bullet and bought all of them and now they are neatly stored in one of the leader's 3rd garages in 200 bag boxes. What a sight! It is so nice not to have to worry about whether we will have enough bags. The October distribution was sort of a pre-Thanksgiving distributio with 12 lb turkeys for everyone, yams, potatoes, cranberry sauce, tomato juice and a whole bunch of other things. The word got out and we ran out of food at about 5:45 about 15 minutes early.
That same night we had tickets for Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Band along with Edie Brickell. It was a great concert but boy were we cold. When the sun set in Paso Robles it went down to the low 50s right away. Fortunately we had our woolies (hats, coats, gloves, scarves) a little like going to a football game.
Any chance we get when the weather cooperates ( not too windy and bright and sunny, perfect beach weather) we try to take advantage and go to the beach. The middle of September was another one of those perfect days. On the way back from Avila Beach we stopped at the Avila Barn where they have a petting zoo and also produce, prepared baked items and preserves. The sheep and all the other animals were happily munching on their dinner of hay that had just been set out for them.
September 30 was the last Monday of the month so guess what it was: Senior Luncheon day at the church. The menu was for spaghetti and meatballs with a salad and cookies. We had a great meal - the veggie alternative was raviolis with sauce and the cookies were ranger cookies - always a hit. Interestingly we had about 60 people signed up but only 45 showed up. Not to worry, the extra all got packaged up and sent home as leftovers for another meal during the week.
For my birthday cousin P&S cooked a wonderful dinner for me - barbecued spare ribs, very long Chinese noodles, kale salad, garlic bread, sauteed mushrooms and I baked my own version of the Rosemary dingdong cake. I think I've got the filling just about perfect. It's a chocolate cake with marzipan cream filling and a ganache frosting. It was all very delicious. I was especially impressed as P&S had had a housefull of company all weekend and still had the energy to prepare a wonderful meal.
T and I went out to dinner the next night to the Sea Venture with a generous gift card from brother M&O. We treated ourselves to a superb meal - that was two nights in a row. Time to work off some of those extra calories.
The Cypress Ridge Women's Golf group has a tournament every year to raise funds for cancer at our local hospital. Each year they raise more money. They always have a light finger food "breakfast" for the golfers (all ladies) but this year many of the usual baking contributors were out of town and didn't think to bake ahead and freeze things. I ended up making 4 items. Two of the items are requested every year - so it's a no brainer - French toast muffins and what I call Golfer's Gorp - basically my reindeer food. Then I made some brownie brittle, hashbrown, sausage, egg and cheese tarts. I always love it when folks tell me what they want as it takes away half the decision making process and then I just have to make whatever.
We received a $2500 grant from PG&E to buy reusable grocery bags for the food distribution. Each month we give away 360 bags and about half of them come back the next month. We were always worried about running out of bags. One of the team leaders talked to a friend at PG&E and she wrote a grant request to get us bags. They really came through. We could get them for .50 a piece at Walmart. We bit the bullet and bought all of them and now they are neatly stored in one of the leader's 3rd garages in 200 bag boxes. What a sight! It is so nice not to have to worry about whether we will have enough bags. The October distribution was sort of a pre-Thanksgiving distributio with 12 lb turkeys for everyone, yams, potatoes, cranberry sauce, tomato juice and a whole bunch of other things. The word got out and we ran out of food at about 5:45 about 15 minutes early.
That same night we had tickets for Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Band along with Edie Brickell. It was a great concert but boy were we cold. When the sun set in Paso Robles it went down to the low 50s right away. Fortunately we had our woolies (hats, coats, gloves, scarves) a little like going to a football game.
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