PRESIDENT’S REPORT-February – March 2023:
2022 is history- it’s been and gone, together with Covid 19 restrictions. Our Christmas and New Year celebrations are over. Some of us may have over indulged in the festivities but why not? After all, it’s only once a year! I trust everyone had plenty of family time and that you will welcome the New Year with vigour and enthusiasm. What will happen in 2023? If we look in some retail outlets they are displaying Easter eggs and Hot cross buns even though April and Easter are months away!
Looking back, our last monthly meeting was on December 6th and was chaired by Vice president John Courtney and Assistant Secretary Debb Schiller. Liz and I thank you.
On behalf of the club (and in particular those who attended), a big thank you goes to Brenda Cowie and her helpers who organised and conducted our Club Christmas Party on December 11th.
Also thanks to John and Vicki Courtney for hosting our first club event for 2023, the annual pizza night on January 13th at their home.
On a personal note Liz and I had a great, although tiring time for 2 weeks with our kids and grandkids at the beach. Our 2 eldest grandsons who are both 16 and on learners permits had many driving lessons in automatic cars with power steering. I told them they aren’t qualified to drive unless they can drive a manual transmission car with either a floor or column shift and lessons will begin very soon. They retaliated by challenging me to play a game which required pressing my thumbs on the screen of their I-phone. Fortress is what they called it and was more frustrating than challenging. The one thing that was realised during our holiday was that there are alternatives to screen time. The grandkids learnt that crabbing at night with a spotlight was good fun and snorkelling on the reef at low tide to catch crabs and finding treasures such as old bottles and brass boat rudders that had broken off when boats hit the reef, was much more interesting than staring at a screen!
There is an old adage “all good things come to an end” and so it was with our sojourn to the beach. Those two grandsons had to be back at their respective homes to report for their school holiday jobs, one at a café in the Adelaide Hills and one at Drakes supermarket in Murray Bridge. They now have their own bank accounts and credit cards. Credit cards at 16 years old! I am told that money-that is “cash money” will be phased out within 10 years! Soon the grandsons will be saving for a car and a girlfriend but not necessarily in that order as one grandson is already “girl friendly”. I have told them that girlfriends could be more costly than a car! I’m simply trying to be helpful.
So it was back to Murray Bridge and our normal routine. On the drive home we reflected on our beach holiday and there were times when we all experienced “cabin fever” with thirteen people and a couple of dogs under the same roof for 2 weeks, but it was all good fun and we will all have many great memories.
Let’s enjoy 2023!
Claude