Saturday morning I went to a Gaeltacht Minnesota workshop on Irish verbs. This went well but was very intense. WK, GM’s leader (I don’t know what official title, if any, he has) ran it with assistance from Máire, who teaches my class.

However, I could not stay until the end, having to attend colgaffneyis Board and Membership meeting a couple miles away. mairi2, aka Prezzy-Wezzy presided, as usual. The big official events were the election of new staff (See this entry in mia_mcdavid‘s LJ) and the issue of the trailer. The long term solution to the latter has not yet been decided, but we did make a start. HL will repair the current trailer and get it out of twolodge‘s driveway.

I hope to shed some of my colgaffneyis responsibilities before too long. At the meeting I found a suckervolunteer to rewrite the website. I inherited this about 1 1/2 years ago when the previous webmaster disappeared. There was no documentation, so this has been a big headache for me.

After the meeting we stopped for a while at the Lynlake Rockler Woodworking; Mia had brought along an old spinning wheel and wanted to discuss its maintenance and possible refinishing. I was quite impressed by the staff at Rockler: They were very interested and spent a lot of time discussing Mia’s concerns. We then went home, showered and changed, and drove back to south Minneapolis for a lovely and tasty formal dinner at the home of c_nocturnum and her husband.

Mia left early to pick up Tom from his home and the three of us met up at Church. Tom did OK there. It was the observance of All Saint’s Day (transferred from Nov. 1), and they had several fine hymns for the occasion. Also, the grandson of a good friend was baptized. I have no idea what Tom was making of all this, but he watched a lot of it quite intently.

A disagreeable part of the morning was to find that the cars in the church parking lot had been leafletted to urge people to vote for the “pro-life” (Republican) candidates. I reported this to the Rector, who quite disturbed by it. I am confident it was not done by anybody in the parish–the Evangelical Church accross the road to the north is a much more likely source. I doubt it will influence any of our parishioners to vote that way. The opposite effect is more likely.

After church we had lunch with Tom (just Burger King) then I took him back to his group home without Mia. This accomplished two things

1. It helped accustomed Tom to the idea that I would visit him without Mia, the need for which had been demonstrated two weeks ago.
2. It spared Mia another round trip to South Minneapolis. Four in one weekend is enough.

I taped the The Woodwright’s Shop on Saturday and watched the episode yesterday. Roy had a guest on to demonstrate making Windsor chairs. Some of the process involves spindle turning, and Roy proved to be a good host there: He drove the lathe treadle while letting his guest do the actual woodworking.

I learned something else about his guest, and several other prominent traditional woodworking practioners: They give classes in Central America. In some non-electrified parts of the world their skills can really make a difference.