Productive Day at Elderberry!!

A beautiful fall day today!  The leaves have mostly abandoned the trees and the pasture across the little valley is emerging as our winter view from the Common House.

We started the day with coffee, fruit and donut holes, and came up with some great ideas for celebrating the 100th birthday of one of our residents in December.  Then we headed out to work!  Most of us worked on the path to the newest homes, and made great progress.  A few people learned how to fix a plumbing problem, and a few others planned and roto-tilled a new bed for herbs near the common house.

Then we headed in for our business meeting where we finalized our 2016 budget.  Lots of very great projects have been funded!  After all the work we've done over the last month on budget stuff, we decided that most of the meeting should be dedicated to FUN.  So we did an exercise where we all wrote something we've done that might surprise others to learn, and then tried to figure out who wrote what.  Pretty educational..... and hilarious.

After the meeting we enjoyed a tasty dinner prepared by chefs Kelly and Meg and we left a singing telegram for a member whose birthday could not be celebrated as planned tonight because she had to go to a work meeting.  But a highlight of the evening was that one of our members, who loves to carve walking sticks, brought in enough of them for all of us to choose one!  They are lovely!  And perfect to walk the 100+ acres of trails adjacent to our community.

Long and wonderful day!

 Pat and Joyce working on the path to Mara and Joan's houses

 Riley, being Riley

 Vonda - is she laughing or crying.... or praying???

 Pam tilling for a new garden

 Cecil working on his and Vonda's house

 Pat and Rosemarie moving the base gravel

 Jeff and Dick moving the Chapel Hill gravel

Jeff and Rosemaire - Team Gravel Moving!

 Joyce - doing the precision work

 All of the path-builders!

 Vonda working on a puzzle at the common house. She didn't want me to take this photo because she said people think puzzles are old-person activities (and she's not old, of course). But hey - they're fun!

 Checking out all the walking sticks that Dick made

 Hard to see in the photos, but there were many different and beautiful woods used to make these - all gathered from his daily walks on the trails here (and quite a few contributed by beavers)

Everyone with their beautiful walking sticks!!