Good tidings and a wondrous New Year,

It was nothing short of shock and awe that I felt as I entered our meeting chambers at The Forum, sighting our Seneschal in her stunningly regal gown, bejeweled and bedecked about. The gown was quite fitting considering the gift of Christmas from her loving husband, Jonas, of the large handmade oak high-backed chair. All she lacked was a scepter to complete the appearance of a Baroness in training.

She opened the meeting with several announcements including a pending donation from the town's marketplace of Wall Mart, a deal that is still in-work so nothing much more to say.

She has asked all officers to develop awards for various things within our shire, annual, seasonal, or special. Please get this information to her before the next Officer's Meeting.

The Traditions document is in its finalization stage, with the expectation of being delivered to the populace by the next business meeting.

On that note, she further noted the note that our meeting locations will be moving within the Forum from month to month. So please, pay attention to email announcements, our website, or our Yahoo site for updates before each meeting.

Our feisty seneschal, not wanting to be outdone by anyone within arms reach asked for a quick show of hands who think we should support the upcoming "Raid or Trade" event. It passed unanimously. Now, she is looking for volunteers… The discussion turned to what capacity we might help with, and most seemed to feel "event troll" was a good fit.

Lillies, the Calon War, will occur from 11 to 20 June. Our seneschal and co-seneschal will be in attendance the entire week. She has asked that if you plan to attend for any part of the week, to please let her know as soon as possible so ground space can be reserved for you.

She then announced that two local events will occur this year for No Mountain, one in the spring and one in the fall. However, for either, she is looking for an autocrat. If you feel you would like to autocrat, that is, organize and direct the event, please let her know. Matthias volunteered to Autocrat the Spring event and was approved on the spot. She is also fondly interested in why you would want to do such a thing, so please let her know it had nothing to do with me forcing you to do it...

With that, our herald, Shamus Thornton of Blackshire, conducted the affairs of the meeting in formality. He turned the floor over to Kathleen for Dance discussions.

Kathleen announced that presently the Harris Center hall we have been using is booked by us for dance practice, but, that we need to be flexible as the school year progresses. Things may need to change as time passes. She will try to keep us as informed as she can.

Shamus then called for Matthias to entertain the people of No Mountain with his many discourses. And Matthias, not wanting to let anyone down, discoursed greatly. First, he needs membership card information from everyone (membership number, type, etc..) Then he announced he would be in great need of help for the event he had just volunteered for this spring. He's looking for an event name, theme, location, etc… He then discoursed on the dissed course the school demo is taking, asking me presently not to say "I told ya' so," which I did not. The demo at this time is "up in the air" as he put it.

As a matter of fact, Matthias is in need of valiant volunteers for many things… He needs them for demos. He needs them for a membership and recruitment committee… And mentioned needing them for a fund raising committee. Now, I don't know if you realize this or not, but the list of addressees on this missive is relatively small… So, if you don't appear on one of these committees, I'll bet something went wrong somewhere.

Lastly, he suggested he was going to research the possibility of us acquiring a person to fill in as Shire Reeve (or keeper of the calendar). It was mentioned that at this time, three of us are maintaining the calendar on the Yahoo website. Please see that calendar in the near future for shire events, meetings, etc…

Adelhaide (mka Beth) was then called by Shamus to artistically challenge the shire. She invited everyone to attend and support our seneschal's entry of Bobbin Lace at the Queen's Prize Tournament on January 31st in Shadowdale (Iowa City). Thursday, 22 January, she will host the A&S meeting at House d'Stirkland from 7 to 10 pm. Please bring sewing machines as she will be organizing the inventory and repair of loaner garb. And lastly, she is actively taking part in the development of the A&S section of our new webpage, and is in need of ideas and original research work.

Willem (mka Lee) was then introduced to discuss the needs of the Chirurgeon. He still needs input from several people on allergies and medical needs. Please, let's not have another month go by without him having it. He is looking into providing official CPR lessons for the group, and is looking at possibly a very low group cost. Let him know as soon as possible if you'd like to attend. I know that Adelhaide, Karina, and myself would like to attend…

Bastion (mka Jon) was asked to provide us with treasury information, and announced that we currently have $614.37 on account. He also mentioned that the Kingdom "was okay" with our purchase of the website. He said we have been approved as well to use funds to fund a fund raising fun event, fundamentally, of course. On that note, he made it known that "If you wanna' fight, let me know." I'm not sure if he was looking for a fight over the funding, or recruiting fighters for our shire… But, he gave me a clue by persisting with his need to have everyone's armor ready by the end of winter. Questions from the floor on archery will be addressed and answered by the next meeting.

Lastly, I was called from my cryptic note-keeping, to provide wisdom to the shire on the act of webbery. Our website is coming along quite nicely. If you are interested, please review the site at www.nomountain.org … We have up to 60 email addresses, 250 meg of space, and up to about 2 gig of bandwidth. I'm not sure what any of that means beyond the fact that we have finally arrived. I am looking for content from everyone, no exceptions, to fill our part of cyberspace, and a large part it is. I expect most big pictures will remain on the Yahoo site, with links from our website to those… Beyond that, the sky is the limit with this web thing. (I think Spiderman said that… ooops, wrong period)

All being said and now done, Shamus Thornton now and for the time, closed the meeting at the beckoning of our duly titled "feisty" Seneschal. In adjournment, we snacked on snacks she and Jonas provided. Our thanks to our benevolent Seneschal.

In service, and on time for a change,

Timothy d'Stirkland
Chronicler
spinner@nomountain.org