At last night’s meeting Hingor Chung was our guest speaker and spoke about her involvement with children and multicultural issues and experiences. She focused on Taiwan and spoke of her many cultural experiences both there and in Tasmania.

Paul, Tracy, Warwick, Anita, Jill and Jeremy cleaned up rubbish in the area from under the Bowen Bridge (Eastern Shore side) to the where the road pokes out into the Derwent River. It is only 300 metres but it took the six of us nearly 3 hours to run out of the special rubbish bags. We started from under the Bowen Bridge and worked our way around and we were a little optimistic in hoping to get to foreshore of Saundersons Road (1.5 kms away).

Amongst the many bottles, cans and plastic wrapping we found a mattress, a dozen or so tyres, the innards of a tv set, and a microwave. We only found two syringes. Along the foreshore we found a lone penguin.

Afterward we took the recyclables to Glenorchy and the general waste to the Mornington tip (200 kilograms worth). Great work everyone. Most of us celebrated by having a BBQ at Tracy’s place.

Paul & Tracy cleaning up near Bowen Bridge

Tonight’s guest speaker was Helen Ransom from Perfect Crime Music.  She gave an entertaining talk on the history of the Falls Festival and of some of the event management issues she has dealt with over its many years.  There may be some fundraising opportunities for our club in the future.

The club now has its very own projector.  Paul brought it to tonight’s meeting.  It now resides at Warwick’s place.

Today Kate held a pancake lunch at her place. It was well attended (11 people) and the $100 raised will go to Uniting Care. We were introduced to Kate’s new puppy, Mr Darcy, who was quite well behaved. We even had a balloon popping competition that was convincingly won by Grace.

As we had no guest speaker Brett & Carmen showed us their wedding photo’s.  They have been married for 5 years and have two children who they regularly bring along to our meetings.

Several of our club helped with the ticket collection at the Briggs Athletics Classic on Friday 12th February.   We started our roster from 4pm and we finished around 8pm.

It was not as busy as the All Schools and Youth Athletics Championships in December last year but it was very busy at times.

Kate, Paul, Warwick, Phil, Belinda, Brett, Carmen, and Anita went to the Rotary Annual Giving Day which was held at Lovely Banks (Melton Mowbray).  The weather was terrific and the we all had fun.  Our club gave $1,000 to Rotary Foundation and the total given and pledged came to just under $70,000.  Thanks to Kate from bringing the wine

Nick Brown from Tasmania Police (and Jill’s husband) was our guest speaker at last night’s meeting. He gave us a run down on the recent changes in the road rules and penalties. Most of these changes occurred from November 2009. He also showed us the drug swap test, which sum of our club thought was a pregnancy test.

We had Julia Fassina from Royal Life Saving Society as a guest speaker at our club last night. She provided a good overview of the organisation (almost 100 years old) and of the services they provide. An interesting item she brought along was the “First Aid in a Box”. This enables people to learn first aid in their own time, very useful.