Next Meeting: Tuesday, October 2 -NEW TIME! 7:00 AM - New Place! Sheraton Hotel. That's at the corner of John Nolen Drive and Rimrock Road, at dawn, 0700 hours, right up the street from MELISSA NOVINSKI'S office. It will be a Project Meeting, at which we will have discussion and plans for the project of the month, which will be the agenda for all of these First Tuesday meetings from here on out. The plan is to end the meeting at 8:00 sharp. So the editor can go back to bed, and everybody else can go to work.

Our last meeting at the Edgewater had 18 people attending, almost double the previous week. That's a good start. Summer is over, ready or not, and we need to turn our attention back to Lions. We had the full form opening - Pres. LINDA opened the meeting, Past Pres. JIM SCHUTZ led the song, and Pres. LINDA led the Pledge of Allegiance and gave the invocation. She did let the hotel make the lunch, though, and PADDHE HEINEN made cookies for dessert. GWEN MUELLER was the only guest.

LINDA (who else?) handed out the Holiday Treat Sale order blanks. We have the usual - nuts, trail mix, chocolate coated nuts & berries, granola, fruit cake, etc. We must order in case lots, and so LINDA has to juggle the orders to avoid another year of malted milk balls for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Get your order in ASAP, and if she can order by mid-October, the merchandise will be here by mid-November. Get your order blanks from LINDA or on our web site order form.

That's not the only important project on our web site. SCOTT GROVER reminded us that the UW Basketball season is not far off, and we again are the lead Club in staffing a concession stand at the Kohl Center. Signup sheets are on the web - the more workers our Club can supply, the more money we get for our Service Funds. Some service, like eye tissue transport, we can do ourselves, but if we're going to reach out a helping hand to earthquake or tsunami victims half a world away, it does the most good if it has money in it. Speaking of transport, September is one of our Club's months on duty, and JIM SCHUTZ is filling in as dispatcher while JIM KEMMETER is laid up.

We hear that our former Club Treasurer, MELISSA ABBOTT (BESKE), who went off to NYC and got married, is expecting, and we offer our best wishes for this exciting time for the couple. She's on Facebook and LinkedIn, if you want to keep in touch.

Lion PHIL STOWITTS made it to our meeting, not without difficulty. We were glad to see him, and it turned out that his effort was rewarded, as he was presented a Certificate and special Lion pin in honor of his 25 years of Lion service. Used to be called an Old Monarch award, but I guess International doesn't want to age any of us prematurely.

Lion WALT PRIDHAM, also present for our final EdgeH2O meeting, was also honored. His Certificate and pin were for 30 years of Lion service!

Our speaker was Steve Keip, Catering Director for the hotel, and the only non-Lion to whom our Club has given a Melvin Jones fellowship, honoring all of the help he has given us on our projects. He briefly reviewed some of them, centering mostly on the exotic stuff he has stored in his office during our sales. He did, however, decline the editor's offer of a fruitcake for a cornerstone for the new building. He's one of the aspects of the Edgewater that our Club will deeply miss. Among other things, the editor will recall it as having the only elevator which has a "Close" button which actually made the door shut.

This was the 8th time the editor had been at a final meeting at a venue - Edgewater, Park and Loraine hotels, Carson Gulley and Simon House restaurants, Howard Johnson (now Doubletree) motel and another one on W. Washington Ave,. and the Elks Club. We have been thrown out of more places than Lindsay Lohan. We've also met at the Forest Products Lab, Olbrich Gardens and the Camp Randall Press Box, which was certainly the high point of that year. There are probably more that others may remember. The Board of Directors used to meet at a different restaurant every month, which got the editor into places he never otherwise would have been, especially during the year when ALEX WONG was Lion Tamer. Making those arrangements was the main duty of the Lion Tamer, an oddly-named office which we no longer have.