Please advise all apologies by 4.30 pm on the Tuesday prior to the following day’s meeting.After this time you will need to contact the Central Court directly on 5562 8555.
Hole in One.
This year we will be supporting the Rotary Club of Warrnambool East and their Hole in One competition.The plan is to have a hit at the hole in one and then retire to the Lady Bay for lunch.All members, partners and friends welcome.Sunday 20th Jan (time to be confirmed).A big thank you to Les for organising this.
Club Membership Day.
Our Wednesday lunch meeting on Jan 30th will be a membership day.Please consider inviting prospective members that meeting.We will have some guest speakers who will talk about Rotary and our club.
Boggy Creek.
Lindsay Bullivant has kindly organised a social lunch on Sunday 24th Feb at 12.00pm, at the Boggy Creek Hotel.All members, partners and guests are welcome.
Nursing Home Working Bee.
Your help is requested for our working bee on Wed evening.Opal Nursing Home Warrnambool (drive between Mazda and Renault), Wed 16th Jan, 5.30pm, bring a spade or rake if possible.
Sensory Garden.
The club will shortly contribute to the construction of a sensory garden at a local nursing home.I wanted to provide a short explanation to members of the purpose of this garden.
A number of people with advanced dementia reside in the nursing home.This illness deprives people of their ability to form memories.When we get dementia, we typically lose our recent memories but retain our memories from when we were younger.Consequentially, people with advanced dementia often live in a time when they were younger, because they don’t really remember being anything else.The world for them is confusing and frightening; full of people and places that they don’t recognise and that do not make sense.A common recommendation in dementia management is to ‘meet people where they are’.Trying to persuade people with advanced dementia that they are the age and in the place that we think they are is a hopeless and pointless task.
Things that induce memories from when they were younger can be very comforting for people with dementia.Visits from people they knew when they were young, old photos, and old music are all very comforting.Plants with a familiar feel, smell and look like rosemary, mint and lavender can also be very helpful.Simple, familiar tasks like potting plants and pulling out weeds are also often helpful.This is the idea behind the sensory garden.
The power of a good vocabulary.
Central Spoke wordsmith Pip Ritchie reports;
I called an old mate who went to University with me and asked how he was doing.
He replied that at that moment, he was working on “aqua-thermal treatment of ceramics, aluminium and steel, under a constrained environment”.
I was extremely impressed.
However, upon further inquiry, I learned that he was washing dishes with hot water under his wife’s supervision.
Boré’s view.
Our nursing home sensory garden project kicked off with some VCAL students constructing some pine boxes out the back of the nursing home.These boxed are about six foot long, two and a half feet wide and have a reasonable depth to them.To be honest, so far the nursing home residents have not warmed to the project as much as we had hoped.Boré thinks he has worked out why.
We thank Boré for another great cartoon.
p.s. If members would like to know how these ‘planter boxes’ are constructed, I am sure Les could organise a guest speaker to discuss the subject.
Rotary Horse report.
Members who purchased a share in Physicality at our auction two years ago will be feeling fairly pleased this week.The horse ran his first race on Friday and came home with the chocolates after leading for much of the race.Lynchie, who two years ago predicted the horse would win ‘a Cox Plate and a Golden Slipper’, is now talking about ‘a couple of Cox Plates’.Happy days.
Physicality notches up another win for the pink and grey of the Wilde Racing stables.
Titus O’Riely – The worst ideas of 2018.
Bob McMillan reports;
The 18-meter goal square
No idea captured so vividly the AFL’s ‘all new ideas are great ideas’ ethos than the proposed 18-meter goal square. At the exact time, the AFL was trialling it at a VFL game, the game in its current forms was putting on one of its best rounds ever.
Such was the outrage over the unnecessary tinkering that the AFL Commission rejected it, finally listening to the fans. Instead, they got rid of the need to kick the ball to yourself to play on after behinds and moved the man on the mark back five meters.
Hey, wait! That’s effectively the same thing without changing the lines! They didn’t listen to us at all!
