It had snowed another 4 inches during the night.

I was grateful it had stopped snowing when I looked out the front door.

So I cleared the stairs and brushed the snow off my car to prepare to drive to the day long Retreat for Commonwheel Artists Co-op members.

I had another member who needed a ride, as her home was very high up on many very steep and curvy streets. She walked to my house wearing her YakTrax.

It was pretty mild in temperature and the roads were pretty clear, so we had an uneventful drive to the venue.

There was a really good turn out of the membership.

Everyone there fully participated in the process.

We had a very delicious potluck at lunch time. Soups, salads, breads, cookies with many gluten-free and vegetarian offerings that satisfied everyone’s special food considerations.

One member brought homemade chocolate that melted in one’s mouth. Yum!

We had some interesting conversations that brought up where some of the splits in the membership reside. How we will mend those in the coming year is still something we need to work on. Mostly people were positive and had ideas that we all listened to politely.

I did have to take some deep breathes before speaking after some people talked about the Arts Festival in ways that I didn’t agree with, or were going off information that was not accurate. Luckily a couple of other  members also spoke up to share more accurate information and make some points the other members were not aware of about the value of the Arts Festival for the Co-op.

Plus some people didn’t totally demonstrate that they understand the concept of “speaking in pearls” and got rather long-winded at times, especially near the end.

Still we came away with a better understanding of how different members thought and ideas of where we would like to go as a business in the future.

Unfortunately we ran out of time before we got to the exercise for creating an actual action plan to reach goals we envisioned. Something we will need to work on at a future date without an outside facilitator.

Yet, we were all glad to end when we did as it was snowing again. And not the fluffy snow of the last days, but one that was immediately crusting on our windows. So we all had to do a bit of scraping before we could head home.

Moments after I got home and my passenger got her YakTrax back on for her trek home, my phone rang. My roommate was calling to say she and her boyfriend were on there way to the house to cook dinner for all of us. And she said she had invited the young boy from next door to join us.

The dinner was sort of celebration of her birthday a week late and his a few days early.

That was fun and another tasty meal for me that I had to do little except to enjoy.

This was the third morning I had to get up early for me, and I am fading now.