My Weekend

I haven’t written in my journal much lately. I feel speechless without my camera. But this is supposed to be a journal, not a blog, so let’s see, what have I been up to lately?

I started training a new volunteer at work last week. She’s going to start paralegal studies this summer and wanted to volunteer to get a flavor of the work we do. We seldom accept volunteers because they often take more time than they save, but this woman was willing to do whatever kind of work we needed help with, so I agreed to put in the time to train her. She’s very sharp and picks up on things the first time around. I took her to the Statehouse with me on Thursday to participate in a workshop I was facilitating on a mock public hearing for Girls Day at the Statehouse. I love GDATSH. 105 seventh and eighth grade girls from all over the state converge to meet the governor and learn about the legislative process. It’s organized by our good friends at the Maine Women’s Lobby.

We held our public hearing on LD 84 – An Act to Ensure Fair Pay – which is before the real legislature this year. The bill would allow employees to talk with each other about their wages. Some employers actually bar this activity currently, but how are women to know if they get equal pay if they don’t know what anyone else is earning?

The girls had a great time strategizing about who you would want to have testify, and what their message would be. I gave my other volunteer the pro side and took the bad guy role for my group – those against the legislation.

It was a fun exercise and the girls came up with some good strategies and actually convinced the “legislators” – another group of girls – to amend the bill before passing it, to allow employees to ask their employer for the wage information in order to lessen any possible tension among co-workers.

Thursday night I went to pottery and then met Rick at Hallowell and Wine to listen to our friend Mark Miller play. Rick usually practices with his band Thursday but they weren’t practicing this week so I convinced him to come in to listen to Mark with me, thinking the place would be packed and he could save me a seat. Well the place was pretty empty. Mark is a kick ass guitar player when he wants to be. He was pretty mediocre Thursday night I must say. Quite disappointing. When he finished at 9:00 I decided to go find what the pottery girls were up to and Rick headed home, preferring to avoid that much estrogen. Probably a wise move on his part. The girls were in rare form. After the music ended at The Cup we headed over to The Higher Grounds where Jonah, Alfred, Thib, and Lefty were playing. A good combo. We found a few other women and an occasional brave male and danced until closing time at about midnight.

Friday was spent pretty laid back and then Rick and I headed to The Depot in Gardiner for a beer with some friends, to Joyce’s for dinner, The Wharf for the last half hour of the early show, and then to The Higher Grounds for music by Stevie Jones, and a shaker of espresso martinis.

Saturday morning I went into the studio for a couple of hours and was really pleased with some pieces I worked on. I came home early so we could go to our local town meeting. That was kind of an interesting experience. We didn’t stay very long because they decided they needed to do a paper vote on whether to authorize a monetary expenditure to investigate the need for a new town office complex. Many of the townspeople thought the tentative design the building committee had come up with was way too extravagant so there was a lot of opposition to it. They didn’t get the point that the money authorized then was to continue investigation – not proceed with the building. Anyway, it was going to take 2 hours to do the paper vote and count before they could continue with the next article, so Rick and I voted and left. As did many others I suspect.

Sunday we went up to The Solon Hotel in Solon, Maine for a benefit concert for a person who is fighting cancer. There was a great turn out and some excellent music and I ran into a few old friends. I had been telling Rick for the past couple of years what a dive the Solon Hotel was so he was anxious to check it out. It had been a long time since I’d been there so you never know if it might have gotten fixed up. It did seem a little cleaner than I’d remembered it in the past but it’s still quite a dive.