[Nfbmt] transportation crisis

[James Aldrich]

Hi all!

No matter which organization one belongs to, the same problems loom! 
The ones who will survive are those who best engineer around and 
through these terrible problems!

I suppose we could hold our convention on Skype!  Nobody would have to 
go anywhere!  I'm not certain how many people can be on a skype 
conference call but it is possible!  We then could stay home and have 
our own banquet in our back yards if it is halfway nice or order a 
pizza!  Or, we could decide to order from Jimmy Johns from wherever we 
are!  Those not online could be invited to our homes.

As I say, how we manage through all of this depends on how we work 
together to make things happen!  I doubt the above solution would be 
seriously considered but it is possible!  So long as we are dealing 
with hotels, we will have personal expenses! Dar and I got $700 on a 
credit card when we went to National.  We even bought meals for others 
on it towards the end of the convention and still had money left over.  
We used the card only for meals with a couple of exceptions. This 
really helped us!  We ate the Kind Vitamin bars for lunch while there!  
These can be found on Amazon and they are tasty! We may use them during 
the state convention, who knows?

I think attending the state convention should be one of your personal 
priorities!  No matter where the convention is held, the same problems 
are still there!  This is why we have a statewide convention committee 
so we can hopefully find the best accommodations for our convention.

There will be a convention planning committee meeting Thursday at 6 PM. 
Bruce was invited to join us and help with the planning!  This will be 
on our conference call number!  If people have concerns, they could 
join that call! Please don't misunderstand me!  I'd love to come to 
Great Falls for our convention!  Right now in view of our lack of 
transportation to Great Falls, I'm glad it isn't there presently!  I 
sincerely hope we could get transportation going again by convention 
time! That's being optimistic!  Till then, we may need to utilize Van 
Services.  President Travis Moses was talking about getting the board 
together to see what could be done to not only get transportation to 
convention, I'm certain he hopes to keep the costs down as much as 
possible! I would say all options are on the table!  Even though I'm in 
Billings, I plan to stay at the hotel!

Meanwhile, I'd check into places as Netspend.com or get some kind of 
credit card with a high credit limit.  This might help break down your 
expenses to a point!  No doubt we may have to do without some things to 
afford convention!  Just a few weeks after convention, we will be asked 
to attend the March on Washington! You can take it from there!

Let's work together and do all we can to achieve what we set out to achieve!

Jim