John Ratcliff's Weblog

I'm back from GDC and I figured I better make a post or I will just forget everything that happened. Not that a whole lot happened anyway, but I still want a record of the event. Let's see..how far back do I go? Last Sunday Troy DeMolay chapter held our regular meeting; and we certainly had a lot of business to discuss. We set out our upcoming plans which included a pancake breakfast fundraiser, a service project with the Shriner's children hospital, a talent competition as a fundraising opportunity, an upcoming movie night, our day of devotion at St. Cletus church, our fun day at the City Museum, our special ritual practice day at Wentzville Lodge, the Shrine Circus, a Rainbow Girls Dance, and conferring the entire initiatory and DeMolay degrees on our own. Wow, that's a lot of stuff! I spent many hours working on the newsletter, but I cannot provide a link here until I remove all of the personal information from the document. On Monday I flew to San Francisco. I was o...

Yikes! I just realized that a draft copy of a post had 'leaked out' onto my blog. I am writing up a recap about my trip last week to GDC , which includes a visit to a Freemason Lodge, a dinner at a Moroccan restaurant with my friends, some other trivia, and my thoughts on reading Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. However, I am not finished with it and sometime today, instead of hitting 'save as draft' I must have accidentally hit publish. I'm heading off to my tennis match now but if I find the time and inclination I will finish it up later this evening. For now, I am going to include a link to the March newsletter of the DeMolay Chapter my son is a member of. On Sunday, before I left for my trip, we had a big DeMolay meeting and did a lot of planning. The biggest item being that we made a commitment to perform our own initiatory degree *and* DeMolay degree in the months of April and May. I have been using a piece of publishing software I bought at Walmart ...

(My sneaky hot Casino Hostess Regina) I had a lot of fun last evening. Our friends Diane and Lenny invited us to attend a casino night fundraiser. It sounded like a worthy cause and a way to have a nice night on the town. The event was held in a large community center and turned out to be a class act all the way. Numerous restaurants provided an incredible selection of entrees as well as desserts. The event cost $35 a person, included all you could eat from this incredible selection of food, an open bar and, finally, play money to gamble with. Personally I don't enjoy gambling that much. However, I am a gamer and I really like Texas Hold-Em. It is so much more of a social game and I like the pace of it. I camped out early at one of the Texas Hold-Em tables and set up for a long night. They played by the regular rules except that no one necessarily had to 'go out' since there were unlimited rebuys. The charity was happy to sell you more play money to keep playing. One other ...