Message From the State First Vice President

Sorry I haven’t been able to post a message for the last few months. I am in the final stages of a project I have been working on for 20 years.

I played in the Southern California Golf Tournament in Palm Springs on Monday the 13 of November. I was teamed up with our State Financial Secretary David Lavezzari, my son for the first time ever sad to say he is much better than I am, his god father from the Anaheim Lodge Mike Guthrie and my eye doctor Joe Occhipinti. We managed to finish one under par. It was a beautiful day started at 8 AM with a temperature of 64 finished at 12:30 PM at 80 degrees. They put on a wonderful lunch for the golfers and it is a great fundraiser for the Western Foundation.

So Tuesday the 14th at 2:30 AM I picked up Brian Sinaguglia from the Centinela Valley Lodge and drove to Sacramento to rewire our new building. We met the ATT installer at 9:30 and they installed a fiber optic line for us. We removed a couple thousand feet of wire that was not going to be reutilized by us and moved all of the lines we are keeping into an office and put it in a nice case to secure and hide it. Tuesday evening State Second Vice President Louis Lodi BBQ’d dinner for Brian and I, they smoked cigars and we had a nice long relaxed discussion. Wednesday while Brian and I finished wiring I arranged for movers to move the copiers from our temporary office and since Lori was free, she met them there and we arranged to move everything we were keeping from that location at that time. Brian and I took a dinner break and took my best friends’ daughter from the Anaheim Lodge out to dinner as she is in Sacramento for College. We went back around 9 and I kept poor Brian up until 1 AM as there was a problem with the network line. Finally got ahold of ATT and they said a technician would be available between 12 and 4. We finished up setting up all the offices and 1 of the new computers I donated. While waiting I got bored (happens sometimes) looked around and noticed there were a lot of lights burnt out. Called and got permission to change them so Brian and I changed 42 lights. ATT decided it was a bad cable replaced it and everything is running exponentially faster than what was available in San Francisco. We tested our remote access system and server and declared the new office operational. I will be back up there in December hopefully to install the other new computer and make custom cables so it hides behind the furniture.

I hope everyone realizes how hard our Recording Secretary works. She came up on Tuesday to help me with the layout and make sure Brian and I got lunch. She drove up again on Wednesday to meet the movers and again picked up lunch on her way back. If she wasn’t cooking Thanksgiving dinner for her lodge on Thursday she would have been there also. Had Brian and I worked any later she invited us to her lodge for dinner. We were in a hurry to get home though.

I want to thank Louis Lodi for the wonderful meal and his offer to help with anything we needed, Brian Sinaguglia for donating his time to drive with me and help, and Lori Rossi for all her help physically, our long conversations and helping me decide where to put everything.

I look forward to our March Grand Council meeting and hope many of our members will come and see our new home.