Community Meeting

So, tonight, John and I attended the Mar Vista Community Council Quarterly Stakeholders Meeting. With my new job, it's great to not only have the time to connect with more of what's happening in the community but to actually have the responsibility for my job to focus on those things.
Anyway, I've been building relationships with some great people who are active in the community, and there is a big community day of service coming up Saturday that is very exciting and involves over 50 projects to serve and improve the community.

I mention those things first to point out that I am truly glad to be able to be a part of such community happenings before I move on to listing some amusing aspects of tonight's meeting. That being said, here are some highlights of the meeting:
* Definitely being the youngest of the crowd there. There were maybe 5 others (out of a total of maybe 40) that were in our same age bracket, and only one of those stayed the whole time.
* Despite being the youngest, I was the one who didn't make it through the entire meeting sitting on the incredibly hard metal chairs we were all sitting on and had to stand for the latter portion of the meeting.
* This is truly the first time I have heard mention of a Joint Pole Commission. Granted, it is in the context of cell phone towers (aka poles, apparently), but it made me giggle.
* Also, L.A. city and school systems and all types of groups out here have a serious love of and overuse of acronyms. There were times when the acronyms and codes outnumbered the actual words being spoken. My personal favorite for the evening, though, is BONC (which, yes, they all pronounced as "bonk"). It stands for the Bureau Of Neighborhood Commissioners. But, when you call something BONC, does it really matter what it stands for if you want to be taken seriously?

Anyway, we're glad we went to the meeting. It was a bit long and dry, but you can find moments of humor in almost anything.