Buildings and Grounds
The Buildings and Grounds Committee is charged with maintaining the church building and outdoor space so the congregation will be able to enjoy a safe and comfortable environment for church services and related events. The Buildings and Grounds Committee is the first line of defense for repairs to both the exterior and interior and for developing strategies to counteract entropy.
Buildings & Grounds Chronicle:
New info added at bottom of document. To find particular topics, use Search or Find function in Word. Please advise B&G Scribe (Martin Berger, saabmb@yahoo.com) of omissions and other errata.
As of sometime in December 2022, the Buildings & Grounds Committee has been reconfigured: Jim Rak and Matt Jones are Co-Chairs, and I am serving as Scribe or Chronicler, maintaining this Chronicle as a record of what B&G has done, attempted, and considered. We have received no formal notification of the Board about this arrangement, but will proceed on an ad-hoc basis.
This document includes occasional observations on Trash & Recycling and Security matters, since the committees that ought to deal with those functions do not formally exist and activities are apt to go unrecorded unless they are included with B&G.
B&G annals for previous years may be accessible on the Church website; if not, interested persons should inquire of the B&G Scribe as above. Anyone wishing to receive this Chronicle via e-mail should do likewise.
[Infrequently-Asked Question: Why are B&G activities recorded in such detail? Response: Especially in an organization that runs on volunteer efforts, there is a lot of turnover in who does what, so the collective memory as to what was previously done and why tends to be weak. We have had many substantial projects undertaken by one individual who took care of business and then threw away all records. In many instances questions like Where does this wire go? or the recurrent historian’s query What were they thinking? have no ready answers. If we write stuff down in a searchable format, future generations can determine what we did and why it seemed like a good idea, or the least of the available evils, at the time. Also, my own memory, even for stuff that I did not so long ago, is increasingly unreliable.]
Chronicle entries are composed by B&G Scribe (MB) unless otherwise noted.
Current Update
Work Party, 20 April. Present: Tim Ingram; Jim Rak; Bob Seibold; Jim Stone; Ryan, Justina, and Ben Stryffeler; MB.
Jim Stone and I arrived before 10, unloaded the chipper-shredder, made coffee, and Jim dealt with the dead bulb in the 2d-floor RE hallway. (Need to get more 100w-equivalent LED bulbs.) I had been unable to remove the glass cover from the ceiling fixture, but Jim had no problem with it.
Ryan and I ran the chipper-shredder and reduced most of the small and medium-sized branches and crumbs to mulch. More of the bigger limbs were cleaned up and stacked along the driveway. There is much less stuff to grind than we had before the Bradford pear tree fell a week earlier. Later Jim Rak and Tim cut, split, and moved most of the stump; big pieces awaiting further cutting are piled along the fence at the north end of the east RE building.
Jims Rak and Stone used a big electric snake to work on the clog in the drain from the Boiler Room sump. The snake was not in usable condition and the drainage continues to make mud.
Justina and Ben cleaned up flower beds at the front of the Church and raked. Bob weeded.
Amiel mowed. Randy Tullis has agreed to do some of the mowing, but not all of it, as he did last year. Michele Huston has been designated to keep track of who’s mowing when, so that we can avoid wasteful duplication of effort.
Nobody could find the yellow wooden bench, which was inappropriately left out in the Patio and disfigured by the weather. (Two other benches have been rescued and have not suffered hideous paint damage.) If anyone knows the whereabouts of the yellow bench, please inform the Office. No point in trying to determine who left indoor furniture out in the Patio, or why.
Scheduling of Work parties is to be revised, so that we’re not working on the same Saturday when the Zen group meets (twice a month, one of which meetings coincides inconveniently with the Work Parties on the third Saturday). Nobody can recall why the Zen schedule was established to collide with the unavoidably noisy B&G work parties, but we have agreed to move our Work Parties to the second Saturday of the month. Michele will run activities announcements accordingly.
This month’s Work Party was a well-attended and productive one. Thanks to all.
B&G Chronicle 2021