Sunday, March 2
Mar. 2nd, 2025 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
Getting up in reasonable time, so that I could make it to the pottery meeting.
The meeting was in some ways frustrating. The person speaking for the Executive (the people who nominally run the studio, and are elected) made it sound like "yeah, well, we can TRY to have committees to work on some of the things you wanted in the last meeting, but I don't know..do you guys really mean it? Do you think it's worth trying to make committees?".
Literally every pottery group member who showed up was because they wanted to address the issues that WE brought forward at the last general meeting. Every. Last. One. Of. Us. wanted to start addressing those issues, and we are willing to do the work.
The executive only wanted to talk about ONE of the areas we addressed in the last meeting, which was to improve communication. Things like having information in a binder about all the glazes (duh), having our policies and practices in a binder where we can all access them, having some kind of group online where we can ask questions and see each other's finished pieces, and to find ways of having different classes meet each other so that we're not all separate tribes.
When someone said something like "since we now have about 80 people in the pottery studio, we need to make sure that there is enough representation", and then a member of the executive said (quietly, because she knew damn well how this was going to go) "there's about 100 now, in the Spring session".
I kind of lost it, because at the last meeting when literally everyone voiced the concern that there were "WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE" in the studio, the executive literally said that they felt that there were a lot of people too, and that was when there WAS 80 something people. I thought, and others did too, that the executive was ALREADY calling for some kind of cap on membership and new potters, and that we were supposed to decide if even 85 or whatever was too many, and what was an appropriate number?
Apparently they hadn't.
It wasn't just me who was upset about that. Other people made a point of taking their turn to speak to directly address the issue of too many people in the studio, and directly asking the executive "Well, when ARE you going to cap the numbers, and how many people will that be?".
I personally feel like they lied to us.
I chose to be on the committee to work on improving communication, and it seems like a few other people really mean it too. Then pretty much everyone else said they wanted to help in some way, but we'll see.
It also annoyed me that the same speaker for the executive also made it sound like our committee was kind of an experiment, and if it didn't go well, we wouldn't be doing more committees to address the many other things we wanted to improve. That sounds arrogant to me. Like, so THE EXECUTIVE gets to decide whether or not the committees are doing well enough to keep trying?
I'm wondering if what we really need then, is a whole new executive.
The reality is, if you're going to have a hundred people using a facility, and they're all considered members of the studio that have voices and votes, then you need to have some way of operating the whole thing so that they are participating, because this isn't going to work if you just have some voted in members running everything without consulting the members, and the members probably need to form committees to do the work, because it isn't all going to be done by the executive. They're going to have to get used to engaging us in useful participation in running things, and I think it will be a better studio for it.
The whole thing left me angry, because of the "now we have 100 members" BS. Honestly.
The day was still fairly young, so I was able to go see River at the barn, but of course the pottery studio and the barn are in opposite directions. I went home from the meeting, filled my husband in (he didn't want to go, he felt a bit under the weather) and then went to the barn after changing my clothes.
My Sweetie did work on sanding the kitchen while I was at the barn.
I met another rider that I've heard about, but not seen in person. She works with Ferrari a bit, and she does horse therapy one day a week with kids at our barn. I just never end up seeing her because I don't come in at the same time usually.
She seemed really nice and we chatted a bit, and I did a little demo of River and I riding. I don't know if I'll see her much in the future, but it can't hurt to try to be social.
River was kind of pokey today, but he did well. Maybe not as nice on the circles around the pylons as he did in our lesson, so back to the drawing board again on that. Sigh.
He did do well on our yields, and did a pokey but technically correct stationary trot circle.
I rode him, stood for a count of thirty, and then did some more riding while carrying the open umbrella, and he was relaxed and comfortable with it.
Then I came home and my Sweetie was finishing up with his baking (he takes it to work for lunch) and made supper.
We folded the ginormous pile of clean laundry that's been piling up for the last week or so.
We didn't watch anything, as he wanted to get to bed in good time.
Getting up in reasonable time, so that I could make it to the pottery meeting.
The meeting was in some ways frustrating. The person speaking for the Executive (the people who nominally run the studio, and are elected) made it sound like "yeah, well, we can TRY to have committees to work on some of the things you wanted in the last meeting, but I don't know..do you guys really mean it? Do you think it's worth trying to make committees?".
Literally every pottery group member who showed up was because they wanted to address the issues that WE brought forward at the last general meeting. Every. Last. One. Of. Us. wanted to start addressing those issues, and we are willing to do the work.
The executive only wanted to talk about ONE of the areas we addressed in the last meeting, which was to improve communication. Things like having information in a binder about all the glazes (duh), having our policies and practices in a binder where we can all access them, having some kind of group online where we can ask questions and see each other's finished pieces, and to find ways of having different classes meet each other so that we're not all separate tribes.
When someone said something like "since we now have about 80 people in the pottery studio, we need to make sure that there is enough representation", and then a member of the executive said (quietly, because she knew damn well how this was going to go) "there's about 100 now, in the Spring session".
I kind of lost it, because at the last meeting when literally everyone voiced the concern that there were "WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE" in the studio, the executive literally said that they felt that there were a lot of people too, and that was when there WAS 80 something people. I thought, and others did too, that the executive was ALREADY calling for some kind of cap on membership and new potters, and that we were supposed to decide if even 85 or whatever was too many, and what was an appropriate number?
Apparently they hadn't.
It wasn't just me who was upset about that. Other people made a point of taking their turn to speak to directly address the issue of too many people in the studio, and directly asking the executive "Well, when ARE you going to cap the numbers, and how many people will that be?".
I personally feel like they lied to us.
I chose to be on the committee to work on improving communication, and it seems like a few other people really mean it too. Then pretty much everyone else said they wanted to help in some way, but we'll see.
It also annoyed me that the same speaker for the executive also made it sound like our committee was kind of an experiment, and if it didn't go well, we wouldn't be doing more committees to address the many other things we wanted to improve. That sounds arrogant to me. Like, so THE EXECUTIVE gets to decide whether or not the committees are doing well enough to keep trying?
I'm wondering if what we really need then, is a whole new executive.
The reality is, if you're going to have a hundred people using a facility, and they're all considered members of the studio that have voices and votes, then you need to have some way of operating the whole thing so that they are participating, because this isn't going to work if you just have some voted in members running everything without consulting the members, and the members probably need to form committees to do the work, because it isn't all going to be done by the executive. They're going to have to get used to engaging us in useful participation in running things, and I think it will be a better studio for it.
The whole thing left me angry, because of the "now we have 100 members" BS. Honestly.
The day was still fairly young, so I was able to go see River at the barn, but of course the pottery studio and the barn are in opposite directions. I went home from the meeting, filled my husband in (he didn't want to go, he felt a bit under the weather) and then went to the barn after changing my clothes.
My Sweetie did work on sanding the kitchen while I was at the barn.
I met another rider that I've heard about, but not seen in person. She works with Ferrari a bit, and she does horse therapy one day a week with kids at our barn. I just never end up seeing her because I don't come in at the same time usually.
She seemed really nice and we chatted a bit, and I did a little demo of River and I riding. I don't know if I'll see her much in the future, but it can't hurt to try to be social.
River was kind of pokey today, but he did well. Maybe not as nice on the circles around the pylons as he did in our lesson, so back to the drawing board again on that. Sigh.
He did do well on our yields, and did a pokey but technically correct stationary trot circle.
I rode him, stood for a count of thirty, and then did some more riding while carrying the open umbrella, and he was relaxed and comfortable with it.
Then I came home and my Sweetie was finishing up with his baking (he takes it to work for lunch) and made supper.
We folded the ginormous pile of clean laundry that's been piling up for the last week or so.
We didn't watch anything, as he wanted to get to bed in good time.
