Kiwanis Club of North Suburban Golden K St. Paul

Well, I’m back on track with the weekly blog and John Sweeney was on track for his last meeting of his tenure with an exuberant “Harris Stretch” – we’ll have to see how this continues with our new president next week!

For our circle three reports, Ron Panter reported that Bill Larson fell last night and had to miss today’s meeting, but he hopes to be back next week. Bill Campion reported on Jack Gooding’s 51st eye injection – he still has trouble seeing and will continue to miss meetings because of it.

The happy dollars continued with a strong showing this week – always good to see our group talking (even bragging) about their lives. Jerry Baumann went to a meeting last night, put his glasses on his lap, got up and stepped on them – opps! The good news was he got them repaired for free – “worth a buck” – to quote Jerry. Bill Campion will be going off to Sun City early this year, but wanted to thank John Sweeney for being president, LaMar Zollinger for being the next president and Wayne Carlson for all his publicity work. Tom Benson had another “grandfather” brag – seems his granddaughter won a first place in quilting and best quilt of show at the lake county fair – quite the artist. Don Anderson put in a check for the foundation in celebration of his 85th birthday. Erv Oelke put a buck in for his visit to his grandson in Des Moines. Jeremy Newhouse, our presenter for the day was glad to be back with the group. Wayne Carlson put in his happy dollar to welcome Jeremy back too. Korny Kornmann provided us with another joke – I guess he’s trying to keep up with Ken Bergstedt. I welcomed back Vic Perman – he has been out for several weeks. John Sweeney finished off his presidency with a buck – something about being able to get his medical information on-line – you are never out of touch if you have the Internet!

Our speaker today was Jeremy Newhouse and he has been instrumental for bringing our club (kicking and screaming) into the 21st century by getting us a sound presence out on the world-wide-web (WWW). He posed the question – how do you find out about Kiwanis? He describes us as the best-kept secret of a incredible club whose story is not being told. He ought to know because he described his joining as totally accidental (something about hearing about it from Ron Panter) and once he joined he could see what an incredible organization we were with all of our committees and activities and fundraisers – all for very good causes to support our love for children around the world.

Jeremy gave us a tour of the current website and told us what we need to do to get our website moved higher up the “Google hit parade”. It’s all about visits and he showed us three ways to improve our hits – just going to the website counts as a hit. Another way is to comment on my blog – everyone that adds something to our website helps use get up higher than the other competing websites. Finally, he showed us how to upload pictures – that adds to the interest of the website – everyone loves to see pictures of what is going on in an organization. And, at every opportunity we need to tell our friends to check out www.goldenkayer.org - you can just click right her on this web address and it will take you right to our website – TRY IT! It was great having Jeremy back in our fold and we hope he will come again soon – maybe with a review of how well we are doing in our hits now that he has helped us understand how the search engine works. We need to advertise our website any way we can to help us get new members through this media – it’s the 21st century guys – that’s where people need to find out about this incredibly great organization called Kiwanis – Roseville Golden Kayers!

Next week is our annual business meeting with the installation of the slate of officers for the next fiscal year. Also there are awards for those contributing to our success this year. Tell your friends how to access our website, call them up and invite them to meet our new slate of officers. Bring a friend and join us next week - our social time is 1:30 - the meeting starts promptly at 2 PM.