Keep the wine flowing!

It's amazing what people will do for charity. Sometimes, we spread composted elephant droppings around on a garden plot, and sometimes we put on our nice clothes and ask people, ever so nicely, to please not handle the wine. On March 6, the annual event known as the Classic Wines Auction took place at the Oregon Convention Center. The auction raises money for five non-profits that support children and families. We found out about the volunteer opportunity through our friends at New Avenues for Youth.

The auction is really an amazing to-do with lights, sparkles, prizes and delicious food everywhere you look. We were "Silent Auction Stewards" and we spent the evening encouraging bids on the silent auction prizes which were mostly bottles of wine and getaway vacation packages. (And also, of course, making sure the wine bottles stayed where they belonged.) The night raised $2.3 million dollars for the charities, which is both amazing and wonderful. Thank goodness for the love of wine!

Knowing our way around the place

We were back for the third time to the Multnomah County Library to help push our way through more material! Sunday, February 28 four of us had the priviledge of working right in the heart of things at the Central branch in Circulation, right next to the regular staff. It kind of went right to our heads. We were even trained on how to label media! DVDs, CDs, audio books - all of them needed a RFID tag (Radio Frequency Identification). Then we scanned each item into the system and gave each one a big yellow Sharpie swipe across their spine. One after the other after the other! We made some great progress. I think some of us may have even been pretending that we actually worked at the library, which, for the right kind of person, could be a dream come true.