Wed. Mar. 13 Day 63   62/16½C @ 9:30AM,   82F/28C @ 12:30 PM

According to LA TV, today is going to be record-breaking temps for this area, the coast, and Palm Springs.  Hemet is supposed to reach temps of 88F/31C.

We loaded the car with our swim gear. our Irish shirts & hats, and any supplies we had for tonight and drove up to the clubhouse/pool area.  I went into the kitchen where Larry & Dick were overseeing the corned beef cooking.  We unloaded our car & Larry’s and moved the supplies into the ballroom.  As there was a Zumba-exercise class on, we couldn’t do any decorating etc. yet.  Sheila went back to the RV to prepare her carrot dish for tonight.  I went over to the pool for a game and then discovered that nobody had taken the swim gear out of the car which was now gone.  I was wearing my swimsuit but I had no hat & no sunglasses--so played the game squinting a lot.  Sheila arrived after 11:30 or so, so only got to play for around 25 minutes.  After shower & changing we headed into the kitchen area of the ballroom to help with preparation.  The next few hours were spent setting up, arranging the beverages and tables, decorating etc.  Several people arrived as well to help.  Cutting the cakes & pies and then setting them out on plates with forks took half a dozen people quite a while to do.  Then around 4 PM Don & I started to slice, (with electric knives), the corned beef.  We started with over 90 pounds uncooked weight, I don’t know what cooked weight was, but there was a lot, enough for 176 people at least.  People arrived with their carrots, potatoes & cabbage and got seated.  Everyone had organized themselves in tables of 8, and they prearranged what each couple brought so that each table had the 3 dishes, plus an appetizer. We then had about a 20 min. ‘Happy Hour’ & then Larry started to call tables.  Don & I did the serving of the meat.  I was really tired by the time everyone had their corned beef.  When I got back to our table, I hardly ate much – did have a carrot cake dessert. Someone asked where we got the desserts as they were so good.  The carrot cake, red velvet cake, apple pie, cheese cake, strawberry cheese cake & chocolate cake came from Costco When it was all finished we worked on clean-up and when we finally got back to the RV I thought it was late in the evening but it was not even 9, it felt like midnight, I was tired and my back was aching.  Sheila was really tired too from being on her feet for so many hours directing the decorating and the general overall stress & worry.  Everything went quite well, people seemed to enjoy themselves, but doing this really gave us an appreciation of all the hard work the volunteers put in to produce a function like this and run the other events, games, etc here in the park.  Work that usually goes unnoticed!