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Hi

Shed Notes 24th September

The nights are fairly drawing in and I’ve seen a big difference this week having come down from the north, even had to light the fire these past few nights! I’m not up to speed with the current zoom/meet scenario as I’ve been pretty busy this week and will not be available tomorrow either as I’m going to collect some stuff from a garage which is being cleared of everything tomorrow morning and I have an appointment to lay concrete in the afternoon! I’ll report back on the spoils when I know more, I do know there is not much in it but it has been on/off for three weeks and finally it’s happening.

The dust seems to have settled now on the next new normal and it looks as though we are going to be stuck for some time with only two households meeting outside so for the shed that means just two of us at any one ‘workstation’ at any one time. We need to have a discussion as to what this means for us trying to get things done for the school and clearing the backlog of pallets building up. We do have a use for them if we can work but in the meantime I’ve told Fiona to call a halt to any more until we see a way forward. Lets discuss this if you have not already done so in my absence and plan a way forward. I can probably do days other than Friday which should give us more weather windows too

I’ve also been approached by Lorraine the Coop Community Liaison Lady regarding some potential shed work for Colinton. The three churches in Colinton have made the decision now that they are unlikely to have church services and are looking at making an open air nativity and light display in a communal space which all can see over the period even with social distancing. They want to be able to take outside the usual Nativity scene with life size Mary and Joseph (and I’m assuming at least a donkey and it will be part of a festival of light. Given that the Coop have been good at donating funds to us and also we have an application into them for another award I’ve said I’m sure we could help. One of the ministers phone me today and said that they are having a meeting early October to Plan this so we will hear more then. My suggestion was that we could build them a stable for the nativity from our pallet source and that I would get in touch with Stewart and Jack to get ideas for Reindeer, donkeys and humans. Does anyone have an idea where they get the football ‘supporters’ for the stands? All we need is a template or two. They also said that they would contact the Colinton Art Community to help and also they could do any decoration. We’ll know more early October.

I also received in the mail an opportunity for the shed Charity to be Registered with Amazon Smile which appears to be the same as Amazon except that things ordered through the smile bit award a charity of your choice with a small percentage of the purchases. I’ve passed the details on to Lyall as treasurer to see if he wishes to register us having scrutinised and if that goes to plan then sometime later this week I’ll put a scanned copy of the details on our website so you can all see it and start to use it plus tell friends and family and we may have another source of funding. When you make a purchase you have to specify which charity you wish to benefit so we need to be sure that Pentlands Mens Shed is up there before we spend!!

That’s all I have for this week, I hope everyone is still safe and well and getting to grips with the changing circumstances. At least we are not in full lockdown and I hope it stays that way.

Regards to all
Alister


Alister Skinner
Chairman
Pentlands Men's Shed