Christmas Ham Dinners

Last Monday, (a week ago!), I went to the Orange County Radio Amateurs (OCRA) annual Christmas dinner. Instead of meeting at the 911 center, the entire meeting is held at the Village Diner, in Hillsborough. As I recall, 29 people showed up, which was a great turnout. I'm not especially fond of the food at the Village Diner, but I ordered a chicken salad sandwich, which was pretty good. I do like their country fried steak on their buffet, but I don't eat beef anymore. Unlike my 6-8 month quasi-vegetarianism, I am pretty religious about avoiding beef. It's not hard.

On Tuesday, I went to the annual Durham FM Association (DFMA) Christmas meeting. That's held at Fudrucker's, in Durham. The three main traditions of that are the collection money for the Durham Rescue Mission, collection of gifts to be donated to Social Services for kids and random trading of gifts among the members of the club. When I first joined the club, back in 1997, gag gifts were encouraged for the member exchange, but that has been largely abandoned. Lots of people got peanuts and candy, which was nice. The ARRL section manager attended the meeting and gave an impromptu talk that lasted at least a half an hour. It was actually fairly interesting, but most people seem to want to get out of the Christmas meeting fairly quickly. The turnout was quite low, so there was a lot of discussion on how to increase club participation, including the use of the repeaters. I think a different meeting place might help, although I certainly enjoyed the vanilla milkshake and French fries that I ate for dinner. Yes, I did have a nutritious lunch that day.