Every December, my dog club (Piscataqua Obedience Club) has a pot luck supper and auction to celebrate the holidays. Because the club has grown in membership, for the past couple of years, they have met in our training barn as it offers enough room for everyone. This year, due to weather, our meeting for December had to be cancelled.since everyone enjoys this meeting so much, we all decided to go ahead with it for our January meeting!!!!!Our auctioneer this year was Santa!!! ahh, no, actually, it was Wayne!!! and what a wonderful job he did!!! He certainly had a way of getting those bids up there.. which is hard, because, you don't know what you are bidding on!!!! Just to add some fun to our auction, all the gifts (donated by the members) are wrapped.. however, you must provide some kind of clue, to aid in the bidding. For example, I made a lap quilt this year.. and my clue was "sit/stay"!!! The clues are really quite clever, and once you see the gift opened.. 
they usually make pretty good sense!!!!
For the most part, too, the gifts are pretty nice, but you do have to be careful for the prank ones that find their way there as well. One member, Cheryn, has quite the reputation for bringing in items that.... well... maybe..... you don't want to keep. And it's been a big part of the fun to try and figure out what gift Cheryn might have brought and to try and steer clear of it. This year, one of her gifts consisted of a family of glass pigs!!! actually they were sort of cute, but what do you do with glass pigs... unless you are a pig collector!!!!
The potluck food that everyone brings is also quite wonderful. I like potlucks anyways
, because I always think people bring their best/favorite dishes to share. And when there is good food, there is always good conversation. Which, sadly, is something that we rarely get to do at a meeting, because, we are having a meeting!!! It's a good chance to catch up with you dog friends and see what they have been up to. We usually know the dog news, but at this meeting we get to hear about the "other things" that they do with their lives.... its' great fun.
The only one drawback that I had this year, was it fell on Ed's birthday. (last Thursday).... so I was a little torn about being with him and entertaining the club. However, as "luck" would have... he ended up going out on a fire call (a hotel fire!!!!) and was gone the entire evening... in fact, he didn't get in until 2:30 AM.... so, I guess even if I had been "home" for his birthday.. he wouldn't have been. So, trying to be in two places at once, sort of worked out for me!!!
Either way, everyone had a grand time, the evening went by much too fast... and I didn't get anything at the auction..........................
