April in Chicago

April was a good month, May will be better.

We just had a nice weekend visit from Summer, complete with a sloppy Mayday Shabbat, a windy beach side meeting, some belly dancing and a man falling off a latter. No pumpkin punching this time, unfortunately. One thing we talked about was ways to make this blog more useful, so I figured I would post about something that works well for our house.

Something I've noticed about our house is that everything goes smoother if we are able to meet more often, like every 10 days or so. The bigger meeting is always the one where we put together the next month's calendar, but if we meet often enough we're able to address all the other house issues, like cleaning, talking about how past events went and what we would change, finances, reminders about things coming up, personal issues, etc. Having these meetings often enough that the agenda isn't packed and things are too urgent also lets us enjoy ourselves a bit, and is a good way to make sure we're all in communication, not just about MH but also generally regarding what's going on with us.

The way we do meetings is we plan them ahead and put them on the calendar, and trade off on who is in charge of facilitating. This person is in charge of putting together an agenda, sending it out before the meeting, reminding everyone about the meeting, and facilitating it. We use a shared google document, with the newest stuff on top, for the house agenda, so we can always look back and old ones. this is especially useful if you take notes at the end of the meeting about what you want to discuss at the next one.

Anyway, this was probably the most boring blog post you've ever read, but maybe you haven't figure out how your house should do this yet and this will help. I've never really thought much about how other houses handle this, so i'll just assume we do it the best way.

Yo.