After 30 (40?)+ years at the Arlington Heights Library, we’re moving our meetings – new day, new location. And – hold on to your hats – we’ve scheduled the holiday party, too!

Our home for so many years, the Hendricksen Room at the AHML, was the only meeting space at the library that we could reserve more than 30 days in advance. And they didn’t charge us for the room – free was always a good thing.

Pre-pandemic, we could make reservations up to a year in advance. After the library reopened, this was reduced to a rolling 6 months. That’s worked for the last couple of years, but the library has started reserving the Hendricksen Room for its own programs. We thought perhaps Fridays were just too popular a day, but the room is now being used, or reserved for potential use by the library, every evening. All good things must end.

We have reservations in the Hendricksen Room for October 20 and November 24, so we’ll finish out 2023 in the present location, then change our meetings starting with the January 2024 meeting. We’ll continue to schedule a 2-hour meeting, from 6:30 to 8:30PM after the move.

The club has had a tradition of going out to eat after our meeting (at least those in attendance who are so inclined), and for the last several years we’ve been going to the Continental in Buffalo Grove, which is about 5-10 minutes north of the AHML. The food has been good, and the staff have been very pleasant. We spoke to the owner last night, explained our situation (homeless and penniless), and he said he’d be happy to let us use his banquet room for our meetings. And, as an added bonus, they have a full bar, so if any would like to have a beer or other beverage during the meeting (cash bar)… Happy days.

In preparation for this change we polled the membership about meeting on a different day of the week, and Wednesday seemed to work for almost everyone. In fact, for many it was preferable to Friday.

In doing our research, we looked at the days and locations used by other modeling clubs in the area. The Midwest Model Shipwrights meet the 3rd Wednesday of the month in a Mount Prospect church basement. (As an aside, your new President attended their August meeting, and found it quite informative. I’ll be stopping by again from time to time. If you have an interest in ships, highly recommended.) So, rather than conflict with their meetings, we’ll make our regular meeting day the 2nd Wednesday of each month. As in the past, there may be cases where that week of the month isn’t possible in a given month, but we’ll do the best we can to maintain some consistency.

The one downside to the Continental is that we may occasionally be bumped by a group willing to rent the banquet room. It’s a business – money talks. In particular, it’s frequently used by members of the Jewish community for funeral services. That obviously happens on short notice, and we’ll just have to manage to be a little flexible. They’ll notify us when this happens, and we’ll use our website, email, text, and phone to communicate these conflicts to the membership. The fallback plan is to move the meeting to Friday that week, as long as the room is available. If it’s not, we’ll play it by ear. We expect this will be a rare event.

Once we worked out the plans for meetings, we asked about holding our holiday party there, as well. Why not? Hitz was fun, the pizza was good and relatively inexpensive, but we thought it might be time to change the menu. The only Saturday still available in December was the 16th, so we booked it. We haven’t discussed details of food yet, but the owner said the typical cost was $30-100 per person. We’re definitely going to keep it to the low end of that range (sorry, no plans for surf and turf).

So please take a look at your calendars and let me know if you plan to make the party and how many will be coming. I’ll be bugging you in a week or two to give me your best guess who and how many will join us.

We were anticipating this to be a major headache, but we think we’ve ended up making lemonade. Hooray!

FWIW, I just figured out tentative dates for 2024:

• Jan. 10
• Feb. 7 (14th is Valentine’s Day)
• Mar. 13
• Apr. 10
• May 8
• Jun. 12
• Jul. 10 (IPMS Nationals are Jul. 17-20)
• Aug. 14
• Sep. 11
• Oct. 9
• Nov. 13