Happy New Year Everyone!

Here’s hoping the New Year brings you striking success and good health!

If you haven’t already seen, please take note to see how well our Phone Card Drive did!! We raised over $8,000 this year which is our highest amount ever!! Thanks to each and every one of you that took the time to either make a donation or got donations for this great cause. This should buy a whole lot of AT&T 125-minute phone cards for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. For sure we will reach out to so many more individuals come Valentine’s Day than ever before and they will know who the California Bowling Writers are!! Thanks also to the efforts that paid off for our Chairperson Mary Lynly and Co-Chair Eloise Cottrell. The dynamic duo that pushed and pushed to get us where we are!! But, they didn’t stop by just pleading and pleading for donations this year. They went above and beyond the call of duty and found a way that phone cards could be given specifically to a loved one serving overseas that is a relative of one of our members or a friend. That is incredible and makes this effort so personable. Quite an effort and it all paid off.

So here we are at the start of a new decade. It’s hard to believe it is already 2010. Even harder to write it!! Hopefully many of you are scheduling in upcoming events for this year and one of those is the annual CUSBC Convention that will be taking place June 11-13 at the Fremont Marriott. Our luncheon will take place on Saturday, June 12, with details coming out soon about our speaker and the theme of this year’s event. Co-chairs Joan Romeo and Jackie Wyckoff are working on all the details so keep checking the website for updates.

And, be sure to download both the Golden Quill and Profile writing contest forms and check through your stories that you wrote last year to see if any of them qualify to enter. And, if you haven’t written a story recently, NOW is the time!! Joan Romeo worked her magic and brought Bowlers Journal International on board as our sponsor for our writing contests and with their involvement, who knows, your story could be published. You never know!

So, in closing, if you made any resolutions, I hope you are still keeping them. If not, you are not alone! For now, I’ll leave you with some important dates:

March 1: Entry deadline for CUSBC Women’s & Open State Championships
April 1: Publish deadline for any stories you’ve written for both Profile and Golden Quill contests
April 15: Entry deadline to submit your stories for either the Profile or the Golden Quill writing contests
April 28-May 1: USBC Convention, Reno, Nev.
June 10-13: CUSBC Convention/CBW Annual Meeting & Luncheon, Fremont Marriott