Barry Duncan gave an amusing short presentation on Fairy Stones of the Cowichan Valley. The slides he used in his presentation can be seen here.
Monthly Meeting: Jan 8th, 2024
Category: Monthly meeting
Upcoming meetings in 2024
Hello,
We hope you all had a relaxing and rejuvenating Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year. The beginning of the year can be a little confusing as to the dates of club events due to stat holidays etc, so to clarify, here are the dates we have decided on. As always, these dates, workshop dates and field trip dates can be seen on the club calendar at https://vlms.ca/calendar/
January 2nd, 7pm: Board of directors’ meeting
January 8th, 7pm Annual General Meeting and first Members’ Meeting of the year. Location: the lawn bowling club. Note, this is not the first Monday of the month, which is New Year’s day.
January 30th, 7pm: Board of directors’ meeting
February 5th, 7pm: Members’ Meeting, Location: the lawn bowling club.
February 26th, 7pm: Board of directors’ meeting
March 4th, 7pm: Members’ Meeting, Location: the lawn bowling club.
March 15th-17th Rock and Gem show at the Da Vinci Center
March 25th, 7pm: Board of directors’ meeting
April 8th, 7pm: Members’ Meeting, Location: the lawn bowling club.Note, this is not the first Monday of the month as that is the Easter weekend,
Annual Club Auction – May 1st, 2023
Our auction yesterday was a great success. We managed to auction off all but one lot (sorry Sean) out of 102. We collected quite a bit of money for the club and it’ll go far to continue the funding of the clubs’ activities. There are many, many people to thank for the success of the auction.
I’ll begin with: Jay Prazma: His kind and generous donations of equipment and materials contributed immensely to the auction.
Thanks to all others who made donations and brought merchandise for the auction.
Thanks to Barb for making the clubhouse available for most of the afternoon, giving us enough time to set up.
Thanks to Karen for helping out with the auction process and keeping me on track.
Thanks to Allana, Kathryn and Karis for recording and keeping track of who bid on lots and paid how much.
Thanks to Dave for processing all the payments and keeping track of all that money.
Thanks to the members who helped set up, carry purchases to the cars of successful bidders and take down tables and chairs at the end.
Thanks to Becci for posting on our website all the pictures of items that would be available at the auction.
And most of all, thank you to all the members who most enthusiastically participated in the auction: you made this the great success that it was.
I apologize if I left anyone out.
Monthly meeting: Feb 6th, 2023
Topic: Can We Predict Earthquakes? Tales of the Cascadia Subduction Zone
Presenter: Ms. Isaporn (Grace) Sethanant – School of Earth & Ocean Sciences – Faculty of Science UVIC
The meeting was well attended and passionately presented, there was lots of talk about it afterwards.
Click on the pictures to see them larger and to run them as a slideshow.
The presentation was given by Ms. Israporn Sethanant who has been so kind as to share a pdf of the presentation itself below for those of our members who might not have been able to attend in person:
Tales of Cascadia (download)
Board of Directors & Annual General Meeting 2023
The Victoria Lapidary and Mineral Society is a non-profit society under the Societies Act. As such, we are run by a board of directors who are elected once a year at our January Annual General Meeting. There are 9 elected postions plus the Past President, and a further 8 positions who are appointed by the board. Our new board this year is:
| Elected Positions | |||
 | President Yvan Gagnon president@vlms.ca |  | Past President Allana Shillito allana.shillito@vlms.ca |
 | Treasurer David Jackson treasurer@vlms.ca |  | Vice President Karen Rowe vicepresident@vlms.ca |
 | Membership Becci Simmons membership@vlms.ca |  | Secretary Position Vacant secretary@vlms.ca |
| Member at Large Joanne Nielsen joanne.nielsen@vlms.ca | | Member at Large Karis Zabolotney karis.zabolotney@vlms.ca |
| Member at Large Robert Belz robert.belz@vlms.ca | | Member at Large Hayden Sander hayden.sander@vlms.ca |
| Appointed Positions | |||
| Laphound News Editor Position Vacant laphoundnews@vlms.ca |  | Librarian Kathryn Hawkins librarian@vlms.ca |
 | Field Trips Sean Maier fieldtrips@vlms.ca | | Field Trips & Program Coordinator Arlene Modderman arlene.modderman@vlms.ca |
 | Program Coordinator Karol Jorgensen karol.jorgensen@vlms.ca |  | Show Chair Sarah Hamilton showchair@vlms.ca |
 | Social Committee Barb McKenzie barb.mckenzie@vlms.ca | | Workshop Karen Rowe lapidaryworkshop@vlms.ca |
| Webmaster Becci Simmons web@vlms.ca |
We are still looking for volunteers for the following positions, please contact president@vlms.ca if you would be willing to donate your time and join a convivial and supportive team to help keep our club going.
- Secretary
- Vice President
- Laphound News Editor
- Social Committee Chair
Christmas party, 2022
As is traditional, instead of a members’ meeting we held a Christmas Party in December. There is no speaker and no club business meeting. Instead we had a pot luck and sit and chat. Here follows the social committee report:
- The VLMS annual Christmas party was held at the Lawn Bowling Club on Monday,
December 5 th , 2022. - The Club was decorated with fir boughs and colored metallic bows, and the seating
was in a horse-shoe arrangement so that everyone could see each other and chat
comfortably. - Members were asked to sign up with the item or dish that they had chosen to bring,
and although only 19 members signed up originally, the ranks swelled for a total of 38
people in the end. - There was a well rounded variation of items, like turkey, ham, sausages, scalloped
potatoes, German style sauerkraut and red cabbage, raw veggies and dip, Greek salad,
a large Caesar salad, 3-cheese appetizer with crackers, cranberry salad, guacamole
and tortilla chips, and multiple wonderful desserts. - Thank you all, who brought the delicious food!
- There was an optional gift exchange. Next year we hope to have more of a program,
with prizes to be won. - Pictures were taken of everyone and they will be submitted for the next Laphound
News. - Everyone cleaned up with an amazing efficiency, and the whole event finished at
8:30pm.
Some snapshots of the event – click on the pictures to see them larger:
