A Winner At SBARA

It's the second Friday of the month, and it's SBARA's monthly general membership meeting. Since the wife arrived later in the evening, we didn't have enough time to eat dinner together before my 7:30pm meeting. So I went on my own, while my wife and James planned their night together.

I left the house at 6pm, and had dinner at my "default" Filipino restaurant, Cherry Garden. Meanwhile, wife and son decided to watch a movie before they had dinner. By 7:15, I was at the meeting venue, waiting for everyone else to arrive.

As in all our meetings, we had the customary raffle. Before the meeting started, we all perused the items being raffled off. This determined if it was worth participating in the raffle. Same with me. I saw a couple of interesting pieces  -- a portable remote weather station and $100 gift certificate from HRO (the ham radio candy store, as they call it). I purchased $10-worth of tickets. I placed 5 under the remote weather station, and 7 under the gift certificate.

Our guest speaker this evening was Chris (W6ATV), who talked about Amateur Television (ATV). His callsign is most appropriate, indeed. Since I do not have any idea about this aspect of amateur radio, I found the presentation very interesting. Chris was very knowledgeable about the topic, and he was just the right resource for this topic. There were lots of questions, and his talk ended 20 minutes past 9.

Now, the raffle. Aside from the two items I mentioned, there were 2 other items raffled off -- a handmade scarf by one of the club members, and an Extra Class Review Book. First on the block was the scarf. I was never interested in it so it didn't matter to me. Next was the book. I wasn't interested either since I was already an Extra class license holder. Then, came the weather station, but my number wasn't called. Oh well. There was one more.

As the raffle was going on, Don (N6DA) was making funny remarks about how we had been wanting to win a scarf, but never did. A big Oakland A's fan, he reacted when a green scarf was selected by the winner. He continued to make jokes as the final prize was being raffled off. And me, I was ready to give up since my winning any raffle has never been consistent.

"7726", "7726" was being announced. And I knew that was mine. I carefully went over my 12 sequentially-numbered tickets to confirm my hunch. And there it was, "7726". I approached the raffle table and secured my prize. Now this prize will surely come in handy -- $100-worth of goodies at the candy store. A great return on my investment, if I may say so.

Before we all left for the evening, a photograph of all 4 winners was taken, to be published in next month's club bulletin.