Budgets & Birthdays

Now there’s a topic to really get your blood up—budgets. Especially professional association budgets. Be still my heart. Read on at your own risk. If you fall into a paroxysm of fiduciary frenzy, don’t come crying to me.

I am now the Treasurer of my professional association. That’s Treasurer with a Capital T that rhymes with P that stands for pool (for you Music Man lovers out there). Pool would be more fun than this. Several executive board members and I had a two hour conference call to go over the budget line by line by line by line. When we were finished I was absolutely wrung out. Now we have our annual conference coming up and I have to present the proposed budget to the Board and to another group of members. This means I have to explain why we did what we did.

When I was an ordinary mortal member of the Board, I didn’t pay much attention to the budget. “What-ev-er” was my attitude. Now, though, I actually have a stake in its neat orderly rows of now-comprehensible figures.

The new president wants to increase her travel budget, but since we are running a deficit, we hope to disabuse her of the notion that she can use our money to finance her family vacations (as she has done in the past with her employer’s money). Did I say that out loud? Meow. A few of us know her story and now we have to nicely maneuver the Board into keeping her budget status quo (us Treasurers occasionally get to flaunt our Latin).

The past president will miss the first round of the Board meeting on Sunday, so we have to table the budget discussion until she can get there to make a case for fiscal responsibility. She is aware of the current president’s shenanigans so it is important to have her there.

I used to look forward to these Board meetings and the conferences, but now I have these petty politics clouding my sunny outlook. Once we get past the Board meetings, the rest of next week’s conference should be fun, though.
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In other news, today is my little girl's 35th birthday. Hard to believe. I know she went on a trail ride today (as in horseback riding) as part of her celebration. She told me the other day that she was at the cattle market this week. I asked her if she were picking out some steaks, but she was serious--someday she wants to raise cattle so she went to learn more about them. I realized she'll finally have her dream job--being a veteraniarin--if only an amateur one.