Kevin Miller-Conley

Happy January everybody! We have had our first business meeting of the year, and already we’re off to a great start. We started with a delicious dinner from Pollo Bravo, provided by our Junior Warden. For business, the Lodge scheduled Matias’s EA Degree for later this month, and voted to accept the Petition of our long-term prospect Steven. The Worshipful Master ended the meeting by reading Five Masonic Thoughts by Brother William A. Carpenter, a Short Talk Bulletin. We retired to our Clubhouse downstairs, where we had a lively conversation about what makes someone virtuous. All in all, a wonderful kick-off to the year!

We enjoyed our traditional year-end dinner at Fogo de Chao tonight to great effect! As always the food was tremendous and we had a wonderful time sharing Fellowship with each other. Sadly, our Worshipful Master and a few others couldn’t join us do to the flu, and they were missed. Here’s to a wonderful 2024, and hopefully next year will be just as great!

It seems like 2024 only just started, and here we are having our last Stated meeting. It was a great end to the year with us discussing how to spend our remaining Charity budget, we positively balloted on soon-to-be-Brother Matias’s candidacy, and we discussed moving the January Stated to the 8th, since the 1st is a holiday. It was a great night, followed by some great fellowship!

Last night we had a very busy meeting between the presentation of two lifetime memberships, a visit from our District Deputy, holding elections, and as well we voted for our Budget for the year 2025.  The budget passed after some brief discussion, as well as a motion detailing how we’ll be spending some money fixing up our Clubhouse space in the Kenton Masonic Temple.

As well, Friendship has elected the following Brothers to leadership for the year 2025:
WM: Kevin Miller-Conley
SW: Hunter Bronson
JW: Kyle Diesner
Secretary: Jim Loennig
Treasurer: Patrick Reilly
Investment Committee: Walter Lee
Investment Committee (Kevin’s remaining 1 year term): Hunter Bronson

Another wonderful night of Degree work at Friendship. We’re now out of EAs, after Matt passed to the degree of Fellowcraft. There was a little scramble for which chairs to sit in, but Kevin opened the Lodge again with everyone shifted up a chair, and then Walter conferred with Chris giving his amazing lecture. We were graced with the presence of three Brothers from Beaverton as well! We ended the night in the Clubhouse, enjoying Pizza and fellowship, as is tradition.

Given that October is a wonderful 5 Wednesday month, we had a second round of Fellowship in a row! Hunter’s new candy machine made its debut, and Walter brought his boys by to sell us some pies for their field trip. When looking for a board game, we came across our ancient Ouija board, perfect for the Halloween Season!

This week we had almost as many prospects as members! We once again found utility in our lovely hot dog roller which provided us with some delicious sausages for dinner. After some light fare, we enjoyed a lovely game of Unstable Unicorns, brought by Matias.

This month, our Worshipful Master is in Greece! So Brother Senior Warden Kevin took the east in his stead. We had a short business meeting, ending with some light education, and a lovely poetry reading from Worshipful Brother Walter.

We held our Officer’s Meeting last night to get ready for the October Stated meeting. We decided upon a date for Matt’s FC, and talked more about our plans for the Clubhouse space for next year. For a few people, it was their first time seeing the front room after we moved the space around and displayed the lovely and restored Eagle embroidery, and the Demolay Banner we found in the back closet.