Status Update

My intention to blog after each monthly meeting fell by the wayside in the madness that tends to be fall in our household.

The health of our chapter president, who is suffering from ALS, appeared to plateau in the fall. In September, he was confined to a wheelchair, but stil attended our Middle Atlantic Region Conference in Charlottesville, VA in early October. Also in October, he recieved his motorized wheelchair and we was quite good at navigating it through the narrow passageways of the hotel where we meet.

Communication through email took some hits as the president tries to discontinue use of his company email and use only his private email. He is also either infrequently on email or is choosing to allow other chapter leaders to make decisions. This could go either way. As I have mentioned before, even without this illness, I believe he would have been more of a hands off leader!

Our October meeting was a tour of a local construction site, so we held our board meeting at the office of a local architect a week later. Despite the old age of the building, wheelchair access was available into the building and the meeting went off without a hitch.

Our November meeting was back at the hotel where we normally meet. We did not have a quorum present until about 45 minutes after the meeting was supposed to have started. Now, our chapter leadership consists of a board of 13 members, that means a quorum is only 7 people. Our December meeting was a bowling night, so we held the board meeting at a nearby bar that offered some wheelchair access. We never reached a quorum on that night - stuck at only 5 leaders present: president, immediate past president, treasurer, secretary (me) and 1 director. These last two meetings have caused serveral of us as leaders to hold conversations about how to not only get a quorum at each meeting for the rest of this fiscal year, but also make sure that moving forward we have leaders in place who understand what they are committing to.

November's membership meeting was interesting because of some folks who were in attendance. We had a panel discussion on construction site safety and probably had over 40 members present. That is slightly larger than we would normally see, especially in November. Our chapter president, like many architects in town, spent a number of years working at RTKL, the large international firm headquartered, at least for now, in Baltimore. About 8 or so folks that worked with our president during his time at RTKL attended the meeting to see him and support him. It was a touching show of friendship and one that I know our president appreciated very much.

December's meeting, the bowling night, showed us a couple of things about handicapped access. The bowling alley, in the Patterson Park area of Baltimore, is totally NON-accessible. There is a pair of doors at the main entry that offer a total of about 30" of width and then two sets of doors in tandem make it difficult for an able bodied person to enter much less someone with a disability. We were then given the 6 lanes upstairs with no elevator. The original bar that we decided to use for the board meeting proved to be non-accessible and the alternate location had two steps up to get to the seating area where we met. The owners of that bar had some plywood to help get the wheelchair up to the area, so that was a positive.

I find it interesting that many of spend enormous hours making sure the buildings that we design and build offer universal access to persons with disabilities but when faced with planning an event, we drop the ball when one of our leaders has a disability. Our typical meeting site offers wheelchair access, with some difficulty, but it is there. For our November meeting, we were relocated from our usual 5th floor venue down to the restaurant level. That meant a trip through the kitchen for our president, but the staff was great and assisted in getting him through. For December, we didn't even consider the need until the week before the event!

The December meeting was both distressing for me and uplifting. Our president is continuing to loose the use of his hands and fingers. As the muscles atrophy, his hands appear gnarled as if by rheumatoid arthritis. Manuevering the wheelchair's joystick is becoming difficult for him and typing is becoming cumbersome. Fortunately, he has many of the prompts needed to run the meeting already in the laptop, so he need only find the prompt, punch the enter key and the computer speaks his prompt. It worked well for about 80% of the meeting. For the rest, the immediate past president and I assisted! I worry about the future and in particular, his ability to continue to communicate with us. We have good leadership in place, though neither of our vice presidents seem interested in fulfilling their obligations, but that is the subject of another entry. At these meeting, essentially either myself or our immediate past president perform the job that these two VP's should be doing.

The uplifting portion of the meeting came from watching our president and his wife work together to get him set, allow him to run the meeting and then get back out to their van to go home. This was a display of unconditional love. I only hope that I have the courage to do the same should my wife and I find ourselves in this same situation.