Gillett Time  02-07-07

            I don’t believe I have overheard or been involved in a single conversation these past few days that didn’t start with “What about this weather?” or something equally profound. It’s not that I have any better words for the incredible cold, but it is amazing how what’s going on outside can completely dominate our lives.

            One other thing that has happened is that I’m realizing how much I now sound like my father when discussing the weather. When I was young, no matter what extremes were raging outside our doors my father would always say something like, “Well, I remember when we had [fill in a bigger number of inches of snow or weeks of drought or degrees below zero] back in [fill in a year before I was born].” I’m pretty sure I doubted some of those statistics back then, yet now I hear myself saying things like, “Well, when I was young we never closed school just because it was really cold,” or “My parents made me go to school even though it was [fill in the blank here with some sort of calamitous weather situation, often including words like tornado or blinding snowstorm or temperatures well below zero].” It’s amazing how in hindsight our childhoods usually seem so much harder than any situation a youngster might experience these days, at least as far as the weather goes.

            Even with this extreme change in our outdoor climate, activities continue as always here in our neck of the woods. AVEC, which stands for “Arts Vitally Enrich Communities,” spent a portion of the past couple weeks in residence at both Washington Middle School in Oconto Falls and New View in Gillett where they led participants through the process of imagining and creating both small and large-scale murals which will be presented to the community in the near future. This husband and wife duo, Connie and Tim Friesen, are well-known to many in the Gillett community for their set design work for Main Street Revue, our local theatrical company, and have also facilitated a mural at Gillett Elementary School. Revitalize Gillett, Inc., is proud to be part of the sponsors of this last mural project along with including Wisconsin Rural Partners and CESA 8, among others.

            On Thursday, February 15, Joe Lawniczak, Design Director of the Wisconsin Main Street Program out of Madison, who has been a great friend to us in the Gillett Main Street Program, will assist the Community Revitalization Loan Program in presenting the particulars of a brand-new funding opportunity available to building owners in Gillett. Beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the downstairs meeting room at Wells Fargo Bank, this evening presentation will help to introduce the process that a dedicated committee has been working on for many months. The meeting is open to the public.

            On Sunday, February 18, Revitalize Gillett will present its fifth annual Appreciation Dinner at St. John’s Lutheran Church at 5:30 p.m. This yearly event gives our organization an opportunity to thank all those who have volunteered for events and activities or in any other way have helped to fulfill the mission of Revitalize Gillett, Inc. There will be a short program, highlighted by the announcement of this year’s “Board Member of the Year” and “Volunteer of the Year,” both of which will be invited to receive their awards at the Wisconsin Main Street Awards Program to be held in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, on April 27, 2007. Along with Wausau, this year Gillett will receive an award for five years as a participating community in the Wisconsin Main Street Program. It is daunting for many of us to realize it has already been five years since then Governor McCallum visited us in Gillett to award this new designation in the Meunier-Pelow Auditorium in June of 2002.

            By the time many of you are reading this I hope we will be out of what can only be referred to as the “deep freeze” of 2007. I also hope the ground hog I saw on morning television news was right and there is less than six weeks of winter left!