PALM Is Filled!

Ellie picked up the mail today. There are over 700 riders that have signed up for PALM. We have reached our limit so, as of Feb 3, PALM is officially closed. Last year we filled in a little over 3 weeks on February 19. This year we filled in less than two weeks. This is really amazing, given the winter we're having. Who can believe in spring?

Vickie has hundreds of applications that she's working on. With the big rush to mail in the applications, there were a lot of errors: missing checks, signatures, names, etc. It's going to take time to contact each rider to get the errors corrected. I have the easy job: I enter the corrected applications into my PC and send out confirmation letters, but I have no applications. Tomorrow I will get the first small batch so I can test the program for this year. I'm looking forward to it but I'm 700 applications behind. It's going to be weeks before I catch up. Spring training and Lent will have started before I'm done. Please try to be patient.

There is no easy way for us to tell you whether you are on the ride or not. The applications are spread out between three people in different geographic locations. Any effort we make to determine whether an application made it in time takes away from the effort to enter it and mail out the confirmation. Even if we did compile a list of people who are on the ride, what would we do with it? Use it to send emails? Isn't that what the confirmation letters are for? Post it on the internet? Personally, I wouldn't be happy if my name was on the internet. I get enough spam as it is. Does anybody have any ideas?

I'm going to spend the last free night that I will have for a while packing vegetable seeds into envelopes for the Garden Resource Program. I've heard back from the Michigan Land Bank. I'm still on track for leasing a lot two blocks from my house for gardening. At least one neighbor there is all for it. And I have another meeting next week on a proposed community garden. I've taken pictures of one proposed site. It's completely covered in snow (surprise!) so it's hard to visualize a garden there and it's a long way from a source of water.