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Four Seasons Spotlight All grown up - the wages of the golden years Neighborly Notes By Bobbie Eckel A special thank you to residents who care enough about their pets to walk them on a leash. A leash serves to protect the dogs from straying into the streets and keeps the pet in an area where the owner can protect and control when necessary. The City of Beaumont and the Four Seasons community have codes which mandate that pets be leashed and that owners are responsible for picking up after their pets as well. As our community population grows, this show of responsibility for pets and for other residents becomes increasingly important. Be sure to mark your calendars. Daylight Saving Time begins on Sunday, March 10. Turn your clocks one hour ahead (���Spring forward!���) and use the day as a chance to check the batteries in your smoke alarms. If you are interested in being a candidate for the one HOA Board seat up for election this year, please turn in your application to the Lodge office by Mar. 10. The General Session of the Board will be held on Thursday, March 14, at 1 pm in the Ballroom. Plan to attend to see and hear what is happening in our community. The Superhero Relay for Life Team from San Gorgonio Hospital is throwing a Beach Blanket Bunko party at 1 pm on Saturday, March 23, at the Beaumont Civic Center and invites all Four Seasons residents to participate. It costs only $10 to play; there is a prize for the best beach-themed outfit and also for the group which brings the most players. Every penny taken in goes to the American Cancer Society. Call Judy Brooks, (951) 769-2135, or Sharon Goodman, (951) 769-2114 if you are interested. Banning Center for the Arts is presenting a Watercolor Spectacular, now through Mar. 23, at Milford Zornes and Mary Backer Master���s Gallery, 138 San Gorgonio, in Banning. Works of Edwin Tuazon will be featured. The exhibit is open Wednesday through Saturdays, 10 am to 5 pm. For additional information, call (951) 849-3993. More good opportunities for theater in Beaumont - the Cast Players first production of 2013, ���The Farndale Avenue 6 FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | MARCH 2013 | community News Housing Estate and Townswomen���s Guild Dramatic Society Murder Mystery,��� a comedy with a long name, will open for a three weekend run at the Beaumont Women���s Community Center, 306 E. Sixth Street, on Friday, March 1. All performances feature cabaret table seating (4 to a table). Admission for all performances except opening night is $12. Opening night will feature a dessert theater; advanced reservations for the evening are $18 each. Easter Sunday falls on March 31 this year. Lodge hours are reduced for that Sunday: 12 pm to 9 pm. That weekend also should be the marker for heating the pool. Because the holiday falls on a weekend, Waste Management pick-up will not be affected. Other special events offered by the city of Beaumont in March include a Literary Fair, Mar. 2, at the Albert A. Chatigny Community Recreation Center from 8:30 am to 3 pm, and a Low Cost Animal Care Clinic at the Civic Center, also on Mar. 2, from 9 to 11 am. A Public Safety Memorial Pancake Breakfast Fund raiser is scheduled at the Civic Center on Mar. 30 from 8 to 11 am at a cost of $5 per person. Softball buffs, it���s time to join the Valley-Wide Senior Softball League. The League plays out of Valley Wide Recreation Center in San Jacinto. All levels of play are involved; interested players must be age 55 or older. Summer and winter seasons are scheduled. The cost is only $30 a season. You play at least 40 games each season. Game Days are Tuesdays and Thursdays. Practice is on Wednesdays and Fridays, 7:30 to 9:30 am. Modified ASA rules are utilized. Players interested in playing during the Summer Season must sign up no later than May. Please call (951) 927-4509 for additional information or to sign up to play. For those who are caring for an ill or disabled family member, the Beaumont City Caregivers Support Group meets the first Tuesday of each month, 1 to 3 pm, at the Beaumont Community Center at 1310 Oak Valley Pkwy. Enjoy the month! Adrift in a sea of numbers By Crochet E. Oldman My numbers are up. It used to be that I had to remember just two numbers: my address and telephone. Now, in this digital age there are those two and my cell phone ��� and my wife���s cell phone and the pins for the ATM, for online banking and e-mail and Amazon. com and American Express and Visa and the Four Seasons web site and��� well you get the idea. Right at the point in life when my memory has lost some of its ��� shall we say ��� carrying capacity, just to get through the day I am required to keep track of more numbers than a Las Vegas bookie. I need a secretary. I have been terrible with numbers all my life. I never did master the multiplication tables, and logarithms ��� don���t ask. In college I majored in English because numbers baffle me. My hopes of becoming a world-renowned surgeon ran aground on a pre-med physics course filled with bewildering numerical values. I once lost a job because I couldn���t remember my Social Security number. I worked as a hod carrier to make money for college and got one of my construction jobs after about a week in a hiring hall ��� long enough that I was beginning to go in the hole instead of setting aside tuition. Anyway, I got out to the job site and the foreman asked me for the number ��� something to do with payroll. I told him I didn���t know and he looked at me with a mixture of contempt, alarm and sympathy ��� like I had early Alzheimer���s. I didn���t know a guy paid to lug bricks, mortar and cinder blocks up a scaffold needed to have a head for figures. He needed help right then, so he kept me on the job for a day, paid me off and went looking for someone who had a high enough IQ to keep his numbers straight. I went back to the hiring hall and deeper in the hole. One number I have remembered all my life is my Marine Corps serial number. On arrival at Parris Island, my drill instructor told me loudly, and quite impolitely, I had better remember that number on pain of serious repercussions. As I recall he said, ���Or I���m going to stomp a mud hole in your (derriere) and then stomp it dry.��� I was also warned, equally rudely, that I needed to remember the serial number on my rifle. I was quickly able to recite those two numbers without error whether asleep, awake, distracted or anesthetized. Then we moved to the rifle range and I was issued a new rifle with a new number. After the range, I got a third rifle ��� a couple of months in Marines and three rifle serial numbers. Then at my first duty station I was issued a fourth. Over four years I probably had eight or nine rifles at different posts. My numerical ineptness took over. Before each rifle inspection I would carefully read the number on the receiver and repeat it over and over until the inspection was finished. I always avoided the dreaded mud hole, but was able to commit none of the numbers to memory. This handicap has become much more severe in this ���paperless��� digital age. Everything runs on numbers. I used to walk in the bank, say hello to a teller who knew me and cash a paper check. Now I deal with a robot ��� the ATM ��� that knows nobody and wants a plastic bank card and numbers from me before giving up a nickel. The convenience of shopping and banking on line has been widely touted but is often less than convenient. I must enter a user name and a password just to get into the digital store or bank. To have that name and password I must have pre-registered, a tedious process that involves entering all kinds of numerical information. Just make one teensy mistake with all those numbers and the registration fails and I am barred from doing what I want to do. Once registered, if I hit one wrong key, the whole transaction falls apart. And online, how do you try on the shirt, smell the aftershave or kick the tires? I���d rather go to the store. In an effort to endure this assault by numbers, I have a notebook I keep by my computer. It is filled with passwords and pins and user IDs and questions to be answered if can���t remember or keyed something in wrong. I constantly refer to it, but don���t carry it when I���m out and about with a cell phone, iPad or GPS. I become reliant on my fallible memory for numbers, because with its countless entries the notebook is too heavy to carry. It weighs almost as much as the computer. Maybe I could put wheels on it, like a carry-on suitcase. How can it be ���paperless��� if I need all that paper? Community News | FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | MARCH 2013 7

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