With the return of daylight savings comes the return of the social Fridays nights at Alphington Bowls Club. Try your hand at bowls, meet locals, have a drink with your friends or family and some dinner … Great prices. Great food. Great company!

Out Men’s Breakfast on Saturday 28 October has been cancelled. John has fractured his hip. Poor thing!

We wish him a speedy and straightforward recovery - and will keep you updated in the next event scheduled for Saturday 15 November.

We’re looking forward to Thursday - our next Op Shop Adventure will be departing ACC at 10am … and then Alphington Arts is on at 7.30pm. Book in on our website.

Also, on Tuesday it’s Kalimna’s birthday 🎂 (pop past and say happy birthday!) AND we have all of grade 5 from Fairfield PS coming along to talk about what makes a great community space and the sorts of activities that can run here. And then they are going to go back to school and design their own community buildings and programs. We hope we can offer them some inspiration!

We look forward to seeing you soon and hope you can join us this week.

Our community morning on Friday includes crafty chats inside and gardening outside from 10am followed by Community Lunch at 12pm.

Cheers Leanne

Hi everyone, I hope you had a great school holidays and enjoyed the AFL Grand Final and are as excited as I am about daylight savings (I have been waking with the birds at 5.30am for the last couple of weeks aagh). I was down in Geelong heartland (Anglesea) for the footy - but there were enough ex-Fitzroy people at the pub to make it a fun day for lots of people … and they served up free party pies at half time which was a boon for winners and losers alike!

We’re back on deck this week. I called in on Friday and it was all looking great - the garden is going gang-busters. We had Project Stationery here for the first week of the holidays and Corrin was also around running her 6 week Introduction to Weaving course, along with a one day workshop for teenagers that looked super. Julie was also around co-working and some of our regular groups continued to meet. It is great to know that things have a life of their own and can continue on even when the office is closed.

This term is a busy one, kicking off with our next Thrift Seekers Op Shop Adventure on Thursday 16 October leaving ACC at 10am - we’ll be catching the bus over to Sydney Road this time to check out the op shops over there. Book in on our website. $5 includes morning tea (cake and coffee). On that night we also have Alphington Arts - for anyone who loves making art, this is a practical collective that shares skills and has a great chat. This time Elise will be teaching us some landscape painting techniques. Starts at 7.30pm. Costs $15. All materials are provided.

Then we have a Diwali celebration at Community Lunch on Friday 24 October. We’ll do some dancing led by Meet, feature some singing by Papu and have some yummy Indian food for lunch.

Then we have our AGM on Monday 27 October at 6pm. Join us for dinner and we’ll take a little photo trip down memory lane with Kalimna’s wonderful snaps, to look at all the great things we did in the financial year. It always amazes me what we can achieve in a year with such a small staff. Please contact us if you are keen to attend so we can guess at catering numbers.

Then we blink and it’s Christmas right? We have the Alphington Christmas Market on Saturday 22 November from 11am-2pm, along with the opening of Alphington Open Studios - which once again runs for two weekends across the neighbourhood.

Our annual Christmas Lunch will once again be hosted here in the garden on Friday 12 December at 12pm and Christmas Carols will run on Sunday 12 December at 7pm at the Alphington Bowls Club.

In amongst all this our programs continue. Community Lunch starts up this week on Friday from 12pm as does Alphington Playgroup on Wednesday from 10am in the front garden. Please note that Crunch and Garden to Plate start back up in two weeks.

So much on. I am exhausted thinking about it already! No … it is going to be super. Also, check out the posts below - some interesting things on in our neighbourhood that you might like to attend.

We look forward to seeing you at ACC this week.

Cheers Leanne

New flood maps have been published for our area by Melbourne Water. If you haven’t seen them yet you can check them out here.

If you have questions or need more information SPAN Community House is running an info session on Tuesday 21 October at 6-7pm. The address is 64 Clyde Street, Thornbury.

You can contact Carmen to register, climate@spanhouse.org.