2 The RAPS Sheet January 2020 CO-PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE RAPS is your ticket to bridge, hiking, and much more RAPS MEMBERS, LET ME TAKE this opportunity to try to entice you all to expand your involvement in our group’s activities. I know you are aware of our monthly general meetings. These gatherings let us eat a light lunch together and get some social visiting done. RAPS members come from working in a wide variety of academic departments. Some of us worked in non-academic areas within PSU. Some members are not actually retired from PSU (spouses, partners, and folks retired from other universities). The RAPS program committee always gets interesting speakers for these meetings. We all get a chance to further our understanding of topics outside of our main work (scientists and engineers can learn something about art, for example). RAPS groups (the Book Group, the Hiking Group, and the Bridge Group) are another way of keeping active and meeting periodically with like-minded RAPS members. I organize the Bridge Group’s monthly sessions, so I am most familiar with bridge as a way to engage socially while keeping our aging brains challenged by the complexities of contract bridge. The Bridge Group players are always willing to include folks with different bidding systems and playing styles. We are adaptable and welcome newcomers. I also periodically hike with the Hiking Group. I tend to avoid the longer, more difficult hikes. Shorter hikes give me a chance keep my aching body working to explore nature (birds, trees, streams, and some hills). A few times a year I meet with the Book Group. This group reads both fiction and non-fiction selections. Thoughts from other folks always enhance my experience of the books. For example, we have read some biographies (Steve Jobs and Leonardo di Vinci among them) which raised questions about technology. In those situations “techies” like me try to assist the non-techies in the group. I am suggesting RAPS offers social events, intellectual experiences, brain sustaining activity, and healthy hiking for its members. Please consider stretching out and trying something new with your fellow RAPSters. —Steve Brennan Hikers enjoy planning 2020 hiking schedule The Hiking Group gathered on December 10 at Larry and Diane Sawyer’s home to plan the 2020 hiking schedule. Left, from foreground: Diane Sawyer, Deve Swaim, Eileen Brennan, Steve Brennan, Cilla Murray-Dieterich, and Mary Lane Stevens. Right, from foreground: Tom Hard, Tom Dieterich, Leif Terdal, and Marge Terdal. Not pictured: Larry Sawyer. Larry Sawyer photo
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