Fall 2008
Fall Festival 2008
On Sunday, October Sth from 1pm — 5pm, Amberations will hold it’s 4th annual Fall Festival. This event will be an afternoon of great music, fun raffles, good food, games, face painting, crafts and most importantly...great people. The Fall Festival is our and largest event of the year and our single most significant fundraiser. We hope you'll join us.
Festival food favorites include our famous pumpkin chili, spanikopita, ginger bread cookies, Hoffman hot dogs, hot and cold cider and Gannon’s own homemade pumpkin ice cream. We are planning some delicious new additions to our menu this year so be sure to come hungry.
Harvey Nusbaum has agreed once again to oversee our musical lineup which just keeps getting better and better every year. Music includes Harvey’s own group The Salt Potatoes, the very unique rhythm of the Kambuyu Marimba Ensemble, the exciting bluegrass of Diamond Someday, and we are working on adding yet another great group which will just have to be a surprise. Plan on staying the whole time as you'll not want to miss a note.
Each year Amberations is fortunate to receive donations from local businesses. We offer most of these as raffle prizes and also hold a silent auction for some. Restaurant gift certificates, ski tickets, John Deere toys as well as original works of art will be displayed and available. Please be sure to check out and support our raffle.
The Fall Festival is held at the Otisco Lake Community Center, 2223 Amber Road in Marietta, which is adjacent to our barn. For anyone that has not yet visited our site, it is a great opportunity to do so while attending a fun event.
Animal Update
Katie and Smiley are doing great and they are two of the most spoiled sheep on the planet. They love their barn and really enjoy visitors coming and feeding them “sheep treats”. Katie and Smiley sometimes join visitors on walks in the woods...call in advance if you'd like to arrange for sheep company on your hike.
Happy and Shadow are our loving barn cats. They also fall into the spoiled category, preferring canned cat food of meat with gravy. The kitties get a can in the morning and one at night as enticement to hang at the barn waiting for visitors. They get dried food too (Friskies Dental Diet is their fav.) We have been told they really like that expensive moist food in the foil pouches if anyone wants to bring them something special. We gratefully accept donations of any kind.
We had our first hatching of ducks this spring. The two “babies” are now as big as the adults. Visitors can usually find the ducks by following the stream east along the fence if they are not right around the barn. At dusk the ducks waddle and quack to the barn as they like to sleep in the cage adorning the front of our barn. It is quite comical.
Our chicken population is constantly threatened by predators. Visitors to the barn can view our new raccoon proof roost and see that we have improved our doors so the barn is more varmint proof at night. So far so good. Our latest chicks spend their days foraging with the ducks. At night we transport them to safe territory. Our goal is to have them flying to their safe perch (without help) by winter.
Visitors are welcome anytime at the barn. Call first if you’d like a guide or company, or just stop by and enjoy.
Outhouse Update
Our new outhouse has been delivered and should be operable by our fall festival. Thank you to the donors that made this possible, your generosity is truly appreciated.
BonTon Fundraiser
Twice a year the Bon-Ton stores host BonTon Community Days. Community Day is a fundraising event for all 501¢3 nonprofit and school organizations. Here’s how it works:
Bon-Ton provides our organization with coupon booklets at no charge.
Volunteers from our organization sell the booklets for $5 each, and our organization retains the entire $5 from each booklet sold!
Here’s what makes it worthwhile for you. Each book contains a coupon for $10.00 off almost anything in the store (along w/various other coupons). Some of our more frugal supporters have told us you can usually find quality items that cost $10.00 — fleece blankets, hats, scarves, socks and jewelry among them. Use your $10.00 coupon and you basically get it free (less the $5.00 you donated to Amberations). It’s a great time to do shopping for the holidays.
We will have the coupon booklets available at our Fall Festival. Buy a few and plan on attending this great event. Since we have become involved, we have discovered that on the day of this sale Bon-Ton has a lot of really good deals (even 85% off).
The best part...a few weeks after the sale Amberations receives a check in the mail for a percentage of all the coupon books the Bon-Ton associates have sold in the store.
It sounds complicated, but really it’s not. Plus this event helps raise almost enough money to feed our sheep each year. Check it out.
Welcome, Raina
Amberations is pleased to announce we have a new board member. Raina Olexa has agreed to serve as our treasurer. Raina has a background with event organization for agriculture related programs, media and publication creation, photography, fundraising, horticulture, and database management and design projects. She lives just minutes from our site and best of all...she is full of enthusiasm.
Thank you, and welcome Raina!
Gloria Wiley — President
Anne Brittenham — Vice President
Raina Olexa - Treasurer
Paul Brittenham — Board Member
Geocaching
Amberations is receiving a lot of visitors thanks to the placements of geocaches on our site. For those not familiar, geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment.
For more information go to www.geocache.com.
Pumpkin People
Since we offer adoption of our Pumpkin People through their own silent auction at our Fall Festival...we really felt they deserve a paragraph of their own. Pumpkin People evolved during preparations for our first festival. They are life sized scarecrow type figures with very unique feet. Their feet make them the only figures of their sort we know of that are able to stand on their own. Pumpkin People have pumpkin heads (of course) that are interchangeable with melons, soccer and basket balls, cabbage, cauliflower and countless other head shaped objects. This allows them to be comfortable in almost any environment during any season.
We know of some Pumpkin People that have graced the porches of their adoptive families’ homes for years and are constantly sporting new outfits and accessories to match the seasons and the holidays.
Each Pumpkin Person comes with a personal short biography. Last year there was even a Pumpkin Sheep. Be sure to check out what evolves this year.
2008 Amberations Bike Race
Congratulations to Scott Ouderkirk, the winner of the 2008 Amberations Bike Race.
