The Page

Pastor Deano Young at The Gathering Place invites one and all to a community Christmas Eve service at The Gathering Place on Dec. 24 at 7:00 p.m. It's a joint project of three Slave Lake churches and has been going on for three years or so now, he tells us.
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It was fun being at the Rotary Club’s draw last Tuesday morning for the $10,000 cash raffle. After drawing Sarah Lamouche’s ticket as the big prize winner, Rotarian Harry Bartlett had the job of calling her, as well as second and third prize winners Lorraine Janzen and Gordon Potts. Clearly enjoying the task, Harry left Sarah a message, saying, ‘I have good news for you.’
She called him back within 10 minutes.
“Are you sitting down?” says Harry. “Maybe you should sit down.”
Then he tells her, and the gang of Rotarians erupted in a hearty cheer.
‘Boy, is she ever excited,” says Harry, after hanging up. “She’s coming right over.”
She did come right over too, to Boston Pizza where the draw was held, with her little daughter in tow. Apparently she’d bought the ticket from Harry himself, outside the ScotiaBank some time back.
Congratulations!
The other winners were not reached so easily.
If you want to see a video clip of the proceedings, you can probably find it at myslavelake.com. Mike Wahlstrom was recording the whole thing.
The festive atmosphere among the Rotarians that morning probably had as much to do with the fact that the cash raffle was the final episode in the club’s $400,000 fundraising commitment for the new library. It took about 2 ½ years and an awful lot of work. At times it looked as if the cash raffle could not possibly sell out by the deadline, but it did.
Congratulations are in order there as well. Good work! Well done!
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Word around town is that a Rona store is coming to Slave Lake. Of course the people who ‘know’ aren’t talking – at least not on the record – so we don’t know for sure. And even if we did ‘know’ for sure, sure things sometimes don’t happen. So there you are, for what it’s worth. There’s talk. That’s it.
The thing is, it’s much easier to believe this sort of stuff nowadays than it once was. The first Wal-Mart rumours four or five years ago seemed preposterous, and we all know what’s happened since then. Almost anything seems possible now. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
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We’ve been thinking about people’s first impressions of Slave Lake - or rather what they imagined the place to be like before they ever saw it. From some things we’ve heard lately, there’s often a huge difference between that and what people actually find here.
We’re thinking of doing a story about it and maybe you could help us out. Did Slave Lake turn out to be much different than you imagined? Was your mental image of the place way out of whack? Or was it pretty much what you expected?
Let us know. Do it via e-mail (lsleader@telusplanet.net), snail mail (Box 849, Slave Lake AB T0G 2A0), or call 849-4380.