Year in review: Blaine Senior Center

By Jodi Sipes

2015 was an active and fun year at Blaine Senior Center. Every month has a pancake breakfast, Bingo, birthday lunch, holiday celebrations, movies, outings, entertainment and education. Every day has exercise, games, meals and community fellowship, and always lots of laughter!

We have more than 700 members 50 years and older, including over 100 valued volunteers and 10 very active and involved board members.

Our main fundraisers are the April Rummage Sale, May Spring Tea, Fourth of July Pancake Breakfast, October Spaghetti Feed and December Homemade Arts and Crafts Bazaar, all bringing at least 150 people. Some draw over 600! These are open to the public and are highly anticipated community gatherings.

Strength training classes are offered for use of our Cybex gym with 10 cardio machines. The gym has constant use, but is never overcrowded. It is included with our $35/year membership – a great value for our members. This year we also added air conditioning!

Helpful information delivered from our stage included topics such as Medicare 101, long-term care insurance, hearing loss, police canine demonstration, memory loss, identity theft, aging at home, medical alert systems and Mended Hearts.

Balance assessments, injury assessments, blood pressure checks, haircuts and memory screenings are some of the great free services we brought our members.

A variety of music including blues, banjo, Dixieland, ukulele, jazz, swing, the Norwegian Male Chorus and school children provided entertainment.

Supper Club is our popular group that visits restaurants, and other groups play games including Bridge, pinochle, bunco, Wii bowling, pool and Ping-Pong. We are looking forward to expanding games and events with the use of the new pavilion in 2016.

Blaine Senior Center is a venue for Whatcom Nutrition Program lunches, Meals on Wheels, community meals, AARP tax help, driving class and the Blaine-Birch Bay Park and Recreation District 2 line dance and ballroom dance classes. We are happy to be such an active part of the Blaine community!