 Hi, welcome to Arlington's Community Update. Today I'm here at Monotomy Rocks Park with the friends of Monotomy Rocks Park, Judy and Mariana. You guys can start off by giving yourselves a little introduction. My name is Judy Weinberg. I'm the president of the Friends of Monotomy Rocks Park and I've been doing this for about 20 years. And I'm Mariana Foskett. I've also been a longtime member of the Friends from the beginning. And I'm the clerk of the Friends board. All right. Well, it's great to meet both of you. Thank you for coming out today. And so why don't you start off by giving us a little bit of history about Monotomy Rocks Park? Okay. We have a history of the park that you can buy as a booklet if you're really interested. And what the park was a wonderful gift from our forefathers. They hobbled together some farms and land from various landowners and made this park for us, which is about 33 acres. And the Friends formed a number of years ago when there was some concern about what was happening in the park and we've been active ever since. Great. Yeah. And now let's talk a little bit about the goals of the Friends of Monotomy Rocks Park. What have you accomplished over the years that you've been active? Well, the Friends were formed when they were, as Mariana alluded to, there were issues of what was happening at the park that we felt was detrimental to the health of the park. So it was formed back then, like 25 years ago or something. So our goal is to keep the park updated and keep it healthy. The town only has so many resources and we know that. So we are the stewards of the park. The Friends group, we're through this park every single day whereas the town just doesn't have the man person power to do that. Some of the things we've done recently, we've put aerators into the pond which we actually just turned that off yesterday. We run events here. We pay for a tree service to come through every few years and just do a complete cleanup of the entire park. What are some of the other things that we've done, Mariana? We've had some social events. We've had Earth Day to get people involved in the park. We have cleanups and I'm in charge of the invasive plants in the park of which there are many and it's going to be a full-time job for me forever. So any volunteers in the audience, please step forward. It's great. Yeah, that's great to hear. You know, this is such a beautiful park and I can only imagine what it would look like if we didn't have these guys coming around on a daily basis to keep it looking as great as it is. Do you have any events that are coming up that you'd like to talk about? We do have Spooky Walk. Spooky Walk has been in Arlington for about 20 years. It was started on a neighbor's front yard when she realized that kids really wanted to show off their costumes more than just for one day, so it was like a little parade. And now we have all around our pond are different spooky stations and kids come. It's the Saturday before Thanksgiving, before Halloween. I keep saying Thanksgiving. And we have many hundreds of kids come. It's a great event. If you want to help set it up, that would be great. If you want to come and enjoy it, that's fun too. It starts at dusk 6.30 or so. Yeah, that's the one we have coming up. It is the 26th of October. All right, that sounds like a lot of fun. So mark your calendars. October 26th, we got a fun event coming on. And my next question is how can the members of Arlington get involved with your organization? Well, they can be nominal members by just paying dues and that helps subsidize some of our work, which is we just had the stealing base and dredged two years ago. That was quite expensive. The tree work is very expensive. So just paying dues is a wonderful thing. They can also come help with invasive plants if they like to do something like that. And then we do have park cleanups. There's always litter to be cleaned up. But the park is pretty clean, thanks to our many volunteers who are here a lot. If they wanted to find us, we have a Facebook page, which is the Friends of Monotomy Rocks Park. And our website is friendsofmonotomy.org. All right, that answered my next question about how to get in contact with you. Yeah, is there a phone number or an email or are those the best way to reach you? Those are the best way to reach us. Okay. And we do have a few items for sale. We have a couple of these to our with t-shirts and t-shirts, hats, other things, aprons. So if you need something that says friends of, or friends, does it say friends or is it just monotomy? We're, go to our website. All right, nice little plug there. Well, yeah, it was awesome to meet with you guys. I'm really happy that you are out here on, you know, almost a daily basis, keeping this beautiful space nice and clean for the community. I'm sure Arlington really appreciates it. And we'll be looking forward to see the great work that you've been doing with the park. So thank you for meeting with us today. Oh, thank you very much, Shayla. Thank you.