We hosted our annual fundraising auction at the Dawson City Museum on Saturday night. It’s a big event and the highlight of the year for many!

The museum employees are busy for months collecting donations from Yukon businesses. As a volunteer, and a member of the Museum board, I pitch in where possible. This year I was the banker again.

Early in the day, I made chocolate chip cookies, a Cinnamon Toast Crunch cake, and confetti cupcakes to contribute to the food supply. Then Jeff baked six trays of wings at the last minute, and I tossed them in some BBQ sauce, so we could bring them over warm.

This year’s theme was Sports! Jeff lent me a Bronco’s jersey to wear.

In my role, I was responsible for signing out auction paddles to everyone and keeping a master spreadsheet I made with the names and auction items. The auction event was upstairs in the courtroom. My fellow board member Laurel was seated in the courtroom and recorded the winning bid and paddle number so it was instantly available for me to use downstairs in case someone had to leave early and needed to settle their account.

Our checkout payment system threw me a huge curveball this year, so I spent the entire night wrestling with scripting inside Google Sheets (with ChatGPT’s assistance) to try to produce a string of text we could copy over to the payment system computer but it wasn’t totally working, which made for a lot of extra work. Thank goodness my new friend Scotta was familiar with their payment system computer so between the two of us, we made it through. But it meant that I didn’t see any of the actual auction at all ☹️ I circled items on the program, though, so Jeff could try bidding for them.

This year, to match our sports theme, our spread of food included a hot dog and nacho bar, chicken wings, chili, homemade pretzel buns, and in our bar there were several fancy custom drinks.

Here’s a mix of photos from the night, a couple from me, more from Jeff, and a couple from Bunny:

Jeff was successful in bidding for three items: a set of Pampered Chef glass mixing bowls (3), a set of men’s personal care items (shampoo, body wash, etc), and a $100 gift certificate for the Grumpy Schnitzel food vendor who will be operating out of our arena again this winter (yay!).

We had two intermissions, so people could come down and fill up their plate and glasses, mingle with each other, or settle up with me at the bank. We auctioned off 80 items, plus had a silent auction, trivia, and games. It was a full night and didn’t wrap up until almost midnight!

It is great to see so many people out for the evening to support our museum!