Friday, July 06, 2007

Surprise!

At our July 6th meeting, we had 11 members and four guests present (one of whom signed up after the meeting)! Alec Metz, with his smooth and flowing mastery of the English language, led us as TMoD in another terrific meeting with his theme of "surprises"!

The biggest surprise was that there was no assigned Table Topics Master! Instead, pieces of paper were attached to the bottom of each chair in the room, and the three lucky individuals with a black dot on their piece of paper got to each be a Table Topics Master and call on one person each! This went unexpectedly smoothly, with Scott Wilbur emerging as the "Best Table Topics" winner for his "Ugly American" diatribe about his menu expectations in a foreign country where he didn't speak the language! We even voted for a "Best Table Topics Master" among the three who drew the assignment - that award went to Leena Oh.

Oh, yes... we had speeches, too! Eric Timmerman was "Most Improved" for his #4 speech about camping in Big Sur. Scott Wilbur then won "Best Speaker" for his #3 speech on bone marrow, and how to be a donor. "Best Evaluator" was a tie between Glenn Woodson and Brian Anderson.

Another very pleasant surprise was the return of Michael Barksdale, who we promptly voted into membership!

We hope to see the rest of the active members back again soon now that the NPS term break is over. We can get a little lethargic when there are a lot of empty seats!

Upcoming events:
Mon July 16: Executive Board meeting, 6PM, La Mesa Community Center
Sat July 28: Smedley Saturday, 1PM(?), La Mesa Coomunity Center
(Sign up now with Angi to get one of the ten speaking slots)
Fri Aug 10: Club Humorous Speech and Evaluation Contest

2 comments:

cole said...

hi, curious if your club uses a digital camera or what, to film your speakers , our club is looking for a lighter modern camera to get away from the older vcr tape. In District 4 also (san francisco) and you must have the best blog at least i am impressed.

Renaissance Toastmasters

http://toastmasterssf.googlepages.com/

toasmasterssf@gmail.com

Arnie B said...

Hi Cole - thank you for your kind words! Your web site is quite impressive! I love the slide show and the yellow foolscap motif - looks like you have lots of fun at your meetings!

We use a mini-dv camera (Cannon ELURA 100) to tape our meetings - although due to a variety of circumstances it has been left behind the last two :(

I import the videos into iMovie (I'm a Mac freak) and extract the speeches (or other snippets that are deemed "blogworthy"), upload them to YouTube, and post the embedded link here on the blog.