Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Post 2237 - Toastmasters and Other Stuff

It's past 10pm.  I should be in bed soon.

I had Toastmasters this evening.  It was a good meeting.  A woman in the club did a speech that was well received.   Table topics was great fun.  We were given job titles and we had to explain to the members why we would be a good candidate for that job.  Mine was "chicken sexer".

I told them the true story of how my parents' former neigbhour kept free range chickens.  Extremely free range.  They would wander around the entire neigbhourhood, and some of them would end up on my parents' lawn.  They would scratch at the lawn and defecate on it.  Very upsetting to my parents.

What actually happened is that I called animal control, and a woman from that fine division of the Kings County government parked her car across the street from my parents' place and sat there waiting for the birds to run amok.  When they did, she ran over to the woman who owned the property and made sure that this would not happen again.  The woman moved away not long after that.   Went back to Switzerland or wherever she was from.  Good riddance.

My own tale divulged from the above.  I explained that my dad and I became very good at picking up the chickens and seeing which ones were boys and which ones were girls.  The boys, we kept for dinner.  The girls were allowed to allowed to leave, where the chickens could literally come home to roost.  I managed to use a cliche as its actual meaning.  Points for that.

People laughed, but not as much as the member who wrote about how he would be the best cow inseminator in the world.  His arm was very long and was at just the right level with the cow's privates that he would not have to reach up or down.  His arm would not get tired as readily;  it was a win-win situation for him and his bovine clients.

I realize I don't talk about what we do at TM very much.  I figure most of you don't care.  But tonight's meeting had plenty of gentle humour that made most of chuckle more than a few times.

A long time ago, I heard a member of another club say that even though he had been in TM for 30+ years, and even though he might at first blush not want to go to a meeting, he always felt better after a meeting than he did going in.  That has been my experience about 99% of the time.  I don't always look forward to every meeting, but once I'm there, I feel fine and participate with about as much enthusiasm now as I did when I joined more than 20 years ago.   It is hard to convey that to someone who's never gone to Toastmasters, or to someone who has only been a member for a short time.   But we old-timers go for a reason.

Besides, it gets us away from our spouses for a few hours.

Patricia made only the best meat loaf in the history of such a dish.  If they made meatloaf in ancient Rome, it would not have been as good as what she made tonight.  I feel sorry for you if you didn't have any of it tonight.

And, I can announce that I have booked my first blog interview for 2013.  It will take place on February 7th at 5:30.  This interview will be perhaps my most unusual one.  You will see what I mean after it takes place.  And, it promises to be my most controversial one.  You will have to wait and see what I mean.

You guys have a wonderful night.

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy

PS:  I put this on my twitter and facebook tonight, but I thought you would might find it interesting to see how polite border services agents can be.  Not.

I realize there are 2 sides to every story, but when one hears over and over and over about how shabbily they were treated by these border agents, one can't help but think there is something to it.

He said, off topic.








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