I had a long day. Up early. Downtown Halifax to do some Frank stuff. Bought breakfast at the bakery not far from here. Haircut. Back home. Nap in the afternoon. And... then the evening came.
I attended my first Toastmasters meeting in nearly three and a half months tonight. A friend invited me to come. They're trying to establish a club in Enfield, so I drove there around 5:25 tonight and got there barely half an hour later.
Setting up a new club is not a trivial task, and not for the faint of heart. It takes real work done by real people who want to accomplish what amounts to a grassroots campaign to establish something out of nothing, where nobody is paid to be there, where everybody pays to be there. This new club, assuming it gets off the ground, appears to be in good hands.
My friend invited me because he was doing a speech that would honour former TM'er Holly Bartlett, whom I have written about here before. She was a member of my TM club until her mysterious death in 2010. Alan alluded to her death and used it as a metaphor for how to approach starting a new club and even how to approach participating in a club. It was maybe a bit of a stretch, but I had a chance to stand up and speak about Holly for a moment, which is never easy to do.
When the meeting was winding down, another member spoke about how he had known Holly. He ran a bookclub in Dartmouth. She, a blind woman, would take the correct bus from Halifax to the Dartmouth location where the bookclub met, and then reverse the process to get home.
The more I find out about Holly, the more I admire her, and what she did, and how she did it. She could have really been something, given the chance, and given the time that was robbed from her.
I returned to Halifax. Got something to eat at Wendy's on the edge of Bayer's Lake and then bought something for Patricia and brought it home. I had left her watching "Broadchurch" on Netflix. Hours later, she was watching the last episode as I got home. Eight hours of David Tennant should be enough for anybody.
I have had a long, fulfilling day, one that I must think about more in the coming days.
See you tomorrow.
Bevboy
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