Wednesday night was our last Greensburg Toastmasters meeting of 2024. In our club, we’ve seen plenty of changes over the past year. Members have come and gone. Our main tech gurus moved early in the fall, but they still attend via Zoom. I completed the path that I began during COVID and started the new one in October. This week, I learned what it means to be “zoom-bombed” and, no, it’s not a good thing. Sweeping changes to our links are coming as well. This put things into perspective as we begin the new year.
As for the meeting, nothing out of the ordinary, as we stand a week before Christmas. We had two great speeches, one by yours truly about his personal blog. The first speaker is one who meets via Zoom and his speech was about his recent medical missions trip to Puerto Rico. With no easy way to use the projector (thus, dispensing with it for the night), we all gathered around our club president’s tablet to look at some of the photos he provided along with his speech. He’s a doctor of anesthesiology in Detroit, Michigan, but he has worked at other PA hospitals including in Altoona.
My speech was a rehash of one that I gave back in November. Originally, I was going to give it at the prior meeting. However, I was getting over a cold at Thanksgiving and, I wasn’t sure my voice would hold up. This speech on Wednesday showed major improvement over the last one that I gave just before the holiday. I even included my trip to Hershey and everything we did in the speech. I was going to include part of Winter TLI. In my evaluation, one of the suggestions for making the speech better was to have included more analysis on one or two of the posts.
Table Topics centered around holiday traditions. My question was about New Year’s traditions and I brought some of our past traditions. We played dominoes at Gram’s, watched the neighbors shoot off fireworks, and went to Borders in Monroeville on New Year’s Day. We got some Pokemon gifts from one of our members in the design of Mew and Mewtwo. Our first Toastmasters meeting for the new year will be on January 8. With the first Wednesday falling on New Year’s Day, we will have meetings on the second and fourth Wednesday in January.
Last night, I caught the finale of the Holiday Baking Championship on Food Network. The five bakers left standing after the others were eliminated couldn’t have been more suited to win the prize. My favorite baker was slipping after a hot start. Her and another top baker faced elimination but survived. It was like they had cooled off and lost that chance to get home field advantage. One never faced getting knocked off and was the favorite to win. The fourth baker didn’t really attract attention until late but started to get on a roll.
The task that the bakers were faced with was making cakes in the form of gingerbread houses. The twist was that the houses had to look like something that would sell on the real estate market. Talk about a challenge.
The commentary provided by the host was spot on when he was analyzing the bakers’ roads to the championship. In the end, it was that sleeper pick who took home the grand prize of $25,000 and the title of Holiday Baking Champion. It’s not about how you start, it’s how you finish. He got hot at the right time and rose to the challenge. As I finish my fourth season of this show, I’ve been very impressed with how talented the bakers and the host, Jesse Palmer, and the judges (Carla Hall, Duff Goldman, and Nancy Fuller), all know their stuff.
Stylish 🍒 