The results are in from the 2024 Top Ten, and I am happy with the results. Toastmasters and Fun Fall Activities made the top five events of the year. Plus, I’m pretty happy with the lower half of the top ten. In fact, I’m enjoying my last Christmas coffee at Cutie’s before Christmas. Finding this cute gem of a coffee shop made #6 on my Top Ten countdown. They even held a Bible study on Monday nights.

Looking ahead to 2025, I want to be serious about getting back to church after dipping my toes in the water this Fall. I don’t care if my political views or fashion offend people. That’s not what it should have been about. I also want to enjoy more podcasts including great rewatch podcasts of all the ’90s shows I enjoyed, as well as The Office. Maybe I’ll go to Dunder Mifflin to beat my seasonal depression and listen to the Office Ladies podcast again. Also, that might be something I could look into is starting a podcast. What I would talk about is up in the air for now, pardon the pun.

Having two weeks off this year was my #7 moment of 2024. After about 15 years without a paid vacation, I was able to enjoy two weeks off in 2024. In the summer, I took day trips to The Rock, Indiana, Kennywood, and Tanger. I explored the Jimmy Stewart Museum and bought a new purse at Tanger during the summer. I went Christmas Shopping and celebrated 100 years of Toastmasters in my December vacation. Next year, I’ll still have my summer week off but I’ll be off in the Fall too. Maybe I can take a trip to SRU for Homecoming and do some leaf peeping in the Laurel Highlands. I just checked and I am off that Saturday so I might just do that. This year marks 20

Kicking off my countdown was a trip to Eat’n Park that saw me pick up a book on the history of the chain. In 2024, Eat’n Park celebrated its 75th Anniversary and released a book that covered the iconic Pittsburgh institution from its humble beginnings in 1949. It was worth the $20 when I purchased it after my meal. I started it in August and finished it right before Halloween. It sits on our bookshelf now with my other books on Kennywood. My cousin works for Eat’n Park in marketing and she made it into the book a few times. I even saw her in a commercial promoting the strawberry 🍓 desserts Eat’n Park comes out with in May.

Looking ahead to 2025, I won’t blog as much as least into Spring. That makes more time for reading which I was doing before I took on this challenge to post more blogs than I ever have. I finished all the Harry Potter books by August and then read a little about Kamala Harris and even got back into Barack Obama’s memoir before this writing season got crazy for me. I’m still not sure what series I’ll start next and we’re a week away from the new year.

My last post of the year will be #200 for 2024 and for that achievement I’m very proud.

Finally, it’s Christmas. All the gifts are bought and the presents are wrapped. You’ll have family visiting. First of all, I know that Christmas may be hard for those of you who have lost loved ones so it may be painful. I’ll go easy on you.

But, if you have a grudge against someone or even against yourself, end it or get over yourself. I had a couple of Christmases where I’ve been mad at someone for the way they treated me and carrying that burden into the holidays soured my mood. Put your differences aside and enjoy whatever it is that you celebrate. It’s a lot better when you’re not carrying whatever that burden may be.

Time for me to be that bigger person and end it.

With the year 2024 set to draw to a close in ten days, here’s my top ten countdown for the year. Most of these are my own experiences with some events that made news locally and nationally.

#10-August 16, 2024—I bought a book after having breakfast at Eat’n Park. This book covers the story of Eat’n Park as it celebrated 75 years in 2024. I enjoyed it immensely.

#9- Spring 2024–Crazy weather in our area with floods in April, tornadoes in May, and excessive heat in June that welcomed Summer 2024. Two devastating hurricanes that caused damage in Western NC and Florida. 

#8–Dinner with Mr. Clougherty. We continued our yearly tradition of eating out starting in the Spring (we had our first dinner May 2 and ended in October). Pictures are from my birthday dinner in June at the Olive Garden and September at Eat’n Park.

#7-June 2024–My first of two vacations this year took me on some fun day trips including Slippery Rock and Indiana. Here are pictures from my visit to the Jimmy Stewart Museum and my purchase from the Michael Kors outlet in Tanger Outlets in Washington.

December 2024-It was much colder when I took my second week off. I went Christmas shopping in South Hills Village and attended club officer training at WCCC in Youngwood.

#6-In 2024, Cutie’s Coffee Company in downtown Greensburg became my go-to place for great coffee. Their seasonal menus have been great too and every other week through October, they held a Bible study in their small parking lot. Just bring a chair and a heart for Godly worship. 

#5-May 2024–I attended my first in person Toastmasters District Conference in five years at the DoubleTree Hotel in Washington PA. The keynote speaker were excellent and our guest speaker listened to me as I connected with her about my “journey.” I was inspired after she told us a similar story. Here are the winners from the two speech contests.

#4-April 2024–Toastmasters International celebrated its 100th anniversary. We celebrated the crowning achievement at Winter TLI on December 7. Johnstown Toastmasters celebrates its 70th birthday at Hoss’s in Richland Twp. I visited Indiana and Johnstown clubs early in the month. In December, Pittsburgh Toastmasters celebrated its 85th birthday. Oh, and don’t forget, Greensburg Toastmasters celebrated its 45th year in July.

#3-June 2024-District 13 finished the 2023-24 Toastmasters year with the highest honor, Smedley Distinguished. Fittingly enough, our District was the 13th to achieve Distinguished honors. Greensburg Toastmasters finished Select Distinguished with seven goals met during the 23-24 TM year.

#2-November 2024–The week before Thanksgiving, we took a trip to Hershey where we saw Trans Siberian Orchestra at the Giant Center. We also saw lights near Hersheypark, enjoyed great Italian food, and we wrapped up the trip at Chocolate World where we shopped before heading home. 

#1-October 2024–We held our annual Gaffron Family reunion on Columbus Day weekend. My uncle played a slideshow consisting of old Gaffron memories. The weather was perfect with sunshine and readings around 70 degrees. We also celebrated Annabelle’s birthday by taking her to dinner at EDO Hibachi and she had a Karate party with her friends and cousins at the studio where they practice.  

Finally, I continue to live my best life with my fashion journey, as hard as it can be to stay loyal to it. It can be lonely at times, but I’m trying my best to ignore the voices telling me to give it up. No matter how compliments I receive for my outfits, they will mean nothing unless I compliment myself. 

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.

Facebook memories are always good for reminding you what you were doing on this day in 2008. For me, bringing up a snowy weather forecast on the week before Christmas in 2009. Another was spotting the joy in everyday situations during the pandemic year of 2020.

In today’s blog, I’m going back to 2019. It was a time when I had big plans for my newly launched platform. I put together a list of ten things people should know about my blog as a PowerPoint presentation. I didn’t do this as a speech but for my own personal records. My blog was new and I should learned early on that everyone starts small. That’s what I said in my speech when I commemorated the five year anniversary on my blog in my speech on November 20.

Just as I got excited about 2020 and hoped that it would be a repeat of the previous year, life happened. COVID hit and everything was cancelled. I still blogged but I came back down to earth and cut my content down to 15 or 16 posts a month. That’s still a lot of content but in early 2020, I was on cloud nine. By the end of the year, I was doing very little content.

The excitement that I built up in 2019 was fleeting and I should have seen the warning signs. No one knew a pandemic was coming though. I was excited and a little too overconfident. I shot too high in January and February and got myself burned but I was still determined, nonetheless.

Even though I didn’t stick to the original script, I’ve been very successful with my blog. It’s more of a day in the life platform though I’d love to do other things as my life isn’t that interesting. That makes it hard to find good content to post sometimes.

This blog was developing while everything was shut down. One thing I could have done with it would be to provide an encouraging word or write a blog post once a week. I’d do this just to remind people that it’s OK to be afraid.

I went through my seasons during the initial stages of the pandemic. These coincided with my Toastmasters journey just after I achieved my Distinguished Toastmaster award. These also tie in to my journey as well. If you know you know.

Five years and 700 blogs later, I’m pleased with how this writing journey has turned out. Can I do better? Absolutely. Is there anything I wouldn’t change? Well, they always say to be true to yourself and not to change for anyone.

As I prepare my speech Wednesday, I’ll take that feedback and apply it to make my blog stand out more.

700 blogs and writing!

Saturday, I had a night off. So, I took advantage of a free night and the forecast, which was rain-free, and drove to Ligonier. I wanted to see the Ligonier Diamond all lit up at Christmas. I made my way towards town on PA 711 and driving up Market I was pleased to see the beautiful white lights adorning the gazebo.

The Christmas Tree was up and the presents were underneath it. I missed light up night on Black Friday wasn’t too disappointed. I’d been to Ligonier earlier in the Fall to walk around town.

It’s a treat to come up here during the holidays, whether it’s during the day or at night. I was up here a lot during COVID and spent a lot of time in the Diamond. Here is a small photo dump of Ligonier from Saturday and from past trips over the years.

The Top Ten of 2024 will be out next Saturday Coincidentally, it will also be my 200th blog of the year. I have begun listing some of the events in my life that made news for me in 2024. There is a change from the previous top ten countdowns that I’ve done. I’m not writing a detailed post for every event. If you want to know more, then I’ll post either the link or the day that the blog post was published.

The Top Ten post will be pictures only. They do say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and so I wanted to try this instead. I’ll write a sentence or two describing the “event”

Thank you for your time and continued support of my blog.