November 2, 2009 Meeting

We had a great meeting on November 2^nd at the VFW Post.

Janice B. was our Toastmaster and we had a nice full agenda.

Our word of the day was Miasma – an adjective which generally means - which is a vapor from a swamp or a fog, it can also be an influence that can cause one to be depleted or corrupted.

We then all enjoyed a joke about healthcare.

Janice P. presented a prepared speech tonight that was from an advanced toastmaster manual – The humorous speech and it was entitled “My Nemesis”. The speech revolved around all of her humorous encounters with mice over the years.

Our Table topics master for the evening, Rob, asked the question – “If you could invite anyone, living or dead to dinner, who would you invite, and what questions would you want to ask them?

Our Revolutionary fathers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the others involved in the revolution were the guests of many of us. But some others would like to speak with Tony Robbins, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. One person wanted to speak with the characters of the TV show Mad Men and ask them some questions. Another member wanted to speak with himself, 50 years from now.

We then listened as the evening’s speech evaluation was presented and the timer and the grammarian and Ah Counter presented their reports.

We were lucky enough to have a visitor come and hope that he had enough fun to return soon.

We look forward to our next meeting on November 16, at 7 p.m. and hope that you can come and join us for the Southern Dutchess Toastmasters next meeting!!

October 19 Meeting

Our Halloween Themed Meeting was a whole lot of fun!!!

Tim P. opened the meeting and Neal gave us our word of the day to improve our vocabulary.

Our Joke Master Janice shared a joke about coffins in honor of our Halloween theme.

Our first speaker was Rob, who did his Icebreaker speech. This is a member's first speech. We learned a lot about Rob, including his extensive knowledge of Thomas Edison. He even brought in a working Edison talking machine phonograph from his own collection to show us. We even got to hear it work at the end of the meeting. It was neat.

Our second speaker Geoff is the 2009 winner of the Toastmasters District 53 Division A Humorous Speech Contest on October 9. He came to visit us from the IBM Poughkeepsie Speechmakers club. Geoff came to share his winning speech with us for three reasons.

1. To demonstrate the skills of an advanced toastmaster for our club and our newer members.
2. this opportunity allowed Geoff to practice his speech in advance of the next round of competition, which will be in Saratoga Springs at the District 53 District conference on November 7, and to get feedback on how he could make it even better.
3. Finally to share a great story and make us laugh and remember going through that special “rite of passage” the Driver’s test!!

Our table topics master Ruth challenged our story telling skills in line with our Halloween theme by beginning a story and supplying a line that needed to be incorporated into your next section of the story a great way to teach us to think on our feet!!

We had two very special visitors all the way from Guatemala, Pedro and Xo`chitl we hope they will come back to visit us again!

We always welcome visitors and encourage everyone to join us for our next meeting on November 2 at 7 p.m.

Rob with a closeup of his Display.

October 5 Meeting

Our October 5th meeting featured our new members getting involved and taking on roles - some for the first time. The word of the day was inconceivable - a great word with many different meanings and uses.

Saul shared the joke of the day and reminded us that ears are important!!!

Our speeches tonight were very interesting, our resident author, Julie took us on the journey of her life and how she became a writer and helped us to understand that "Talent is a long patience" not necessarily all about being perfect the first time or giving up when you first run into a snag in the plans you make for your life.

Neal shared with us the inspirational story of Dr. Plummer of Kentucky and how he made such a difference in the community he served and how he was "remembered" by the community when he passed on.

Jean Marc, our table topics master, shared the surrealism of Rene Magritte and asked us to give our own interpretations of them - many of which included our word of the day "inconceivable" in the description as we tried to formulate coherency from Magritte's works into words that made sense to us.

Our night ended with speech evaluations to help our speakers to learn about their presentation style and the content of their presentations and how to make their speeches even better.

We had a great time and ended with some time to network and share some of the goodies brought by our snackmaster.

Our next meeting will be on October 19 at 7 p.m. and our theme will be Halloween - come join us!!!

Another Successful Meeting

On September 21st, Southern Dutchess Toastmasters enjoyed another successful meeting.

Our Word master, Jean Marc, challenged us to use the word "ubiquitous" as often as possible. Our Table Topics master, Swarna, initiated interesting discussions on all kinds of emotions. As more and more members get used to stepping up to impromptu speeches, they can attest to it being much less scary than once thought. And our speaker, Karin, presented a module from the Successful Club series.

The next meeting will be Monday, September 7. We hope to see you there.