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.