I believe you would all agree that we had an effervescent meeting yesterday! We had 18 members and 3 guests – Adrian, Diana and Clint.  The evening was very energetic and fun. We also welcomed a new member to our club Mariela Minsoni who volunteered to take a role at her first meeting as a member. Mariela did an outstanding job as a Timekeeper!

John started the meeting by celebrated the great achievement of one of our members. Stephen Pearce completed Level 1 on his Pathways – Innovative planning, this is a wonderful accomplishment, we have seen Stephen working hard and developing his skills rapidly. Well done!

We heard four excellent speeches. Richard as always entertained us with a wonderful Educational speech on “Keeping the commitment”, we also learned a lot about virtual kissing and hugging. In Rebecca’s ice-breaker, she introduced himself to the club and shared the reasons why she joined Toastmasters, it was a remarkable start to her Toastmasters journey. Paul talked about his job using an interesting way to describe it, he kept us all engaged and amused. Finally, Harvey painted beautiful word pictures and transported us to an Italian village – it was an emotional and magnificent story.

We had helpful evaluations with great recommendations from Kevin, John, Steve and Stuart. Mark was our quotemaster, he intrigued our interest with Hanlon’s razor aphorism and Anna counted our Ahs and Ums. Chris was the grammarian for the evening, with an awesome word of the day “effervescent” which was used countless of times during the meeting. Stephen brought an outstanding selection of Table Topics which everyone enjoyed. Tamara, provided helpful tips for people performing roles as our general evaluator. Finally, Donia had marvellous performance as Toastmaster of the evening.

Our best speaker award went to Rebecca, our best evaluator was Steve C. and our best Table Topics speaker was myself.

We achieved a lot in just a couple of hours (and of course the opportunity to socialise afterwards). I’m definitely looking forward to the next one on 19th of February our “Evaluation and International Speech” contest!