Tuesday Speakout

Bluebells fascinate me

Our delightful morning walk featured a lot of bluebells and other flowers.
The first bluebells I remember seeing were around the plum tree at the north end of our property. They seemed so very special, growing on their own without any beds of dirty old dirt, just coming up to greet us. We cut some (I think with permission) to give mom and she put them in water in the window, perhaps.
In retrospect, my parents might have planted them, but who knows? The feeling remains.
Today's mask pickup in my sector was canceled, presumably for lack of materials.
I participated in a noontime program, by PLI, on COVID19 impact on immigrant legal rights. This is excellent and timely information; I recommended it to the WPTL section and I hope they passed it on.
I received new artwork from Stephanie! I will put it up over the weekend; I want to do this neatly not haphazardly. I think it'll really make the living room mine.
Caliber Home Loans did not respond to my message about the error in their billing system, although I did get an email confirming my initial payment. I'm not surprised about their failure to honor the promise to respond, because of their legendarily bad customer service. I'll give them another day before taking this to the next level.
I worked on my Toastmasters responsibilities. I edited Karen's draft of a Mentorship document, which was fun, especially rewriting the introduction to introduce "Mentor" as a person in Homer's Odyssey instead of a definition in the dictionary. I hope the specific bullet items may be helpful; I suppose I should test it out myself!
I put in a little time preparing for the next contest round. Since Starburst linked to a recording of another District's co ntest, I decided to watch the speakers and see what tips I could pick up. What I picked up from Omar Rivas' presentation ( https://vimeo.com/409513379 hour 1 minute 29 second 20 ) is that I didn't need to worry about renewing my passport; I wasn't going to Paris. It's really worth watching (  ) although I'm still trying to figure out how I can learn from it.

My role for the evening SPEAKOUT Toastmasters meeting was to evaluate Karen Lezon's presentation, paying special attention to presentation skills specific to the online (Zoom) meeting format. The presentation itself was excellent, as expected, and her sound was perfectly understandable. I noticed that she not only kept good eye contact with the camera (and therefore with the audience) but varied the eye contact by looking away briefly as part of an expression, such as look to a top corner while thinking, or looking up in exasperation. This gave me the thought of "eye contact variety" which can be as important as vocal variety.