Tuesday

This laptop computer has been having a problem with connecting with websites for several days now; it just randomly says there's a DNS error. I try again and it usually connects. It continues to randomly connect and disconnect the mouse, and often it's hard to find the cursor. The device may be reaching the end of its useful lifespan, or there may be a problem upstream - I don't know.

Little Free Library
Our Lady of Guadalupe school
Class of 2016-2017

On the morning walk I saw some little free libraries that were especially fun.
I spent much of the day preparing for the evening Toastmasters meeting that I was Toastmastering at. My first theme was something like "What A Spring It's Been!" working off the many extraordinary disasters we are suffering, but as I went on I felt impelled to add a message of hope, until ultimately the theme became "Hope".
I had overprepared because I had not defined who was doing some of the roles (I still remember investaturing new members from my time as President, and keep forgetting that that is someone else's job now - oh well! I had also reworked my speech from last week at SPEAKOUT since we had only 2 speeches, but   as I developed the agenda with Karen we decided that just 2 speeches were fine since we had a lot of business - what with the election I had to lead (more preparation!)
The meeting itself went well; the speeches were fine and the evaluations on point. Franni apparently looked at the Theme and chose as Word Of The Day: Faith.
This impelled me to re-write my closing remarks. I had used a perfectly fine Michelle Obama quote, but the Faith/Hope pairing demanded a send off ending with "Love". I did some quick research on the distinction between the two and came up with something like
"Our Word of the Day is Faith. Faith is trust in something, we at Toastmasters have faith that we can improve our skills, faith in our fellow Toastmasters that they will support us, faith that we can use our skills to improve the world. Hope is the anticipation of something good. Our faith in ourselves, our fellow Toastmasters lead us to Hope that we will improve, that we will help others improve, and the world itself. What is our motivation? We care about this; you could say that we have faith in and hope for improvements because we care for or even love ourselves, our fellow toastmasters, and the world.
The saying is that these are the three things that endure, but I say these are the three things that let us endure: Faith, Hope and Love. And the greatest of these is Love.