November 5th

The phone rang and woke me up at 8am which is a bit early for me, being a night owl. I think it was about 2 or 2:30am when I went to sleep, so decided to lay here a bit longer and fell back to sleep until the phone rang again. Some days I wonder why I answer that thing, lol.

Mostly I worked on the speech and I don't know where the day went, but it flew by. I finally got finished writing the speech shortly before 6pm and went to print it out but the stupid printer has issues and again screwed up and wouldn't print it out for me. I wasted a bunch of time trying, but to no avail. So I had to go with no notes to deliver a speech that I hadn't even practiced preforming. I was speaking about chinchillas, and it was a 'demonstration' speech, so I decided to take along my rabbit to demonstrate 'chinchillas are about the size of a small rabbit'. I also took Smudge, one of my chinchillas. Getting down the carry cage I cut my hand and was bleeding all over so had to take care of that too. I was about 10 minutes late for the meeting... so far nothing going right.

There I was with no notes, no practice, totally stressed out. Come time for me to speak, I had the cage covered with a sheet so no one knew what was in it. About half way through I took out Grace Hawk, the rabbit, and they loved it. I was in my closing that I took out Smudge and wowed the crowd.

I felt like I had totally blown this speech. I screwed it up so badly it was not even funny. And yet they liked it. I even got a really great evaluation for it. Okay, so no one but me knew what the speech I had written was about, so they didn't know I had forgotten so many interesting facts, and they didn't know I had missed a couple great 'humor' opps. Each speech has certain objectives you are to meet and I did meet those objectives. I was the only one there that thought I'd blown it big time.

One thing I figured out that might be a good thing... or not, we'll see. Many of you will remember that I have been experiencing acid reflux problems for the last several months. All the tests have been done and the doctors haven't been able to figure out what is causing it. I've been on meds that didn't work, and for over a month now have been on a 2 month trial with Nexium, a strong med for acid reflux. I've felt a lot better the last while, but still have some problems with this, and know the problem is still here. At least, even though I still experience some pain and discomfort, I haven't had it bad for awhile. Tonight, when I was trying to get out of here and everything was going wrong, and I was going to be late, etc, my stomach started to hurt... then at Toastmasters, shortly after my speech, I was sitting there and had a full blown acid reflux attack. Chest pains, pain in my throat, that kind of thing. So this tells me that stress has a lot to do with this thing. Gee, maybe they'll have to give me Valium... haha.

After Toastmasters, as usual, a group of us went to Tim Horton's. I had 2 extra large Peppermint Tea and 4 chocolate Tim Bits.... to settle the stomach, lol. I don't know for sure if it did the stomach any good, but it tasted yummy.

When I got home I bathed the chinchillas (easy... no water involved, just a special dust for them to roll in), fed and watered every critter, treats to those that get it... beef heart and cream to the cat... yadda, yadda. Then I came to bed where I have all the comforts of the living room. It's now time to turn off the TV and the light ands say goodnight... but not until I post about the weather and another quote of the day.