November 9

Today was a wonderful, full day. It started off with my friendly pellet stove repair man coming by about 8:30am to have a look at my stove. It's been making noises lately that I don't like and figured that the motor on my fan could be 'going'. He thinks it just needs a good cleaning and oiling so will be by Friday morning to do that. This means I will have to get up early to turn the stove off so it can cool down before he gets here as it must be cool for him to work on.

I was on the schedule tonight at Toastmasters to be the Greeter & the Grammarian, give the Joke, chair the business meeting (I'm the club President) and to give a 5-7 minute speech as well as to be Timer throughout the meeting. I had been trying all week to think of what do do my speech about and yesterday came up with an idea that just wasn't really working, though today it 'jelled' and came out as a fairly good speech. It would have been much better if I had it written a few days ago so I had more time to practice it rather than just a couple hours, but it is what it is. Due to many people moving away for work, our club has gone from around 21 people to 7 people this year, so each of the active members must 'wear many hats' to fill in all the spots on the evenings agenda.

Usually on Tuesdays I am at the pool for a good part of the afternoon, doing Aqua Therapy then some swimming &/or soaking in the hot tub, but not today. I had to get the speech written & practiced, do up the agenda for the business meeting, read over the basics of Roberts Rules of Order in preparation for the business meeting, find a Grammarian word and print out the word with it's meanings, find a joke and familiarize myself with it in order to 'present' it rather than 'read' it.... etc. etc. so I didn't have the time to spend in town. To make up for this, I got onto my recumbent exercise bike and peddled for 30 minutes while studying the speech I'd written, then had my shower & got ready to go out. I've decided that since I don't seem to be able to give up the 'bad' foods or change over to more healthy, sensible foods, I must exercise more to make up for bad eating. I still must work on changing eating habits, mind you, but the 'work outs' are a good thing. More work to be done tomorrow.