It was another hectic day, starting with the Silver Tongued Cats meeting this morning. Our Toastmaster had selected “F. E. A R.” as the theme of the meeting, and she opened with a few possible expansions of the acronym, such as “Future Events Aren’t Real” or “Frustration, Ego, Anxiety, Resentment”.

I was the Inspiration Master for the day. I wanted to play off the theme and come up with something that was Toastmasters-oriented. After a bit of thought, I arrived at “Fair Evaluations Are Rewarding” – an effective Toastmasters evaluation gives the speaker praise and encouragement for strong elements in the speech but still offers suggestions for getting better. It sufficed.

I also put together the minutes from the Ritual Committee meeting I led last night. In the process, I found (thanks to Codegena.com) a solution for a technical problem we identified during the meeting – being able to automatically embed the most recent video from our YouTube channel on a web page without having to edit the page every time. It looks like this:

and it should change every time we livestream on YouTube.

It wasn't the most exciting day, but that's OK!

It’s been a very busy day today – a trip to the gym, a funeral, a volksmarch, and a committee meeting, along with the usual cooking and eating.

Well, not quite the usual cooking – one of our trivia friends (and a fellow IBM Almaden retiree) took a trip to Greece last year and liked the Early Harvest (“agoureleo”) olive oil he found there so much that he had a little sent back to his house. 40 liters, in two convenient 20 liter boxes. He invited us over to taste the oil – it’s very buttery at first, but then there’s a good bit of pepper and bitterness at the end. It’s quite distinctive. He gave us a bottle of the oil to take home with us, and I used it tonight in One Pot Tomato-Basil Pasta. The recipe only calls for one tablespoon of olive oil, so I can’t say that I really tasted the difference, but we enjoyed the meal!