I finally admitted to myself that I was never going to read the backlog of Sunday New York Times Magazines, Book Reviews, and other miscellaneous sections – so I put them in the recycle bin and sent them away. That felt good!

We’re going to Australia next year to see the total eclipse; the tour organizer suggested we ask their travel agent to look for flights, so I sent them a note. While they were working on it, I spent some time with Google Flights and found what seemed like a reasonable routing – the travel agent came up with the same flights, but at a significantly higher cost! I booked direct with the airline.

I found a good candidate for a new 4K display – the Dell P2723QE. Reviews seem positive, and it’s got an integrated hub, which is a plus.

I got my phone’s Lightning port de-clogged at the Apple Store.

I reinstalled Homebrew on my new M2 MacBook Air so that I’m using native versions of programs instead of ones compiled for Intel.

And I even culled and labeled more photos from Africa!

As I said, modest progress.

This morning, I spoke at the Silver Tongued Cats; I had hit the point in my current Path (Presentation Mastery) where I had to present the “Understanding Your Communication Style” project. Again.

I like a lot of what Toastmasters did when they created the Pathways program, and they’ve been improving it since they rolled it out. But Level 2 in the program shows their interest in appealing to corporations – it has a mandatory project on mentoring and most of the paths also require “Understanding Your Communication Style”, “Understanding Your Leadership Style”, or both.

I’d presented “Understanding Your Communication Style” on my first Path, and I wasn’t thrilled with it then; I was even less excited about repeating it, but there was no alternative.

Part of the project requires filling out a 12-question multiple-choice questionnaire which shows your preference for each of four styles: Direct, Supportive, Analytical, and Initiating. Once you’ve filled out the questionnaire, you can’t see your answers – you can only see your scores. I guess that’s to keep you from gaming the program.

I went to bed last night unsure of what I was going to talk about; this morning, I had an idea – what if I compared my scores from 2019 and today and discussed what had changed?

A couple of minutes of fiddling with Excel, and I had a lovely bar graph to use as the visual aid for my speech, and I was ready to go.

I wish I’d recorded the speech, because people liked it – I even won “Best Speaker”!