Usually, when I open my mail first thing in the morning, I don’t have high expectations – half of it is spam, half of the rest is news, and two-thirds of the rest is marketing from companies I want to hear from (but not as often as they want to tell me things).

Today, though, there were two pieces of good news when I opened my mail.

The first was the results from Learned League for yesterday’s match – I won, and that means I won’t be relegated to a lower rundle for the next season (this has been a brutal season for me, and I was in relegation territory two days ago).

The second piece of good news was a note from British Airways telling me that our flight from London to Barcelona has been cancelled – I hope that will let me get a refund instead of a voucher, but I won’t know until I can call them (and I may have to call the London call center rather than the US toll-free number).

This afternoon, we ventured into the mountains to pick up wine from David Bruce Winery – they’re offering some nice cases at a discount, and going there gave us an opportunity to work through a small part of our backlog of podcasts (not driving has its consequences).

Most of the rest of the day was taken up by Toastmasters – two meetings and Club Officer training. I’m going to be VP Public Relations for the Silver Tongued Cats beginning July 1; this is my first time in that role, so it gives me a chance to do something different.

If you’re interested in improving your leadership and public speaking, we’d love to have you visit the Silver Tongued Cats on any Thursday morning at 7:30am Pacific (1430 UTC) – ask me for the Zoom link. We’re as close as your computer!

The start of the new Toastmasters year is only a week away, which makes for a busy time in my role as District 101 Webmaster. Probably the most time-consuming task is getting photos from the incoming District leaders to publish on the District website – this year, I’m trying something different by using their candidate photos and cropping them to fit the space on the right page and just asking for their approval (in past years, I’ve gotten teeny-tiny thumbnail photos when I’ve asked for a full-size photo, or photos where the person was barely visible). I spent most of the morning on that task, and much of the afternoon culling yet more photos from 2005 (I’m half-way through my day at the Great Wall of China and the Summer Palace – I took a lot of photos, not all of which are necessary to tell the story).

No new recipes today; instead, we revisited two new favorites: Kay Chun’s Korean Barbecue-Style Meatballs from the New York Times and Gaby Dalkins’s Greek Chicken Trough from the Mercury News. Both make leftovers, which is a blessing – and the meatballs freeze well, so we can save them for a day when we’re in a hurry.

This evening was trivia courtesy of the Santa Clara City Library. They filled up the Zoom room with 36 teams; participants came from all over the world (mostly California, of course, but there were people from Scotland and Singapore). Our team, Bingo Slytherin, won – in the Before Times, that would have earned us a dessert pizza. Victory was sweet anyway.