The theme of the Silver Tongued Cats meeting today was “Preparation or Lack Thereof” (our Toastmaster had been drafted to present at a conference for her job and didn’t have time to work on the meeting until yesterday).

I was on the schedule to speak today and didn’t really have a good plan for my speech until I got the meeting theme, and realized that it had given me a handle for the mandatory “Introduction to Toastmasters Mentoring” project. I decided to talk about being mentored as I learned improv – not about the skills of improvising, but about the “Yes, and!” outlook that improv is built upon.

I’ve given more organized talks, but I think that the title gave fair warning: “Winging It”.

Late this afternoon, I got back to working on Home Assistant; I have the alarm system and the Insteon switches defined and more-or-less functional. For some reason, the system thinks all of the Insteon keypads have 6 buttons rather than 8, so I’ll have to convince it of the truth. But not tonight.

I posted early last night so that I could get off the computer and ignore the election news. It’s not that I wasn’t interested, it’s that I knew that the returns would trickle in all night, that there would be pundits filling the time with information-light prognostications, and that watching wouldn’t improve my sleep.

Instead, we watched some of our backlog of Young Sheldon and Call Me Kat – not the most intellectual shows on TV (especially the latter), but just what we needed.

Today, we got our windows cleaned for the first time in quite a while. I’d found Pioneer Services through Consumers’ Checkbook, and they lived up to their reviews. Our windows are so clean that we’ll have to use curtains again!

And this evening, I went to the Shir Hadash Mens’ Club annual dinner and saw a very interesting documentary: 9th Circuit Cowboy, about Harry Pregerson, who served on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for more than 40 years. He was a real mensch – someone who used the law for good.