I mentored Toastrix, the Toastmasters club at Citrix Systems, during the 2019-2020 Toastmasters year, which meant attending their weekly meetings in Santa Clara (until they had to move online).

I kept attending after my formal mentorship ended, but the frequency decreased significantly – meeting on Zoom wasn’t nearly as much fun as seeing them in person.

But today, I got to see many of the members in person – they held a get-together at DishDash in Sunnyvale and invited me. It was the first time I’d eaten with a group in a restaurant in a long time, and I don’t think I was the only one.

Over the last couple of years, the club became an open club – many of the members had moved out of the area, left Citrix, or both. One of the people who came today arrived with a suitcase – he’d flown into SFO and taken Caltrain to see us before going up to Palo Alto for a week of meetings at his new employer.

It was a lot of fun to see people and talk with them – and this makes two days in a row that I’ve had the opportunity to do that. I’m getting spoiled.

We went to a Shir Hadash “Gratitude Reception” today; one of the hosts is the person who got me started on the Indigo and Insteon home automation process. Their house is far more technologically sophisticated than ours; I don’t plan to emulate what they’ve done, nice as it is.

Perhaps it was appropriate that our house alarm went off while we were there. My watch told me that the alarm had gone off and that it was because the side door had opened – I figured it was because it was only closed by the latch, not the deadbolt, and the wind blew it open. And none of the motion detectors were complaining, so I ignored it – until my next-door neighbor called and said that the alarm was still sounding. I was able to turn it off, which I’m sure made her happier.

We made sure the door was well bolted when we got home.