I was Toastmaster of the Day at the Silver Tongued Cats today. During last week’s meeting, our President asked me what I’d like as a theme for today; since it’s our first meeting of Spring, I chose “Spring Cleaning” and put it out of my mind.

Until last night, when I had to assemble and email the agenda, and I suddenly realized I didn’t have anything in mind to say about the topic. And it was late enough that I didn’t want to do any more preparation, so I went to bed.

But not to sleep, at least not well – I kept thinking of things I could talk about if only I had some information. And I didn’t want to get out of bed and do any searching. So I tossed and turned and eventually fell asleep.

This morning, I raced over to the computer as soon as I got up so I could do my research. Did you know that 78% of Americans plan to do spring cleaning this year, up 10% from last year? The American Cleaning Institute does! And Fantastic Cleaning told me that there’s an official Spring Cleaning Week in the UK and that 2-5% of the UK population are compulsive hoarders. They also talked about the Chinese custom of cleaning for the Lunar New Year, and that you’re not supposed to sweep for the first few days of the year to avoid sweeping away good luck.

The meeting went smoothly; I had things to talk about, and we had excellent speakers and evaluators (none of whom talked about cleaning, though our Table Topics Master did ask about various aspects of cleaning). Next time, if I pick a topic out of the air, I think I’ll do a little research before going to bed the night before the meeting!

Cartoon Vectors by Vecteezy

When I spend money on insurance, I hope I won’t actually get that money back. Ideally, I’ll never talk to anyone at the insurer – I’ll just send them checks and never have to fight my way through their claims process.

Once in a long while, though, I’ve had an insurance company offer a service that improves my life (and reduces the odds of me having to make a claim). IBM’s Major Medical used to encourage (and pay for) some preventative care, for example.

Last November, our homeowners’ insurer, State Farm, made me an offer I didn’t want to refuse – they offered free electrical system monitoring through Ting to reduce the chances of an electrical fire. The device was free, and they’d pay for three years of monitoring – and if there was a problem, they’d even pay up to $1000 to correct it.

I jumped on the offer – a lot of other people must have done so, too, because I didn’t get the Ting device until today. I plugged it in and it’s “learning” our electrical environment. In the two hours it’s been installed, it’s learned that the line voltage in the house has been as low as 121.5 volts and as high as 123.5. I hope its other learnings are as uninteresting.

This afternoon, we took a walk with the South Bay Striders in South San Jose. The walk started at a park we’ve never visited before – Shady Oaks Park, which is on the Coyote Creek Trail. We did the 5k version of the walk, which was basically an out-and-back from Shady Oaks to the edge of Hellyer County Park. It wasn’t the most interesting walk we’ve done – the 10k version adds the Hellyer Velodrome and some equestrian areas, as well as a walk around Cottonwood Lake. But there were a few wildflowers to be seen, and it was quiet and peaceful for the most part.