I’m not sure if I’m happy or annoyed that both Toastmasters and Shir Hadash observe the same fiscal year, but it does mean that I’ve been busy today getting ready for the transitions which will happen on Thursday.

I got a request from the Toastmasters District Director to help the Webmaster team redo the email forwarding for the new year, so I sent a note with instructions (and an offer to help if needed).

At the club level, I made sure the new Treasurer, VP Public Relations, and President have the information they’ll need to deal with our web host, and I pulled together the paperwork to give to the new Treasurer (my term as Treasurer ended last year, but I never got a chance to give the stuff to this year’s Treasurer – I’m sure she didn’t miss having to keep track of it for a year).

And on the Shir Hadash side of things, I started organizing the first Ritual Committee meeting of the new year, as well as sending the High Holiday Honors information to our Interim Rabbi so he’d know what we’d done in years past.

Despite spending most of the day glued to the screen, we did manage to get a couple of walks in, so here’s Lily Du Jour:

We tried another new recipe today – a Greek Salad Sandwich. We made it with Trader Joe’s Whole Wheat Pita Bread instead of the suggested English muffin; it was worth repeating (though I might try a different pita next time – the Joe’s pita was very thin and the sandwich leaked a lot). It’s not a big meal, but it was surprisingly satisfying.

 
Tonight was the Silicon Valley Storytellers 8th Anniversary Meeting. It’s the club’s custom to finish every year with a Story Slam, where members compete for prizes by telling 3-5 minute stories that incorporate the meeting theme. This year’s theme was “Infinity”.

I signed up as a speaker weeks ago and promptly forgot about it – I had photos to edit, recipes to try, and newspapers to read. But it came back to me on Sunday morning when I looked at the week’s calendar. I didn’t really have a story dealing with infinity, but I did come up with a title: “All the Time in the World”.

And that made me think of friends and family who died early; friends who nearly died but didn’t; and people who fled one danger only to die in a different way (like the Paraguayan President’s sister-in-law, who came to the US to get a Covid vaccination but stayed in the condo that collapsed last week). And that gave me a foundational phrase for the speech: “they had all the time in the world…until they didn’t.”

This morning, I looked in the Virginia Death Records for two of the people I wanted to talk about. Carol was my age; she died at age 13 from familial dysautonomia. The other was my cousin Ruby, who taught me to play bridge when I was very little and died suddenly at age 67 – the same age I am today.

I also talked about a classmate’s husband who keeled over at our most recent high school reunion – I called 911 while people gave him CPR and used a defilibrator to get his heart beating again before the paramedics arrived. He survived and recovered, and I expect to see him in October for our next reunion.

And then, just before the meeting started, I glanced at Facebook and found out that there had been a 4.2 earthquake just a few minutes before – and that gave me my ending.

The club voted on the three top speeches – mine was one of them, and the prize was an Amazon gift card.

Last night, I nearly withdrew from the contest because I didn’t have a coherent story in mind; I’m glad I didn’t. I may not have had all the time in the world, but I had enough!