I had to give a speech at Silicon Valley Storytellers today. I’m on the “Engaging Humor” path, but not all of the speeches have to be funny; I decided to talk about the upcoming election.

No, not about the Presidential election, nor even about any elected office. I talked about the propositions on the ballot. And I didn’t even give my opinion of any of the propositions; instead, I gave a presentation about how to research the propositions instead of relying on the limited information in the Official Voter Guide and the even more limited information in ads.

People seemed to find it useful – in fact, I got requests for my slides, so I put them online here.

I did something different in preparing the presentation – normally, I just start creating slides, but this time, I made a mindmap with iThoughts. I reorganized it a few times as I was pulling the presentation together, which would have been difficult in PowerPoint! When I was happy with the mindmap, I exported it to PowerPoint. I still wound up reordering the slides to make more sense as a sequential presentation, but it was pretty easy to get the flow I wanted.

I also experimented with the “Design Ideas” feature of PowerPoint to get away from plain bullet lists – instead, I had pretty bullet lists and boxes. I added pictures to a couple of the slides, and my evaluator suggested I do more of that. I have to give a speech to my other club on Thursday, and I might just reuse this one…with more pictures.

It was Sunday, so we began the day with a trip to the Farmers’ Market. Local King Salmon season has ended for the year, so we settled for lingcod and halibut. Tomatoes were still good, and we’re hopeful for the strawberries we bought, but the seasons are definitely changing.

After the market, we took our usual Sunday walk in town. We passed a very nice morning glory and both Diane and I took photos. Hers is on her Facebook page. Here’s mine:

When we got home, I looked at my photo and thought it would look better without the bright spot at the upper right of the flower. I’d been looking for a reason to try using my new Apple Pencil for something constructive – this seemed to fit the bill. I downloaded Photoshop for the iPad and started playing; the Pencil made it pretty easy to select the parts of the picture I wanted to deal with, and I wound up with this:

The bright spot is gone. If I knew what I was doing, I probably could have avoided creating the dark blotches, but considering this was my first use of Photoshop and I haven’t looked at the tutorials, I’m not disappointed.

I think I’m keeping the Pencil. I’ll have to find another excuse to go to the Apple Store!