Today’s Toastmasters meeting went off surprisingly smoothly considering we lost one speaker in the middle of the meeting due to a family emergency. Our Table Topics Master had plenty of questions ready, and she used them all!

After the meeting, a few of us met in person at a nearby Panera Bread – we sat outside, and a good (and, I hope, Covid-free) time was had by all.

I visited my allergist today; both he and I were happy about my progress. He’s afraid that my polyps will return now that I’m off the prednisone, so he’s working on backup plans.

And I girded my loins to do battle with British Airways to get a refund for our flights to and from South Africa. I knew they’d try to steer me towards a voucher, and they did – with one button on the first screen of the refund menu. I clicked the button that said “refund my money” and I was done 20 seconds later – no hard sell, and really no problem at all. Of course, I don’t have my money back yet. They said it would take up to a week to be credited to the card, but I can wait.

A little over two weeks ago, I fractured a crown – I don’t know what caused it (I wasn’t eating anything particularly tough at the time), but my mouth felt funny and I kept feeling little pieces of something where they shouldn’t have been.

Today, I got the crown replaced – it took a bit longer than expected because it was hard for the dentist to get my mouth numb enough, but she finally succeeded. She discovered a little bit of a cavity under the old crown, so she had to drill that out, too – but the new crown made it unnecessary for her to fill the cavity. I guess that’s a good thing.

I also spent a lot of time doing things for our synagogue – I finally finished the High Holy Day Honors invitations program and sent out the initial batch of invitations. There will be further invitations to send when someone declines an honor, but that process should be easier this year than last year. Last year, I had to specify which invitations should be sent to a new person every time we had changes; this year, I made a simple database with the invitations that have been sent out, and the program knows not to send an invitation to a person if nothing has changed for that slot. Databases are wonderful things sometimes – using sqlite3 for this was easier than creating a flat file and searching it myself.

I finished the invitations just in time to go to the monthly synagogue Board meeting – which ran long. At least there were goodies!