Greetings Toastmasters,

Last night's meeting started at 6:30 pm. We have started on time for 3 weeks in a row. So your Secretary would like all of us to give ourselves a pat on the back. The theme of the evening was “Retirement” and the toastmaster - the one and only Mac Smith. Mac’s famous words were “Earn all you can, save all you can and give all you can” although he didn’t seem to be excited about the giving part. Paul motivated us with that famous question “What is it that brings me to the meeting every Thursday?” Ben Vincent led an exciting round of table topics. We had 7 speakers and it was so much fun.

After the break, Tony drilled some common sense into us with his speech “Shut Up!” Jagadeesh gave us the low down on dealing with notebook computers and Hut spoke passionately of the mound builders of “A previous United States”. We had some wonderful expressions generated during our session - "purge the urge", "digging graves with their tongues" and so on, mostly attributed to one Tony Brucks Jr.

We had several guests at the meeting – Jennie Higgins, Dee Frazier, Jeff Markus, TingTing Li, Young Master Rockwell and Debbie Allen. They assured us that they had a good time and we hope to see them back again.

The awards went to Jim Wolff for “Best Table Topics”, Jagadeesh Krishnan for “Best Speaker”, Keith Moore for “Best Evaluator” and Paul Carter for “Toastmaster of the Evening”.

There was no unfinished business and the meeting ended at 8:25 pm.