ne of my favourite parts of a Toastmasters meeting is the Table Topics section. That’s when speakers are given a prompt (sometimes it’s a topic, sometimes a question, or sometimes something completely different) around which they have to create an impromptu 2-minute speech. It’s incredibly challenging, but can be lots of fun, and definitely teaches…
I said yes. My fence is getting ever-more political. At least I’m not as bad as the house I saw down on Riccarton Road the other day that had signs for five different (and wildly opposed) political parties on its fence. I imagine a family that have really intense debates around the dinner table… But…
lection day is looming, and the campaigning is hotting up. I had five pieces of mail in my letterbox when I got home this evening, and they’re all from political parties. Most went straight in the recycling bin as junk mail, but one I’m considering – a letter from James Dann, the local Labour candidate,…
uckily, the rain stopped during the night, and it turned into a lovely day today. Which I was very glad to see, because I had a lot of walking to do today, seeing as I’d promised to deliver those flyers for the Greens, and today was my last chance to do so (the election is…
fter a week of lovely spring weather, even managing to reach the low 20s for a couple of days, it’s back to being cold and wet and miserable again. I’d planned on going out to deliver those flyers today, but it was just too wet, so I’ll have to do them tomorrow – the forecast…
he thing about 4 September being such a significant date for Christchurch is that these days I forget that only a week later is a significant anniversary for my American friends. It’s the 12th here, which of course makes it the 11th for you, and the anniversary of that horrible horrible day. Remembering 22 February…
eading back through my blog posts today to pick out the earthquake-related ones was more affecting than I expected. Even though I spending my working days looking at photographs and reading peoples’ memories from the quakes, I’d forgotten just how scary they were. I think because I wasn’t hugely affected by them in any material…
ell, my diary is officially about to go public. I’ve signed off on the paperwork to officially donate it to the archive, and started the process today of sorting out which entries are actually earthquake-related and converting them to a format that can be archived. It’ll be a few weeks before it actually appears on…
ou know how I keep saying I’m not going to volunteer for anything else, and that I’ve got way too much going on in my life already and can’t add anything more? Yeah, I totally fail at that. I can’t help it – people ask me to help out with things and I say yes…
eriously frustrating day today. We had a major update go through on the site, and (as seems inevitable) it broke all sorts of things, none of which had shown up in the pre-release testing we’d done. So I spent most of the day trying to find out exactly how broken it was, trying to fix…