This past weekend was the Toastmasters Area-level humorous speech contest, which I competed in because I won our Club-level contest. I won second place at the Area-level, and that's just ducky with me. The woman who won first really did an excellent job, and now I don't need to go to the District-level, which is a relief.

Jon played along at the contest, participating in the non-competition Table Topics activity they used to fill time before lunch. He did a great job; everyone gave him lots of compliments. The way Table Topics works is that you're given a prompt and then have one to two minutes to talk about it, unprepared and off-the-cuff. For this day's activity, each speaker drew a "hard" word from a bag and then gave a (probably made-up) definition and used the word as their topic. Jon drew "ankh." We're too much of geeks not to know that word, but he made up a fun definition anyway: a pygmy, two-foot tall elephant from India.

In other news, we went shopping for Halloween mask supplies on Saturday (yay!), and my African violets (gift from Dad) have started blooming (double yay!). I'll be taking an SQL database class next week, which should help me feel slightly qualified for my job. Our friend Ben got the new Dungeons and Dragons edition, recently revamped and re-released by Wizards of the Coast (now an arm of Hasbro, the Unstormable Citadel of Fun (thanks to Jeremy B. for that title)), so on Sunday I played (here's a big surprise) a halfling rogue (barely indistinguishable from an elven thief). Yay, geekdom.