Mar 30: Twenty-Four Years and Counting

Celebrating our 24-year history, we kicked off our meeting with a prayer and a feast. It must be a requirement that you be a great cook to be an Afterburner because every dish tasted delicious! We had an incredible array of food that was coordinated by Brenda Daniels. Everyone participated and we enjoyed scrumptious treats such as Chicken Spaghetti, Chicken in Cream Sauce, BBQ Smokies, 7 Layer Dip, Fried Chicken, Taco Soup, Grilled Chicken Salad, various desserts and much more.

Peichang Shi started our prepared speeches off by giving us a great speech that was filled with lots of humor. He taught us a little about the NCAA brackets and revealed that he and his wife, Joanna had a friendly wager going to see who could predict the winner. Perhaps it would be better said that the bet was that Peichang couldn’t predict the winner! I wonder which one of them ended up cooking dinner for the month?

Brenda Daniels was our second speaker and gave us a wonderful history of her Icebreaker speeches. Brenda has been in Toastmasters for over 20 years and has presented several Icebreakers. Although there have been several different Icebreaking speeches in her time with Toastmasters, they have all had one common thread. They were all inspired by Country and Western music. We have to be worried if a C&W singer writes a song about stumping their toe because it could be the start of Brenda’s next speech.

Our last speaker, George Arndt spoke to us about “Anniversaries” and reminded us that we celebrate all types of anniversaries; most are fun and happy events while others can be heartbreaking. George left us with thought-provoking ideas that we can think about until our next anniversary.

Next year will be our 25th anniversary and plans are already underway for a large Open House to celebrate 25 years of our club’s success.

Pat Quick