Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

At this very moment, I'm peroxiding my hair an insane shade of blonde (again.) I had to take off my specs, so now I have to lean really close to the screen to see what I'm typing :-)

Spent the day today in a stuffy, too hot church hall in Cheltenham, at a toastmasters contest. Gah. I saw seventeen speeches. Strewth. I think I'm getting a bit over the toasties thing - I was bored to tears in the end, ended up checking facebook on my phone. I definitely want to go back to being a "normal" toastmater, rather than an area governor. Spare time? What's that?

You might want to look away, I'm a bit hacked off...!

I'm heavily involved with a group called Toastmasters which is not a cult I swear.

Heavily involved to the extent that I'm the Area Governor of a group of clubs somewhat arbitrarily dubbed N1. I have four clubs I have to look after, some as far away as Camplefield and Saint Albans.

Anwyay, the main thing on my agenda the last few months has been area contests. They all have to happen by the end of this month - which means I have to organise a couple for my clubs. This involves a small amount of back scratching - one needs judges from other parts of town, so I've been visiting other area's to help judge their contests (four so far, at least two more to go.)

So I've been sweating blood organizing the first of these contests, which was on Wednesday. I basically spent most of Tuesday, cup day, running around collecting the bits and pieces I needed. I booked (and paid for) a venue. I printed masses of forms etc. I bought biscuits. I emailed dozens of people who were contestants. Anyway, it's been occupying a lot of my spare time.

And then on Wednesday I actually ran the contest itself. Which I thought went very well.

One of the contests was a kind of spontaneous speaking exercise. It's quite tough, one is asked a question, and then you have to speak about it for at least a minute.

And then what do I get, by way of thanks? Someone whined to my superior in the organisation that the question wasn't "neutral" enough. Fucking conservative twats. The question asked if the government should be supporting the racing industry during the Equine Influenza out break - which I thought was good a relevant give it was the day after cup day. And it gave everyone something to work with...

OK. Just had to get that out of my system. Damn it, this feels a lot like a completely thankless task... I put a lot of work into these extra curricular activities of mine. Perhaps I should have stuck to the Culture Jamming, at least that was meant to be a bit controversial...

*end rant*