Obviously, I’ve never attended one of these before. The main event was “announcements”, where 2VP candidates formalized their ambitions. As widely expected, Mohammed Murad from UAE announced (ID 2007-09), and then Mary G. Russell announced (ID 2008-10), and then I announced (ID 2008-10). Bash Turay (not sure what years he served as ID) announced he is also running again.
It’s going to be fun, that I am certain of!
Was quite interesting, THREE ballots for Second VP! It didn’t wrap up until 11:30, after several breaks while the ballots were counted.
| Second Vice President, first ballot: Ralph Wallace, 5,673 George Yen, 4,545 Bash Turay, 3,636 John Rich, 3,499 Second ballot: Third ballot: Region 2: Region 4: |
Region 6: Gina Cook, 13,733 John MacDonald, 3,652 Region 8: Region 10: Region 12: Region 14: |
Wow, caught myself typing LUNCH up there in the headline — hard to think of it as dinner. The honoree was Carolyn Kepcher, who became famous as Donald Trump’s assistant on “The Apprentice”. Now, however, she is writing books and providing career advice in a New York Daily News column, and started a web site to help professional women, WorkHerWay.com.
Her presentation was a very interesting review of how she got to where she is. One of her most interesting claims is that she didn’t believe in work/life balance; she used to believe that if you weren’t in the office, you weren’t working. But the Blackberry has changed all that.
The distinguished districts were the guests of honor for this, they were announced, and pictures of the DGs and the trio names played on the video screens throughout dinner.
Oh my back!!! 4 1/2 hours of interviews, standing up, reading the same set of questions to 13 different ID candidates (and four 2VP candidates), while making it sound fresh and exciting every time! At least there was a short break in the middle; the first version of the schedule had NO breaks at all from 8 AM to almost noon.
It was very interesting hearing what the candidates had to say, of course, but by necessity, I’ll keep my opinions on those to myself. Some were clearly a little confused by the question, but I could not do anything to help them understand it — just repeat the question verbatim.
Being on the other end of these questions next year will certainly be interesting!
As a second-year director, I was chief judge for one of the nine semi-finals, but it wasn’t exactly hard work. WHQ staff had already recruited all the judges, timers, and ballot counters, and all I had to do was find a tiebreaker judge.
It was a great contest, we had a fantastic winner, and I can’t wait to see how he does in the finals on Saturday afternoon!
The Hall of Fame is always a fantastic celebration of our achievements over the last year, the energy is so up and enthusiastic! Every distinguished district brings their whole convention delegation up on stage for the awards!
I was privileged to be the very first announcer (photo below), reading off the Presidential Citations, and there were only NINE this year, compared to the usual 20-30 or so. And two of them were for people from Region V, Michael Smith and Justin Gottfried.
Two of the Region V districts (where I’m from) were Select Distinguished, D43 (James Mayhan) and D8 (Dori Drummond), and three more were Distinguished (D30-Michael Gougis, D35-Kathleen Wesselink, and D63-Allan Daniels), which ties our best-ever number of distinguished districts (5 of 8).
Truly amazing — this is the event that district leaders worked for all year long, and they deserve it!
The board members were present for this, but had no role. We sat there and listened as the officers (VPs and president and immediate past president) have reports summarizing our work for the week. Full details will be on the TI web site by Friday, Aug. 20, but in short:
I was heavily involved in the first one, so I’ll summarize those here:
Distinguished Area
Select Distinguished Area
President’s Distinguished Area
Distinguished Division
Select Distinguished Division
President’s Distinguished Division
Distinguished District
Select Distinguished District
President’s Distinguished District
Perhaps the best feature is that the Distinguished District program is no longer competitive — EVERY district can be Select or President’s Distinguished, regardless of how other districts perform.
Had a great time walking around talking to everyone and the candidates. And of course, there was my roast! Quite a few people had stories to tell about me, and I had forgotten about some of them. I do NOT remember going hunting with Ron! *lol*
Here’s a shot of me in front of the publicity wall.
Great speaker at tonight’s opening ceremonies! Todd Newton is an E! Entertainment Television host, and a Toastmasters member. He had a great story on CHOICE:
- Be CLEAR
- Have a HEART
- Pursue OPPORTUNITIES,
- Trust your INSTINCTS
- Get involved in your COMMUNITY
- Be the EXCEPTION
I spent some time on Saturday adding the rest of the districts to my daily and weekly reports on the web site, and adding the “Top Three” of each Region V district (where I’ve known them personally for a long time) to the weekly e-mail list. Oh, it feels good to finally throw off the shackles of candidate campaign rules, which strictly limited contact! I actually heard that one past 3VP candidate went into a depression during the year of candidacy, since he or she was practically unable to talk to so many friends and fellow Toastmasters (no one outside the home district)!
Saturday evening started with a photo session of the new board. We were also given our committee assignments for the new year; I’m on the District Administration (DA) committee. Next was a reception for the District Governors. We then were lined up to march into the ballroom, where we were announced and took our places at the head table — it was truly an exciting moment to look out on what must have been a thousand Toastmasters! I was accompanied at dinner by my campaign manager, Joan Diehl, and we had an entire evening of interesting conversation (see photo).
One of my greatest privileges was to pin Dietmar with his Past International Director pin (see photo), and him to pin me with the International Director pin. International President Jana Barnhill had a wonderful inauguration speech about her theme, “The Courage to Conquer”, including some video of her skydiving! The total time up on the stage was almost three hours, but it just flew by, seemed like mere minutes.
The evening ended with dancing until late. I didn’t stay long, as I knew I had to be up at 7:30 AM for our board orientation Sunday morning!
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