Fellow toastmasters and most welcome guests,

We had a wonderful meeting on January 18th, 2008! Thirty one people came including ten new guests Jennifer, Lama, Steve, Carolyn, Joey, Shemeka, Myung, Ju-yeon, Herman and Lidya (sorry, if I spell your name worng). Welcome and thank you all for coming!

[Note: Since our club is getting bigger, we strongly recommend that everyone come to the meeting on time. If you are late, please wait outside for the next applause before you come into the room so that the meeting, especially when a speaker is delivering his or her well prepared speech, will not be interrupted. Thank you all for your cooperation!]

The meeting was started on time by the president of our club Al with a brief opening remark. He then gave the lectern to Michael Lee who, for the first time, led the whole meeting through as the Toastmaster. Al then took the lectern back as the toastmaster of the table topic session. The table topics “just 3 minutes” was held in a totally new style. Two groups of three volunteers were given a specific topic and debated as opponents in a continuous manor. If an unnatural pause, a fill-in word, repetitive or meaningless sentences occurred, the speakers would be stopped by either the toastmaster or the opponents. The first group whose total time reached three minutes would win the debate. The winner group then stays and debates with the next group of three. It was a really fun session, well done, guys, and thanks to the nine participants for their wonderful impromptus and “unstoppable” arguments.

We had three wonderful speakers in the prepared speech session. In her #5 project “are the young and adults truly different?”, Merlyn told us her opinions by touching three different areas. Our former president Kilrak then took the chance to deliver his #7 speech “decoding my obesity”. He explained why his body has been changed from a “Korean” to a typical “American” shape and what he wanted to do actively about it. As usual, Michiko surprised the audience again by her #8 speech “latest funeral trends in the US”. She started by a joke “it may sounds strange for a pregnant woman to talk about funeral”. They were well-prepared speeches. Well done, guys!

In the evaluation session, Cathe, Miguel and Eric gave their wonderful evaluations to Merlyn’s, Kilrak’s and Michiko’s speeches, respectively. The ah-counter was Julian and timer of this meeting was Yong-jie. They all did excellent jobs (see below)! The meeting was finished at about 7:40 pm right on time. Overall, it was a wonderful meeting! Thanks everyone and see you all next Friday in the same room on January 25th, 2008!

Meeting Roles:

Toastmaster: Michael Lee
Table Topic Toastmaster: Al
Ah Counter: Julian
Timer: Yong-jie

Ah Counter’s Report

Table Topics
No good records

Prepared speeches
Merlyn: 14 ah/um and 2 so
Kilrak: 7ah/um and 2 so/ok
Michiko: 2ah/um

Evaluations
Cathe: 5ah/um 2you know
Miguel: 2 youknow
Eric: 11 ah/um

Timer’s Report

Michael Lee as toastmaster: 2:36min

Table Topics
No records

Prepared speeches
Merlyn: 7:18min
Kilrak: 7:52min
Michiko: 6:17min

Evaluations
Cathe: 3:16min
Miguel: 1:50min
Eric: 3:08min