March 14th Speech Contest

Before the start of the meeting, Brian asked Lauralee to report on the 4H evaluation. Lauralee said that Lee and her listened to two of the speeches, and that we were invited to come to their official competition and be judges on April 22nd. Today's hot seat Toastmaster of the Day was Avital, who has never been a Toastmaster before. She was very humorous, adding statements like master some toast in to keep the meeting light. Avital did a great job for her first time as a Toastmaster.
Today was the speech contest, so the meeting ran differently than normal. There were two contestants in today's meeting, Dave and Christa. The speeches were on a topic of their choice, and had to be between 5 and 7 minutes, with a thirty second grace period. Christa was the first speaker today. Her speech was called South From Alaska, detailing her journey moving from Alaska in the winter. She talked about how they were driving through Canada when she got two flat tires in the middle of nowhere, but were lucky enough to find spares for both the tires allowing them to keep traveling towards her new home. The next mishap in her journey was the back window shattering, raining glass all throughout the car and finding it's way into her many layers of clothes. Because of this, Christa and her ex had to get out of the car in freezing temperatures, to moon the wolves guarding the tree line, in order for them to remove the glass from their clothes.
Dave was the second contest speaker today. He gave his speech called Half The Man I Used To Be. He started out talking about how a man is missing today, and that is the man who he used to be at over 400 pounds. Throughout his speech, Dave told the story about how people find the motivation to lose the weight, such as health reasons, shame and a desire to look more appealing. When Dave decided he was done enduring hip pain, he went to the doctor who told him he needed to lose a lot of weight in order to go through surgery. Dave then was told in order to have weight loss surgery he had to lose thirty pounds. Now he is half of the man he used to be, at under 200 pounds.
Peter was the Table Topics Master of the day, asking Brian what he thought about alternative facts. Brian said we think of facts as indisputable because they are proven unlike opinions. Avital was asked what her favorite food was by Peter. She told us a story about how her spiritual advisor noticed something was up and she explained that she did not love and trust in God enough. The advisor asked, "Do you like Thai food?" and when she said yes the advisor said "Then go eat Thai food."  The winner of table topics was Avital.
After everyone had voted for the winning speech, Brian, the general evaluator and vote counter, announced that Christa placed first in the club speech contest, and Dave came in second. 
Lauralee was the timer for the day, and Paul's word of the day was exuberant and ebullience.