With the Fall Conference taking place next weekend, here are some things I’m thinking about as I look forward to some of the festivities:

  • Looking forward to seeing many old friends and new faces as the last District 30 event I attended was the Spring Conference (I was out golfing during the Summer TLI).
  • Definitely will be at the Friday portion of the conference, definitely won’t be able to attend the Saturday night portion of the conference as my singles golf group has their dinner dance (and being on the board for the group that now takes precedence).  As far as during the day Saturday, I may attend parts of it just to meet more old friends as not much in the schedule or the educational sessions seems appealing.
  • Both the Evaluation and Humorous Speech contests should be fun.  I already seen both the North and Northwest Division representatives, the Evaluation contestants are both relatively new to contests but have done great so far (the North contestant came from Master Speakers @ Baxter club, which only chartered in April!), while both Humorous Speech contestants have excellent speeches that can wow the audience.  If the other Division representatives are as good, it may be the best District 30 Humorous Speech contest in years – I’ll be missing that one though.
  • Early last summer I was offered to be the Evaluation Contest Chair, turned it down for reasons mentioned in a previous entry, plus still have no desire to get back to active service in D30.  Never thought about what might have been if I did accept it.
  • One thing I did find bothersome with the upcoming Evaluation contest, the Toastmaster is a current Division Governor who also serves as the District 30 Club Building Chair, while the Chief Judge is the Immediate Past D30 Governor.  Not sure they offered last year’s winner the Toastmaster role, which has been the tradition here, but regardless shouldn’t we give these opportunities to others without major roles and responsibilities?  Time to go back to this old entry from last year.
  • I shouldn’t care because I won’t be there and don’t have any say on the quality of D30 events, but it’ll definitely be a challenge honoring last year’s Distinguished winners and the end-of-the-year winners within a 25 minute time frame.  I hope whoever emcees this won’t spend any time talking more than necessary especially about themselves – last year the IPDG not surprisingly did just that prompting someone to tell me “no wonder why it took her 4 tries to reach Top 3!”
  • Same problem with the DTM ceremony, there are at least 12 new DTMs to be honored at the ceremony with their new medallions and receiving congratulations from the other DTMs.  At the last conference, there were 6 honored with the ceremony taking at least 6 minutes as shown in this video.  The upcoming conference will have 15 minutes and with likely more DTMs at the line congratulating the new ones, it could take longer than that.
  • On the lighter side, District 30 put out a YouTube video promoting the conference, featuring the “faces of District 30”.  It doesn’t appear I’m among the faces, so I can definitely say I’m a “has-been” and proud of it!

Since I just joined Twitter after getting a new smartphone (HTC Droid Eris), I may use that to post updates from the conference, so check http://twitter.com/willhsiung next weekend.  Otherwise check my Facebook page for some updates or wait until I put in a summary in this blog.