Today I went to a wedding in CMCC and to my surpise, I found the homily of Fr. Chiu, the priest of CMCC, is not too bad afterall. In all the weddings in CMCC I went, Fr. Chiu always give the same boring canned homily about marriage and love. Today’s wedding couple is very active in CMCC and Fr. Chiu knows them very well in person. Therefore the homily adds a lot of personal touch and stories directly related to the couples and us, the guests. Too bad that Fr. Chiu falls back to his pre-packaged message on the second half of the speech, but overall the homily is well delivered. That reminds me what I had learnt in Toastmaster. A homily is essentially a speech try to get a message across the audience, either informative or inspiration. Therefore a good homily has to meet the critia of a good speech, relating to the audience is one of the key elements. I think Fr. Chiu should join Toastmasters as his homily doesn’t improve much over the years. Someone once said, practice doesn’t make perfect, only make it permanent. Fr. Chiu is a very good example.

This morning, I helped Pat threw away some years old garbage sitting in her garage, like old wood fence, door removed from renovation, broken excerise machine. The garbage is so big that we have to deliver it to the city garbage dump ourself. This trip to the garbage dump is an eye opening experience. The dump yield charges desposible fee by weight. There are drive thru scales weight your car before you get in and weight it again when you get out. I can only use horrific to describe scenery inside the garbage dump. There is literally a garbage mountain as big as a hockey rink and several stores high. The smell is obviously bad, but it is the amount of garbage shocks me. There are excavators, bulldozers working hard to pile up the garbage to free up rooms to receive more garbage. Dump trucks unload truckfull of garbage directly to the mountain. There are people dump small amount of residential garbage at the edge of the garbage mountain. This dramatic view pounder me to think about our environmental problem. Try to imagine how can we deal with all those garbages. The first response I have is that men have to create less garbage. Recycling is a really good idea. After I have calmed down a bit, the rational side of me came back. Proceduring less garbage is not very practical without significately lower our living standard. We really should focus on how to get rid of the garbage. The only solution I can think of is garbage fussion, covert all the mass of the garbage into pure energy. Garbage is really a serious problem and only technology can find a solution for the survival of mankind.

There is a new vietnamese resturant opened close to work. It is a branch of another famous vietnamese resturant in richmond. The quality of food there is really good. Its menu has some special dishes not found in other vietnamese places. It has became one of our most favourate place to have lunch. There is another old vietnamese resturant close to work. The food there is so-and-so. Since we had no other choice, we used to go there from time to time. After trying the new resturant, I am very sure we won’t go back to the old resturant ever. I wonder long the old resturant can last before it has to close its doors. In the food business, cuisine price and food quality are the key differtial factor. If price is the same but quality difference, the result would be is a winner takes all effect. Even the better resturant has no seats, we still won’t go to the lesser resturant. We will simpily pick another cuisine. If the resturant is targetting repeat customers, having the quality to price ratio is very important.

My car is sent to the body shop to repair the door lock today. I got a courtesy car from a car rental company. Since they run out of compact cars, they gave me a Ford Explorer. It is a hugh monster 4×4 jeep. I feel like driving a boat on the road. To my surprise, despite its size, its handling is quite good. It’s an American car, so I have the usual complains about dumb American interior design. The controls are not very user friendly and various components are arranged without any style. The mileage of this car is really bad, almost 50% worst than my Volvo. I can appriciate someone may need its capacity or offroad ability some time. I don’ t understand why someone would drive it as a commute vechicle. If they need to use such a big car once a while, just rent it when they need it would be more economical, needless to say it is more eco-friendly.

I have completed all my ten CTM speeches and earned the title of compotent toastmaster. It has been a long way since I joined the toastmaster club at work. Most of my friends at work think spending an hour in toastmaster meeting and preparing mock speeches is a waste of time. I found I had learn a lot in process experience. I couldn’t say I am a very good speaker now. But comparing to a year ago, I have made some significant improvements. I think the most valuable thing I earn is confidence in public speaking. English is my second language and my english foundation is quite weak. I have to spend extra effort to get the message across when I am giving a speech. Grammer and prounciation is my still biggest challenage. Other than that, I have pretty much overcame stage fright and had reasonable skill in preparing a speech. I will keep participating in toastmaster, trying to finish the next level in a year. I havn’t decided what advance speaking skill I want to work on yet. I will probably pick the humorous speech manual and one other manual. I received a small pin and a certification for archeiving the CTM level, which I hang it in my cubicle. Becoming a CTM doesn’t give me as much joy as becoming a ski instructor or a P.Eng. However CTM is still a nice and useful decoration on my resume.