It was Saturday morning of the first full weekend in November. Spouse and I were barely recovering
from going over our budget, when I somehow missed a call on my cell phone. The
caller, a friend from church, left a message.
“Hi there, just checking in to make sure you’re all set to
speak at our meeting Monday evening. Have a great day!”
Wait - what??
We had agreed months ago to talk about our wild and crazy
Budapest and India trip from last winter at an upcoming meeting for the women
at our parish. The problem was that we were convinced it wasn’t until December.
Oops.
After a few minutes of spouting out how we couldn’t possibly
put something together that weekend with everything else we planned to do, and
how it wasn’t fair that we had such short notice (she told us about this during
the summer), I called her back determined to gently let her down.
I failed. She’s good.
Our weekend was spent downloading – or is it uploading –
photos from our phones and the cloud. I still don’t really understand where the
cloud floats around but it sure had a ton of stuff in it. Then we had to try
and remember exactly which monument/bridge/traffic jam was where. While I
worked on putting a Power Point presentation together, Spouse looked up some
details on several places in case anyone was curious about those little known
facts. In the end we had 76 slides, our garb that we wore for the India
wedding, and a few other trinkets from our travels.
Too many slides? Did they need to see the slide with the
peacock feather vendors in India or the artful presentation of eggs we had in
Budapest? Maybe not, but we left them in. Perhaps that’s why people dread
seeing personal slide shows – it gets so personal that you can’t relate to “one
more slide” of a family vacation. But I will admit it wasn’t so easy to cut
back once I started putting it together. Everything was fascinating even a year
later.
I flipped through the slides, if you can call it that on a
laptop, and Spouse did the majority of the talking. There were a few times that
I wished I had stuck in “one more slide” to make a point of a certain area we
visited, but based on comments and questions, I think our audience found it
interesting and entertaining. I know I did, because it brought me back to where
we were just about one year ago and reminded me how we will never regret the
time or money spent on this trip.

The main part of our slide show was The Love Couple’s India
wedding. Recalling the beautifully
arranged rooftop ceremony surrounded by The Groom’s family and friends brought
a smile to my face at the thought of how they welcomed us into the fold. There
were also other amazing memories such as the magnificent vision of the Taj
Mahal. It was a world we never expected to see and will always recall with a
touch of wonder.
It was fun to reminisce for a night and not see too many
yawning, glazed expressions. I can sympathize with someone being forced sit
through a slide show, but hey, at least this one time we were invited.
Powerpoint for me is a very useful program. It helps me a lot you know. By the way, look at this great Construction Presentation Template which I used in my last presentation last week. How do you like it? I prefer to use new templates every time.
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