The final episode of the “Read” series of The Hi All Podcast is up.
As the over all series was able my life long struggle to read, I thought we’d have fun by interview my wife Shannon Elise Muir Broden who had an entirely different experience growing up and reading.
Please take a listen.
Shannon loved reading where I didn’t.
We talk about her experience, how we met, animation, our webcomic Flying Glory and the Hounds of Glory, and Toastmasters which this whole project is for.
Please take a listen, and comment on Youtube, or here, as your comments will be including in the Speech I have to give at my Toastmasters club about this whole thing.
Also, please Like and Subscribe to my Youtube Channel. I’m 12 away from 100.
This whole Hi All Podcast series, done for Toastmasters, has been about my struggle to read from childhood on into adulthood.
Comic Books got me through school. Rarely was there a class assigned book that I enjoyed. Only after getting out of the structure of education did I find things on my own that I enjoyed to completion.
First came fantasy, and then science fiction, and then a love for mystery stories.
What I found however was that no matter the genre I had to enjoy the characters and their relationships to like the book. For me a fantasy couldn’t just be about the dragons, a science fiction story shouldn’t just be about spaceships, and mystery isn’t all about deductive reasoning.
I would stumble upon a genre that fit what I really needed in a book with interesting characters and relationships. That genre: Romance.
My faith in God, in Christ, has been a part of me since childhood.
Our family attended church every Sunday, so I went to the children’s Sunday School classes while my parents were in the church service.
This was the period of “Jesus Loves Me” songs and the ‘Felt-Board Gospel’. Where cutout characters were stuck upon a felt covered board. Very visual, really worked well for some of Jesus’ Parables, and stories like Noah’s Ark.
That was all good when I was quite young, but as I got a little older, I wanted to read the stories of the Bible myself.
Unfortunately, as I told you, this was during the worst period of my ability to read.
Which meant I was struggling to read the Bible.
I got through the ‘creation story,” and how Cain killed Able, and even the Tower of Babel. Because those were stories I already knew from Sunday School and were each relatively short.
Everything after that became heavier and harder to read.
A dozen or more of us were standing in line in the football field, and it wasn’t even the field at our High School. Tomorrow would be graduation day, and today is rehearsal.
Before we could get into the rehearsal line, some of us had to get into this smaller line that slowly moved and approached a corkboard standing off to the side of the field with several pages pinned to it. Each of us came up to it and searched for our names.
The girl in front of me, and myself, were desperate to find where our names appeared on this board. Because, only then, would we find out if we were graduating high school or not.
As I’ve told you, I struggled through school. All my classes effected by my struggle to read. Each year was better, but it was still hard. When an assignment called me to read chapter 6, 7, and 8, of a science book, or literature tome, the more pages I had to get through the harder it got.
There were classes I wanted to enjoy, but even those were hard.
Hi All, Apologies for the delay, I had some trouble with recording the latest episode, and also had to go back and make edits on the first two. They’re all up now.
Hi All, and Welcome back.
Several years ago, I received an odd phone call from someone who claimed be from my childhood and wanted to meet at a local restaurant. I did not recognize the name, but agreed to meet.
It turned out the person was going through Alcoholics Anonymous. Step number eight in AA’s Twelve step program, is to reach out to people they had harmed and be willing to make amends. This person turned out to be one of the many school bullies who had made my childhood a living hell.
However, after all the years that had gone by I had absolutely no memory of who the person was that was sitting across the table from me. Oh, I remember most of the bullying from elementary school, Junior High, and High School; but I just couldn’t place who this guy was. I had moved on to face other bullies in my life.
What does this have to do with my struggles to read? A whole lot more than you’d think.
Here is the second episode of the “Hi All Podcast” as I talked about how comic books helped with my struggles to read. Watch it here and come bag and read the blog. Thank you.
As mentioned last week, and as part of my next Toastmasters assignment, I have begun a podcast that I am putting up on Youtube. May find other places to put it, but for now a video podcast will be up, hopefully, weekly on Youtube. Please Like, Subscribe, and comment on the different episodes, as the response is part of the Toastmasters project.
I have a lot to learn on recording videos, and finding the appropriate software to edit it. I’m hoping each episode will get better than this first one.
For now, you can watch it here and read the written version of it below.
This is going to take a bit more work. The average Toastmasters speech I’ve given is 5 to 7 minutes long. At the end of this assignment, I will have to give a similar speech while also playing a sample of the podcast itself. Since the post has to either be 6 ten-minute episodes, or 10 six-minute episode, or there abouts, so that it all adds up to 60 minutes. Which will be the longest Toastmasters “speech” I will have given. Of course, this one is broken up in to multiple smaller ones so it might be easier.
Certainly, easier than the actual speech I need to do soon which will be twenty minutes of me standing in front of the club. What in the world am I going to speak about then? I have no idea.
We’ll see what happens with that speech and this podcast.
Hopefully, it will be interesting enough that I’ll keep doing it beyond the first series of episodes.
It’s hard to come up with topics for my blog regularly, it’s even more so at this moment.
My father had a stroke and we have spent the last week at the hospital with him. So, being creative is not a high priority.
And you know what, that’s okay. Take time to be you, during the worst and best times, you do not have to perform for anyone. Even yourself.
I will tell you this short little story out of all this.
My parents live less than a mile from the hospital my father worked at for over twenty years, but because the emergency room was full the ambulance had to drive ten miles further.
As my wife and I made the drive down, it had been just after a heavy rain storm, now the sun was shining with light clouds around. Then as we got closer, a darker (but not black) cloud drifted over, and for about three minutes it misted on us as we drove. Then it stopped, and the sun came out.
The most vivid, colorful, and bright RAINBOW appeared in the sky ahead of us.
It reminded me of the rainbows we would see in Ireland.
For the next twenty minutes it shined in front of us. For a while there was a second bow but that came and went, but the primary rainbow stood in front of us. Leading the way.
There is still a long journey ahead for my father, and for us, but we have Faith in God to see us through it. The rainbow was just a blessed sign to keep moving forward.
Most of my weeks, if I don’t have anything to do, or have a job, the days go flying by.
This week, however, crawled by and there were plenty of things to do, and then it came to a screeching halt right in the middle of it.
I won’t go into detail of why we went on a road trip Wednesday, but my parents and I wanted to visit an old friend. My parents live about thirty miles from me, and our friend is an additional fifty miles.
Getting to my parents wasn’t a problem. It rarely is (except when there are major traffic issues around downtown Los Angeles, but I’ve learned to deal with them and how to drive around them).
I picked them up and grabbed a quick lunch from one of our favorite family run restaurants before heading out.
Then we drove on down to our destination, only getting lost briefly because I had put in the wrong address in the GPS, which added fifteen minutes to the trip.
Once our visit was done, we headed back up, with plans on what we were going to do for dinner.
Then we hit the traffic, only miles from my parent’s home, and it slowed to a crawl.
Eventually we were down to about three exits and we would be home, and then the car dashboard lit up like a Christmas Tree. The Battery Light came on, and then the Oil Light came on, and then the steering wheel began to shake crazily.
I had to carefully move to the side of the freeway with my emergency blinkers on. I shut everything down and start back up again, move a few feet and have to start all over again several times. After which not only were then did the Battery and Oil lights come on, so did the Engine light.
Even with the emergency lights on people were honking at me to get out of their way. I was terrified that we’d get hit and my elderly parents would be injured.
Thank God, and I really mean that. When we finally reached the off ramp the engine ran fine again, but there was no way I was going to drive it more than a block at this point. I just needed a safe place to park. Luckily there was a small shop that had a good parking lot and I was able to safely get into a spot.
We then spent two hours sitting in the parking lot waiting for a tow truck to show up.
The tow is a story in itself, because there were two drivers. One was new and was training, and my car was the class room.
My sister had to come pick up us and take us home and the tow followed a few minutes later.
I ended up spending the night with my parents, and then in the morning called another tow to take the car down to the dealership for repairs. (This dealer ship is where I bought the car. Actually, I’ve bought all the cars I’ve owned so far from this dealer. I’ll write about them someday.)
I was dreading the cost of all this. I really can’t afford anything like this right now. As you know I need to find a job, so paying for car repairs isn’t going to happen.
After I leave the car off, I walk back to the restaurant I mentioned earlier, for breakfast. Then I spent an hour or so walking about the neighborhood, and I get a phone call from the dealership with the news of what’s bad with the car.
The problem apparently is a fuel Injector Pressure Sensor. That sounded like it was going to be expected.
It was going to take to the next day in order to make the repairs and so I rented a car so I could drive home and back.
Turned out that since it was related to the fuel, it falls under the Emissions Warranty and so there was no charge for the repairs. Not for the parts or the labor.
Praise God for that. We had been figuring out ways to pay for it all, but it was taken care of on its own.
In the end all that I had to pay for was the rental car. A nice car, but I didn’t like it and certainly wouldn’t buy one in the future.
On Friday I am able to bring my own car home with no problems, and no financial stress. Praise God.
In the meantime, my employment agency has submitted me for three different jobs this week, so that’s a positive way to end the week.
All has been good, and I pray that next week will be just as good.
