Going Home Packing List

 

Before leaving your holiday or business destination, check your going home packing list.You need your suitcase and suitcase keys and any strap used to secure or help identify your suitcase.

Colourful peacock feather wheeled suitcase, for fast identification. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

You need.

1 Fill the car with petrol if leaving a country where petrol is cheaper. For example, leaving Spain for England. 

(In Singapore you are not allowed to leave with a low tank and fill up in Malaysia. Check local regulations.)

2 Have your home door keys ready. Make a note of were you left them, with a neighbour, in an outside pocket of a suitcase, an inside pocket of a jacket, with your travelling companion. If you cannot send yourself an email or WhatsApp, because there is not connection, make a note on your phone, or use your laptop's Word document, or simply make a note in your diary for the date of return. To avoid informing potential thieves, you might disguise your note.

3 Have home country money in one place ready for buying milk or paying the taxi from the airport. Have the foreign country money handy to remove the weight from your pocket, donate to charity at the airport, or save for your next trip 9noting where it is stored, eg beside your passport back home.

4 List vital things to do on return. For example, paying bills, gardening, watering plants, confirming babysitting or gardening, stocking up with food, voting!

Wishing you smooth sailing, literally and metaphorically.

Save notes on packing in the lid of your suitcase or the back of your bedroom door.

Save useful posts with a bookmark or printing them and leaving a copy in your suitcase. 

ROOM CHECK LIST

1 Check bedroom, bathroom, balcony.

2 Check bed area, under bed, in bed, under pillow, under duvet, bedside table, under bedside table.

3 Check fridge.

4 Check all cupboards, wardrobes, sliding drawers, wardrobes again for jacket, top shelf for hat,.

5 Check around hotel. Anything in a hotel safe, hotel pool, locker, left for safekeeping at reception, loaned to a fellow traveller or colleague.

6 Return hotel keys. 

7 Check you have passcode to get your car out of the hotel garage.

8 Ask for a packed lunch, pick up your ordered packed lunch, have a last coffee, or last toilet stop near reception.

9 Check the number of suitcases, plus hats, coats, jackets, umbrellas, maps, camera bags, laptops, phones.

10 Stow in the car boot (Americans call it the trunk) all valuables out of sight. 

Please share links with your family, friends and colleagues.

Online meetings tips and tricks: Hiding, Muting, Naming Photos, Polls, Summary, Timing, Voting,

An online meeting of Braddell Heights Advanced Toastmasters Club

Polls and Voting
How do you take a vote for candidates or best speaker in an online meeting? If one person has a zoom account which is professional, about 15 US dollars a month, maybe 20 Sing dollars, the person with that account calling the meeting has the option to do polls.

Menti Voting
Alternatives, using menti.com

If the host shares the poll results, anybody who gets no votes could be disappointed. If you are tough, you say that they have to learn to be a good loser, and try harder to be more popular, more memorable and more meaningful.

Chat Group Voting
A third way of voting is to have all the votes sent to one person in the chat group.

Ideally the vote counter should not a partial President nor somebody who has spoken and might either be tempted to ri the votes or risking being accused of doing so by a disgruntled loser.

Naming Photos
Before Voting For Speakers, you must check that everybody is named correctly. If everybody knows you by your married name of Lee, and your automatic fill in has listed you by your maiden name, you might lose votes. So either the photo owner or the meeting host must change the name.

How?

Re-naming Yourself
On a mobile phone and ipad you may need to slide the screen with your fingertip to see by swiping your second page. Under participant.

You can look at the participant panel. You can change your name.

The co-host can change somebody's name. But let the name owner try so they can learn.

Now, let's look at time.

Timing
Is the speaker eligible to be voted for or over time?

Put the timing in the chat.
5 minutes up.

6 minutes up.

7 minutes up.

Speech Summary
At the end of a speech or the end of a meeting you might want a summary. Why?

The speaker at a Toastmasters International training is taught to end with a summary of the speech.
If I arrive late to a meeting or get called away in the middle, I am very glad to hear a recap from the speaker at the end, or a toastmasters international speech evaluator.  In a general meeting you might hear a recap of the highlights from the chairwoman or man or person giving the vote of thanks at the end of the meeting.

Useful Websites
Menti.com
Zoom
Toastmasters International Find a Club
https://www.toastmasters.org/find-a-club
learncool.sg
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8262085/College-student-shocked-professor-read-private-conversations-Zoom.html

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. (Not related to the actress.)
Author of twenty books including: Quick Quotations; Who Said What When.
See books and profiles on Lulu.com and Amazon, such as Wedding Speeches & Toasts. Also watch videos on YouTube.

If you want to learn to speak the Queen's English, or Received Pronunciation. join me at my online toastmasters club,
Braddell Heights Advanced. Wednesdays, 7-9 Singapore time which is seven hours ahead of London, England.
I am also a member of
Singapore Online.9-12 pm, Singapore time, Fridays. I am also a member of
Tampines Changkat Advanced.
Harrovians, London.

See other posts on speaking, singers, statues, languages and destinations.
Please share links to your favourite posts.

Voting When Away Travelling on Holiday or Overseas On Business

Flag of Europe.

I have lived in the UK, USA, Spain and Singapore. I am British but spend a lot of time in Singapore.

With a major vote in the UK on November 12th 2019 Singaporeans were asking me whether the British could vote in Singapore.

There are three ways in which you might vote when away. The same rules may apply if you are voting in another country or visiting another country.

Different rules may apply in the UK for national elections and local by-elections. Singapore is part of the Commonwealth (yes, it still exists).

Somebody suggested I or other members of my family might be able to vote at an embassy. My family phoned the embassy and got a long menu of multiple choice of departments. They chose consular services.

Postal Vote
You will have to register well in advance.

If you are registering from your home country, you might need to register online for the forms to be posted. Then you need to post from home to the polling organization well in advance. Also allow time to fill in the form before the last post of the day.

Don't just allow five minutes for the form and five minutes to run to the postbox on the last day. You need time to read the instructions, fill in the form, seal the vote inside one envelope, place that inside another envelope.

Photo by Sellers in Wiki under post

Last Minute Delivering or Posting the Voting Form
Then find your coat and umbrella and run to the postbox or post office. Or drive and look for a parking place. Maybe the post office closes their door five minutes early to deal with the last customer before closing time. Then they point to the nearest postbox. Stop to check the envelope is securely sealed.

Electoral Register
Note whether your name and address then appear on the electoral register. You may choose to leave it on. This is handy. The electoral register is old to companies whose staff check your credentials. That is how the phone operator can ask you is that Mrs so and so using your first name, to be sure whether it is you or your spouse or your neighbour or child. it can also autofill, either from information saved on your computer, or saved on the computer of the people receiving your form - the government or those who are sold your information.

Privacy and Protection
Check to see where your information is going and whether data protection will protect you and if so how. It may be that the government and legal organizations such as the police are exempt in the country where you are voting or residing.

To summarize, getting off the register might help protect you from mailing lists, spams and scams. On the other hand, staying on enables your contacts to find your customer name or company name faster and acts as PR.

You might have to provide a signature within a box - practise writing your signature small enough to fit. You might also need your address including the postcode. read the form through so you don't write your first name or whole name in the box which says surname.

You might also need to write your name in capitals. And write your name in capitals in one place and your signature in another box. Then if you make a mistake you need to see if you are allowed to rub out or use correction fluid or if you have to cross out and add your initials.

Or have the forms couriered out to you and back to somebody reliable in your family or workplace to post for you.

Do you wish to be voting online just for one election, or for any and every election?

Proxy Vote
For the UK the proxy vote must be done by somebody who is themselves eligible to vote.

Online
Not yet available everywhere but will be the thing of the future. No doubt in avant garde Singapore.


Useful Websites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting

https://www.gov.uk/voting-in-the-uk#voting-by-proxy

https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office

About The Author
Angela Lansbury is an author and travel writer and photographer, teaching English and other languages.
Please bookmark and, if you have a favourite post or two, share the links with your family, friends and colleagues.

Singapore - voting day count down

Today has been voting day in Singapore. People working in offices have been given the day off. Voting is compulsory. If you don't vote, I was told, you are barred from voting in later years. The campaigns have generated a lot of excitement. The majority party is sure to get it. But one of the opposition parties might win a seat or two. Locals will be sitting up into the night watching TV and phoning each other agog to hear the news. The papers have been full of election news for days and this is likely to carry on. (Along with news about the haze.)

Election as a topic for talks
At Toastmasters clubs one of the table topics for impromptu speeches is likely to be something to do with the election. In the past month meetings have started with 'what will you be doing on election day' for every person to answer.

One of the speeches might be on elections. One speaker talked about electing a monitor at primary school, elections in China which he visited, and finally elections in Singapore.

Update:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-ruling-party-popularity-tested-general-election-000458562.html

Angela Lansbury, BA, author, writer, speaker.

September in Singapore - voting on 11th

If you are planning to attend any event in Singapore, note that 11th is voting day so venues may be busy, voters may be busy and meeting dates of club may change.

A popular topic for Singaporeans at speakers' clubs, members of Toastmasters International, is 'what will you be doing on September 11th?'.