Hi Mom,

It's 3 AM, and I decided to get up as I hadn't been able to get back to sleep after waking at 2AM to go for a bathroom visit. Heavy socks, a fleece vest, and a thick furry "throw" are keeping me warm enough as I sit in Dale Sr.'s recliner chair, drinking a cup of broth.

Arriving home Monday night, I was so glad that for the first time in a month or so I would be able to be home for more than three days at a stretch! However, as it turned out, I was again only home for three days, because I had to get to my Travel Meetup in Tempe and my car still isn't fixed, and Dale Sr. was still away on his hunting trip.

I reserved a room in a Motel 6, near the restaurant where are meeting was to be held. I called Dale Jr. and asked him if he could stop by both in the evening and the following morning before he went to work, to let Ziggy out and feed him. My friend Laure gave me a ride to the Tempe motel at 4PM. I checked into the hotel and walked to the restaurant, around a mile away. One of the members gave me a ride back to the motel after the meeting.

The travel meetup went very well. There were six of us, including my three other favorite long-time members, two of whom had been gone all summer. A small enough group to fit into a booth, but large enough to have a spirited conversation. 

You may remember Sandy helping me put photos onto my computer. These photos were to use for a slide show for my presentation on Brussels. The presentation was well-received, and also served as a springboard for interesting travel stories from other members.

I had been concerned because a particular woman had rsvp'd "yes",  a woman who had not attended all summer. This woman
is a person who monopolizes the conversation yet had little interesting to say, and whenever she paused she filled her gaps with "and, uh" so it was difficult for others to jump in without actually interrupting her. 

Also, the only travel she seemed to do was go on cruises, which is not the kind of travel our group is about.

This problem had worried me pretty seriously, because this travel "meetup" has meant so much to me, but I now wondered whether I wanted to keep it going. I'd not enjoyed the two or three meetings when this woman had been there. 

At the same time, I knew that the issue was not a trivial one, as I knew of two other meetups which had actually disbanded because an obnoxious person had started attending.


During the summer, I'd consulted with Nancy about techniques I might use to solve the problem. I'd also talked with others about the subject. Learning techniques for managing a group discussion is a new subject for me and an interesting one. It feels good to have had a problem come up and learned to do something about it. 

(The meeting did go much better than the last time "The Talker" had attended. At the bottom of this blog I discuss ideas on this subject, in case you want to read further detail.)

 The Motel 6 does not have coffee available in the morning in the motel, so I was very glad to get this cup of coffee at Denny's. (The reason my hair looks rather stringy is that Motel 6 does not furnish shampoo either....but the room was only a little over $42, with my senior discount.)

I then walked a couple of miles more to the Tempe Library for my Arabic lesson. It was good to see Hakima again. Health-wise she is not doing to well and may have to move back to Jordan where several of her family members are, and where health care is much more reasonable. She can't afford the Medicare A which pays for hospitalization, and she was recently hospitalized.

After my lesson, I was walking to the bus stop when Brian called to invite us for Thanksgiving Dinner at Marie's parents' home. I was so glad to hear that Diana is well enough now to host Thanksgiving dinner. Of course Marie does all the cooking for it.

 I took the bus back to Power Road, which was as far as it goes. By then it was around 4:00 PM, so I went over to a nearby restaurant to order two dinners-to-go and wait for Dale Sr. to pick me up. Here I am having a beer at the bar of Mi Amigo Mexican Grill (it's a chain, but it was near by) while I wait for the to-go orders. You can see on my face how glad I was to have that long day over!

 Written Saturday afternoon:

This morning I had my "beading, embroidery and handwork" meetup, and I really enjoyed meeting these two ladies:

I started making this necklace:

Have received a letter from Helen but haven't read it yet.

Love, Lennie

P.S. Below, I have some paragraphs about the topic how to handle a person who monopolizes a group discussion, which you may or may not want to read:

A couple of years ago the same problem (someone who talked too much) happened at one of our meetings, but the guy never came back. But I remember what another friend told me after that meeting, a friend who has a lot of experience on committee discussions (she is a member of the Phoenix Council of Foreign Relations) who had come on that particular night to our meeting.

Later, she told me on the phone, "You're the organizer, you need to moderate the discussion so that one person doesn't take over!" 
I could see that she was right, but I feared that I did not have the personality to take over that leadership role.That's just not something I can do, I thought!

 So when the same type of situation reared its ugly head with the present woman, I first consulted with Nancy on techniques for handling such a person. She suggested that this type of person actually has some sort of anxious lack of confidence, which they sound of their own voice compensates for (if I remember you correctly, Nancy.)

 She suggested combining "cutting in, but with a compliment", such as, "So sorry to interrupt, but what you are saying is so interesting, that I can't wait to hear what so-and-so has to say about it!" Nancy said that the compliment would assuage the talker's low self-esteem and make it easier for them to take the fact that someone had stopped them from continuing.  I find both the theory and technique Nancy gave me to be a valuable.

I also talked to a woman who moderated discussion groups for former drug-users, for years, in the prison system. This woman has a photography meetup in Colorado, and she told me that that group refuses to meet in the winter when she is not there, because there is one guy who "goes off on tangents" when she is not there to moderate. Talking with this woman reinforced to me the importance of the moderator's role, in those situations where a problem arises.

I also had consulted with the other long-time members of the travel club: e-mailed our two members who were gone for the summer, (babysitting for their grandchildren in the east coast) and gone to visit another member, Mary, at her home. They were all helpful to bounce ideas off of (such as having more of a format and having that format include a specific place for asking for other opinions.)

Ann, my co-organizer, said,"Sometimes you wonder if such a person has anywhere else to talk!"

Maybe more important, talking to them made me realize how much our club was important to them, which helped give me the courage to take on the leadership role necessary.

So, what did I actually end up doing? Well, a lot of times I just straight-out interrupted "the Talker", and the weird thing is she didn't even seem to notice that I was doing this. I had more confidence to "take action" because I'd discussed the problem with the other members and found out that she bothered them also.  The thought would go through my head, "I'm not having my friends' eyes glaze over in my travel club!" which gave me the courage to be more pro-active.

You remember the photos of Brussels which Sandy was helping me put onto my laptop, for the purpose of giving the group a presentation on my five days there? Giving that presentation seemed to spur the conversation into many different directions, which stretched out the length of the presentation, but also gave me the opportunity to use "let's get back to the presentation" as an excuse to move things along whenever she started going on and on.

Mary, who gave me a ride back to the motel after the meeting, said, "I think our friend did better tonight." (Meaning that "The Talker" didn't bother us as much).

 She said she'd noticed that the problem with this woman was that she kept adding unimportant details to her stories. For instance, she was talking about teaching school in Ash Fork, Arizona, and as she started into her story, she started giving actual driving directions to Ash Fork! ("You know you get to Prescott and take Highway blankety blank and then turn right at blah blah blah").

"You're right," I said, I myself had not noticed this. I realized that a  diversionary technique in that sort of digressing would be pretty easy, as in, "So what was interesting about the school you taught at in Ash Fork?" or something like that, to move her story along. (It turned out she actually had an interesting point, at the end.)

Anyway, learning techniques for managing a group discussion is a new subject for me and an interesting one. It feels good to have had a problem come up and learned to do something about it.