The Federation of Westburg

Well, so much for that goal of posting more often.
I drove back over here to college on the 10th, and the semester started back up on January 11. That weekend (the 15th and 16th) a group of underclassmen in ACO (one sophomore, seven of us freshmen) went to a tournament at Missouri State in Springfield. We gave a ride to a guy from MU, who rode in my car on the way down to Springfield from Columbia, and then back from Springfield to Columbia. The team I was on got third, while the other team got 5th. We had fun, as we usually seem to do, and fitting 8 people into a hotel room is an adventure. The girls' giggling did keep the rest of us (three girls versus five guys, just to give an idea of our gender ratio) up for a little bit, but that subsided after a short time. After puttering around for a while Saturday morning, we did get to the tournament. I now feel I should have mentioned this earlier, but Friday night it was ridiculously foggy, and then it was also foggy when we were driving back Saturday night. I recall seeing warnings for "freezing fog". I happened to think at one point between Macon and Kirksville that the other two people in my car, who seemed more concerned with the lack of markings on the GPS than I did (maybe I had bigger fish to fry at the time?), were from Chicago and Kansas City respectively. I don't know, but in any case I thought having the GPS in the car was a big help. It seems that my driving is going to be poked fun at for some time. It was the first time I've driven to Springfield, or in Columbia or any big city really, by myself before, "By myself" is more of a relative term, it seems to me, but in any case I spend more time driving through isolated farmlands that more urbane individuals can probably scarcely imagine.

( I really should be working harder. )

On a related note, a couple weeks ago for some reason I had a sequence of dreams that I remembered and typed some things about in a few text documents. One dream, on February 1, was reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica for some reason (I blame the design of the space fightercraft that were in the dream, since I've never seen Battlestar Galactica, other than a couple episodes of the 'redesigned' series), and I'm currently working on basing a story on some of the things from the dream. Today I was wasting some time thinking about how fast to make the faster-than-light engine to be used, since I don't think I want to use BSG's instantaneous teleport FTL drive in this story. It's inspired by my dream, after all, and while I may borrow some things here and there from BSG, I'm pretty sure it's going to be very different. For one thing, the polity that the protagonist is going to serve is a Commonwealth (I haven't really decided firmly on anything much more specific than that), and I have no idea what enemies they'll fight, but I've been looking and am thinking of basing some aspects on 1650s Europe (no, not at all inspired by the Commonwealth of England during their Interregnum ;-)  ).

I went home two weekends ago, and it seemed like my weekend was shot between driving 8 hours (counting the round trip to home and back to Kirksville), sleeping, and basically not doing anything. I did get to go to the Upward Bound alumni panel, it was nice to see some of my classmates, though I was amused by hearing about some of them talk about partying the night before- one girl that showed up late was apparently a little hungover, which amused me. I'm not really sure why it seemed like the showing up hungover part seemed appropriate, but oh well. I did get my alarm clock, so now I wake up to the radio rather than whatever random song I select to play over my headphones perched near my head. I also got some more clothes at the Lee store while I was home, so now I have several pair of ill-fitting jeans, unfortunately. I hope they shrink a little bit more, or at least over time fit better.

The tournament we went to this last weekend was fun - the team I was on got first place in our division, and there was one junior and three freshmen on that team. We only had one bad game, really, all the rest we fairly consistently scored above 300 points per game. It was fun, though it sure ate up my weekend. I greatly enjoyed eating at Fazoli's Saturday night - I don't think I've eaten there for almost 7 years, I had forgotten how good Fazoli's breadsticks were. I rode down in the front seat of the least cramped car, and then on the way back I got squeezed in the back with two girls... I was fairly satisfied with the arrangement, I could have been stuck next to much worse people. But enough of that. 
( And here's the obligatory rambling. )

Really, though, I need to step it up academically and whatever, since I'd rather not have to drop out just because I was lazy and stupid. I'd rather keep my full ride...

Mid-term break starts next week! I don't know of any tests that I have before the break, though, and considering the break starts Wednesday I would hope that my teachers would have notified their classes... ( Then I decided to ramble. )

So my half-birthday was today - only 6 months until I turn 19. Woo-hoo. Uh, I don't have too much to say, I guess - yesterday it was announced that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, and he had only been in office 12 days before the nomination process closed. I'm my typical skeptic self, for the most part - I feel that he's hardly done anything worthy of really getting the award - he hasn't brought peace to the Middle East, he's actually sending more soldiers to Afghanistan, and I have yet to hear of anything really deserving, but at the same time I prefer to think like the statement from someone I read, which said something along the lines of Obama's winning the award shows the promise that he has shown so far and might be more encouragement than "Good job on your achievements." Most of my Facebook friend feed had at least something about Obama winning - I saw a story about it, was surprised, opened the "Latest Headlines" RSS feed to the BBC in Firefox, read a story, tweeted and then updated my Facebook status, and then I saw a lot of people mentioning it somewhere in their status. I like to think that I had something to do with at least some of the reactions, haha.

This week was my college's homecoming. Wednesday I bought a hooded sweatshirt (since I hadn't thought to bring one when I left home in a hurry), and I was glad I did since Thursday and Friday (well, and today for that matter) all turned out to be cold and cloudy and wet, to varying extents. I was going to go to the homecoming parade today originally, then I was talking to a girl on Facebook via comments on my status about planning to go to the homecoming parade, and I guess I became less adamant about waking up early and going to the parade. I ended up staying up until around 3 and then I went to bed, woke up a couple times, and then I woke up close to noon and finally got out of bed. After an excursion out to my car, I found that I didn't bring some things that I had wanted to bring to college, so I suppose I"ll have to make do until I either find or buy more of the disposable razors in question. I only shave every week or so anyway, so it's not like it's a huge deal I suppose...

In other news, I've come up with several intriguing story ideas lately, due to playing "The Battle for Wesnoth", my computer science class, and possibly some other origin I can't think of. ( I thought I'd cut these to save on space.  )





I went to my first college academic bowl tournament last week. I had a lot of fun - ( if you really want to read about it, click here )

So, since graduation, I have gone to National Quiz Bowl, then Upward Bound, then probably done a lot more stuff that I don't remember right now...

I rather enjoyed the two days between graduation and school getting out - I think I probably stayed up too late both nights, or those three nights, or whatever. I thought I finished Latin the first time a couple weeks ago, then since then I've had to change my Mythological Couples project PowerPoint presentation (first I had to write a love letter in Latin, then I had to remove a couple words, and ultimately I just submitted it earlier today or hopefully the final time). I probably should have worked on Thank-you cards from graduation, but instead I wasted time and did other things... I probably should remember more about that time, but I had my computer on for two weeks straight - which is probably the longest time I've had it on for pretty much ever, in view of I've only had this computer since just after Christmas and usually it seems like when I have my computer on for any length of time, a thunderstorm hits or the power goes out; in any case, something happens so the computer goes off and I have to turn it back on, but a couple weeks ago I had it on and running for two weeks straight! 
Achievement aside, we left for national quiz bowl very early Friday the 29th (about 6 a.m.). I was awake and trying to fall asleep until Villisca, and then slept until we had just crossed into Illinois. We ate lunch at a Culver's there, then carried on to Chicago, and I believe I slept some more. After we got there and got registered, we played a practice round against some school from New York and got stomped, I believe the score was 355 to 30 or something. They read the questions very fast.  Later I think our coach was talking to someone and they mentioned that the good teams liked to go and show off at these practice rounds. I happened to catch Jay Leno's final broadcast, I think it'd be nice if they sold DVDs or something of his time on the show but we'll see... Saturday was the actual tournament - we lost our first match to Maggie Walker A of Virginia, who I had heard usually does well (they ended up getting 5th place out of the 192 teams there, I think). Then we beat White Cloud of Michigan for our first win of the day, then we beat MSMP B from Mississippi. Then we lost to Bergen B from New Jersey, then we beat University from California, then a private school from Mississippi, then we lost to Killenberg, New Jersey, then a loss to a private school from Texas, then a loss to a team from San Jose, California (I think they were from an all-boys school), and our final match of the day we beat Danville, Kentucky by 10 points. After that, we went out on the proverbial town, to Navy Pier, and we got to ride the El train. Let's just say I love loathe mass transit. The MetroLink in St. Louis 10 years ago, at least from what I can remember, was smoother and probably faster. The El Train, aside from the inconvenience of having a stretch of track out of service for repairs, thus neccessitating that we transfer to a bus, which would then take us to another train stop, kept hitting bumps and the train car kept moving around. Then, mass transit in general, where the trend seems to be "Fill all the seats, then cram more people in until absolutely no one aboard has any space!" I don't seem like I was raised on a farm 12 miles from anywhere, do I? I'm such a farmer, or something... Anyway, the guy who read for us at the practice match kind of adopted us and was with us the whole time that night, he helped us get around the mass transit and was talking to most of the group at some point - apparently he was 18, but had graduated from his high school in Los Angeles (or at least it was in California) at 16 and he was currently in college at UCLA studying biochemistry.
The next day, since we had a record of 5-5, and better than 4-6, we played in the small school playoffs, but were eliminated by White Cloud. I was annoyed, but in retrospect never really anticipated doing very well at Nationals, so the fact that I got 20th individually and that we got 8th place in the small school division and 116th overall isn't too bad. After getting eliminated, we ate pizza at Giordano's (that was delicious), then we split into a couple different groups. The group I was with browsed some souvenir stores, but we never did get to any museums, as was originally planned - we did get to the Shedd Aquarium for about an hour, but then it closed. We took a water taxi to Navy Pier, and spent a few hours there. When we got back to the hotel (we were on the 8th floor of 10 floors... It was ridiculous, the Hyatt Regency O'Hare), at some point I got my individual trophy and then there was a party in one of our rooms. I had assumed it would be only people from my team, so when I was there and people from other teams started showing up, I went to my room and rested for a while. Then I headed back to the room and hung out there until 4 am, then went to bed. We left that Monday morning about 8:30 after checking out and I had to run back to my room to get my quiz bowl shirt, which I had left hanging in a closet. This time, I slept a couple times in Illinois, then didn't sleep through most of Iowa, and I was certainly awake from Williamsburg, probably, on. It was interesting seeing the clouds, and as we pulled into town we got an escort and sort of a parade, and the diehard fans (parents, mostly) were waiting at the bottom of Main Street in the rain. After a little bit, we went home and I threw together some things for Upward Bound, then I got to drive to Maryville in a thunderstorm. I had thought I was merely getting a ride there, I didn't know I'd have to drive. Anyway, aside from some curb checking and confusion, that managed to work out.

My college class I'm taking (Introduction to Literature) doesn't start until Monday, so this last week I pretty much hung out in the dorms most mornings. I did sleep in Wednesday... I'm surprised how good and different the food seems to be this year (in the past, breakfasts have been reconstituted scrambled eggs, some form of potatoes, and sausage links, sausage patties, or bacon, and biscuits and gravy or pancakes or waffles- Tuesday morning we had a meat egg and cheese biscuit, Thursday morning we had breakfast pizza!). Work study isn't particularly challenging, I can run this program to clean off 96 laptops at a time and when that's done I restart them and run a hardware check. Usually about half of the ones I'm running get done with the disk wiping after 53 minutes and between 35 and 55 seconds, so I start the hardware check on them and then I go to work on sorting through this pile of cables - power cables separated from laptop A/C adaptors, then sorting through Ethernet cables. I work study two hours a day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. I've enjoyed hanging out in the dorms and doing nothing, but my class is from 10:10 to 12:40, so I won't really get lunch as long as I have class, it looks like.

I thought it was funny Thursday I was discussing a map I've been working on for a story with a friend when one of the RAs said "Now I don't want to be presumptuous, but" there were a couple RAs wanting to get a Dungeons and Dragons game together, and asked if I'd be interested. I said I would, and so last night we tried rolling for characters. I was annoyed by a group of people who decided to sit right next to the group of us that were trying to get started and talk, one of whom wouldn't shut up. I was getting pretty annoyed, and in the end with the amount of interest we had we got I think everyone's class and ability scores decided, some people also decided race (I decided on Human Wizard for now, but I want to play around with D&D and make other characters, which I may end up using since most of the people seemed to want to play clerics, wizards, "psions", and "psychic warriors", I think there was one fighter. I may end up using a rogue.... I had this idea of making a human rogue, fighter, cleric, and I don't know what else just to see what I could make. The RA in question who had asked me if I was interested also had a binder with a couple guidebooks in it and a lot of character sheets, and one guidebook I thought was interesting was a "Hero-Builder's Guidebook" or something that had these sets you could roll, and if you got those numbers that's what your character's home environment, family economic situation, family defense readiness, and many other things were. I went through part of it once and got Temperate Marsh, frontier homestead, religious order, and rudimentary family defense readiness, or something like that, I thought it was really interesting. I still think it'll be interesting to see how it goes, and whether the 8 or however many people remain interested, or if it'll just be the core 3 or 4 of us. Since so many of them were non-bridge students, they had to leave at 10:30... Most of the core group that were really interested  were bridge students, and we are supposed to go to bed of our own volition, rather than having specific lights-out times, I think (or guess.. I don't know).

Anyway, I'm up far too late, and probably won't get enough sleep tonight, darn it. Oh well.

We had practice for NAQT the Thursday before we left

As you can tell from the title, I've had a busy time in the time since my last entry. I shall attempt to keep this relatively short (Laconic Entry ACTIVATE!)

First: Prom. Also known  as Operation PROM NOM NOM or Promenomenade. In short, fun was had. In more detail, I took halopikachu to my school's prom on May 2. The theme was "Memories of the Chocolate Factory" and my English, Drama, and Speech teacher was dressed as Willy Wonka to announce at promenade and he was also at prom proper. The car I took (Mom's) was having issues starting when I was going to leave home, but we (meaning Dad) managed to start it, I picked up the flower, then the date, and then we went to the park in town for dinner with a group of my friends. We ate Chinese (well, most of us - one girl had pizza instead), parents took pictures, then we went to a house and changed. After taking pictures once we had dressed, we headed up to promenade, promenaded, then sat around for a while until it seemed like plenty of promenade guests were leaving, so we hopped in the car and I drove to the community building, where prom was - one of the junior parents told me that they weren't letting people into prom until 8 (so we still had half an hour to kill), and so then we cruised. We pulled into a parking lot at the park and talked and took pictures and recorded a short video, then enough time had been killed so we went to prom, played with balloons, danced some (slow danced once, the other times were Cotton-Eyed Joe and I'm probably forgetting some others), ate candy, took pictures. Then it was midnight, so I drove us back to the house where we had changed and changed back into our street clothes, then up to the school for after-prom bash. We got t-shirts, watched the hypnotist, spent like an hour (it seemed like) running through the obstacle course, sat around, talked, and had fun. I got about $150 and a generic Mp3 player at the end (4 am, or thereabouts), so we headed back to the house, got our stuff, and I drove her home and talked. There was something about that conversation I enjoyed, wish I could distinguish what exactly that was. Oh well.

About a week later (May 8) was State Academic Bowl, which we qualified for by winning Districts (April 18) and Sectionals (April 23). We left May 7 for State, the send-off assembly this time was a sort-of quiz bowl match between two teams of teachers. The questions were all essentially over inside jokes from our brain bowl team, like "Which member is more worried before a quiz bowl match than before a basketball game?" or "What is our coach's pet peeve?" or "What is the answer to any math question that you don't know?" I thought it was pretty funny that after I got up on stage and said something about wanting to beat the school who defeated us in the state championships my freshman year, and then explained a little more once it was pointed out or I realized that nobody would know what I was talking about based on what I had initially said, this junior boy that wrestles and is the only person I know currently attending the high school who has beat my ACT score (I scored 32 on the ACT last December, this kid scored 33 on the ACT in April of this year) and probably the smartest kid in next year's senior class (If he's not the smartest, he's certainly in the running) was saying he and a friend of his would go beat up the kids from Thomas Jefferson (the school who beat us in the state championship my freshman year). I thought it was hilarious. We took a school bus down to Columbia, got to the hotel, spent some time there, then we took some pictures and went to Steak and Shake for dinner. I ate with the two sophomores who had gone (well, and my brother after he decided to switch to our table). After dinner, we went back to the hotel, swam in the small hotel pool, and then went to bed. The next day started off with a storm. When we got to the university campus where state brain bowl was being held (MU) it was raining and we got inside. Apparently one team's sponsor had fallen on the slick sidewalk and broken her arm. I was on guard our first two matches, expecting the teams to be pretty good, but in the end I think we beat them pretty handily (Can't be bothered to look up the scores right now). The third match of the day, and final preliminary match of the morning, saw us facing off against Thomas Jefferson Independent (who has made it to the state championship round for like the last ten years and won I think four state championships in a row before this year). That was our closest match of the morning, it ended fifteen points in our favor and so we exited the preliminary rounds with a total of 690 points. We went to the McDonald's on campus for lunch (a short walk, and the weather had cleared off and gotten warm), and when we returned after lunch we played the fourth seed (we were seeded first) and then Leeton. It was Leeton's first time in the state championship (apparently they're from somewhere near Warrensburg) and it was kind of funny their captain (who I think was a junior) had a similar name and looked similar to me. Oddly enough, for being the second-place team they scored 60 points to our 255. Their coach, I seem to remember talking about before the match that they had heard of me, and I heard afterwards something about their being scared of me. I can't imagine why... Seriously, though, we won and got first place in Class 1. Everyone else seemed to be making a big deal about it, and I really didn't get why (making ridiculous poses for pictures and so on) but on the other hand, not everyday do you win a state championship, I suppose. After the picture-taking was over, I got my indivdual award (first place on the All-State team, 15.4 questions per match average, compared to the Leeton captain, who was in second with 11 toss-ups per game... also, the first place all-state players in Class 2, 3 and 4 had averages of 11, 13.6 and 9.8 questions per game respectively, but enough bragging) and after that, we left. We ate at Culver's in St. Joe on the ride home and got periodic updates via Indian Alerts (our school's text messaging system, usually used for announcements like 'track meet today has been canceled' or 'school will be dismissed early due to inclement weather") on the greeting that was planned. The first update was something like "Meet academic team on main street @ 9:30, bring flashlight", most of the other updates were more like "confirmed arrival time 9:30" or something like that. Apparently we weren't supposed to know about our greeting until we got back to town, but considering they used Indian Alerts I'd consider that a FAIL. Anyway, once we got back to Tarkio we rode on a firetruck down Main Street with the sirens going and when we got off the fire truck at the end of Main Street, it seemed like half the town was there. There were lots of congratulations, handshakes, hugs, etc. etc. etc. It was a triumph, almost in the Roman tradition.

The fun part of last weekend (using the term "fun" loosely) was that after returning from State Academic Bowl Friday night, I had Saturday and half of Sunday to pack for senior trip. I managed to get everything packed and my Mp3 player "fixed" so now it will actually sync and get music on it (I need to actually fix it so it will actually work now, the Halo: CE soundtrack doesn't work, along with other problems - I suspect the problem is that dad put the Halo: CE soundtrack on my Sansa TWICE). The trip down to Branson for senior trip wasn't too eventful - a few boys tried purchasing pornographic magazines at the gas station we stopped at near Clinton, but the principal and sponsors got wind of it somehow and so those who had purchased that literature had to return their magazines. That was pretty much the worst rule infraction of the whole trip, I think - no alcohol was brought or found (that I'm aware of) and in short I think we behaved ourselves quite nicely. I also discovered that I enjoy laser tag - at least the place we went to was really cool, Tuesday night a group of us that didn't go to Dixie Stampede went laser tagging at this place, and I thought it was neat the setup of this place had statistics for each vest-gun pair, and  what I suppose would be called a callsign or name - I was Titan, for example, and ended up getting 7 of 16 (there were fourteen kids, our ag teacher, who was one of our class sponsors, and a girl that worked there). Based on the statistics, I would say I gave a little bit better than I got - I was terrible at watching my back, for example, but I'd say I was reasonably good at "sniping" people who showed their LEDs on their vest through a hole I could shoot through. Possibly the most exciting part of the trip was Wednesday night, when they had been talking on the Weather Channel all day about storms that had spawned tornadoes (including one that hit Kirksville, which I thought was interesting in light of the fact that I'm going to go to college there this fall, and made me curious as to the extent of the damage that tornado caused) in the state. After we went to this place we'd gone Monday night for go-karting and mini-golfing, when we got back to the hotel (after stopping at Andy's frozen custard, I got a butterscotch shake) I went to my room and glued myself to the Weather Channel. I decided to get ready for bed so I wouldn't be showering when the storm hit, and I was brushing my teeth after having showered when I first heard thunder around 11 pm. About half an hour later, the county that Branson is in went under a tornado warning, and we had been told at least once earlier in the day that in the event of severe weather, we were to go to the second floor of the hotel (we were on the fifth floor, the lobby was on the third floor, the second floor was apparently mostly underground.) I grabbed my wallet, room key, cell phone, and camera, put on my shoes, and headed downstairs. My class and one of our sponsors (The principal's wife) were in the hallway for about an hour, all told; I felt like it wasn't a good idea to be near the glass door which led to the hot tub and outside pool (which, by the way, didn't have water in it, either one , and some other things happen that I wasn't happy with, but I'm not sure if I was just being neurotic or if I was being intelligent.

We got back from senior trip and Friday was the awards assembly and graduation practice. Our school has a tradition at this awards asembly of after the seniors leave, every class gets to jump forward to the next class's chairs (juniors move to where the seniors were sitting, sophomores move to sit where the juniors were sitting, and so on). Well, our class pulled the prank of taking our chairs with us, which from what I've heard has never been done before. We win. In addition, I feel like I made off like some kind of bandit with all the scholarships, certificates, a couple medals and a trophy that I got at that assembly, but then I've usually done pretty well at this assembly for an underclassmen up to now anyway.

Saturday I went to a couple graduation parties - well, actually, as it happens, the graduation parties for the valedictorian and salutatorian of my class. First we went to the salutatorian's party (she only lives half a mile from me), and then we went in to the valedictorian's party. The valedictorian's party had karaoke, food, and I got cold and wanted to leave before we finally did.

Today was graduation - it was nice to just get it over with. There were technical difficulties gettting the senior slide show to work, and finally they had the chorus sing "I'll Be There For You" before they finally got it working. Multiple people were telling me to either get up and help, or go get my Dad and have him help, but I figured that if our class sponsor/tech coordinator and her husband the principal and whoever else was there wanted or needed my or Dad's help, they would have gotten us. Anyway, I got my diploma, my picture taken multiple times, tassel moved, hugs handshakes etc. Afterwards I went out to my graduation party and ate, finally changed into normal clothing (jeans, t-shirt, tennis shoes, in contrast to shirt, tie, khakis, nice shoes), and we only left there probaby around 8 maybe? I'm sure the import of today will hit later.

 

Well, so much for keeping it short!

Gah, haven't blogged for 3 weeks. Let's see...

A week ago we won Conference Brain Bowl for the 4th year running - I foresee that this streak won't continue, and that some other team will win Conference next year... I'm not sure exactly how accurate extrapolating next year's results from what went down this year would be accurate, considering that most of the All-Conference team members were seniors. There were some surprises, too, with teams not turning out to be as formidable as in the past. The last match was intensely close. I still favor one team, I think, but next year would be interesting - and I'm going to be in college!

Earlier today I was talking to somebody about some kind of LARPing, after consulting the GREAT GOD OF THE INTERNET (Inside joke much?), I have decided that the guy I was talking to must have been talking about Dargohir, basing this conclusion primarily on the guy I was talking to's mentioning Ragnarok as being a major event for this game. It sounded mildly intriguing, and to my surprise the site isn't automatically blocked by the evil accursed school firewall DEMON! thing. It sounds mildly intriguing, remains to be seen if anything comes of it though. I think I've witnessed LARPing roughly... once. It was amusing to see a few people whacking each other with foam swords and wearing costumes on the a college campus. (Truman State during the UB college visit earlier this year, I believe)

Today I (think) I'm going to try to get my license (for the 3rd time, if I fail I get to write to the state government and figure out how to be authorized to re-take the driver's test). Also today is the Conference spelling bee, it'll be interesting to see how that will go.

I got texting as of a couple weeks ago, and tomorrow is an early out.
I have, by my calculations, 29 days left of high school (assuming no state brain bowl, if we do end up going to state then I'd have like 28 or 27.5 days left). I'm not sure I'm ready for high school to be over, on the other hand it probably won't be sorely missed. I don't know.

We got the schedule for district brain bowl yesterday, it was interesting because there's a break for dinner - A break for lunch is usual, since, you know, most of the academic bowl meets I've been to start in the morning (and we usually proceed to the afternoon, so a lunch break is only usual). This year we need to be at districts at 1 p.m. (I think there's a rules meeting or something for the coaches), and the last match starts at 7 p.m. I, as I believe I've previously mentioned, foresee about two challenging teams at districts. I don't even know who would win the other district, that would play the winner of our district at sectionals.

Well, bell rang, gotta go, let's see how today goes...

Today is my final conference tri-meet of my high school quiz bowl career- against Mound City and Nodaway-Holt. My sources tell me that Mound City isn't as formidable this year as in years past, which makes sense to me - my freshman year they had a senior that seemed to buzz in and score most of their points, and then last year they had a senior girl who had dated the boy that was a senior my freshman year, and the girl who graduated last year similarly seems to have scored most of their points, so it would certainly make sense to me if they weren't as formidable as they were in the past - HOWEVER, I am anticipating victory, but not expecting it. Overconfidence is detrimental to our performance (see Victory Disease), and I'm pretty sure that losing to Mound City at the conference championships last year was an example of overconfidence. I'm pretty sure there is at least one other example of overconfidence in my quiz bowl career; nonetheless, if indeed Mound City proves to be not as much of a challenge as anticpated, that leaves Rock Port as a formidable challenge, and St. Joe Christian as an unknown. Even our defeat of St. Joe Christian at the Savannah invitational tournament last year isn't that great of an example, I don't think, since the format and questions are different there and the questions at the Savannah invitational also generally are somewhat weighted towards social studies (as far as I can remember, no or very little math calculation), probably due to Savannah's former coach being a social studies teacher.
I was pretty certain I had more to say on that... Well, anyway, in summary I'll get my first look at Mound City tonight, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if, as all my intelligence says, they aren't as formidable this year as they have been in the past.

When I found out our district assignment, I was pretty sure that the most formidable teams in the district (that we'd play, so obviously leaving ourselves out of the reckoning) would be Rock Port, Mound City, and St. Joe Christian. St. Joe Christian won the district last year, Mound City is usually challenging, and Rock Port has been challenging the last few years at least. We narrowly beat Rock Port earlier this year, and have yet to face the other two teams that I'm considering to be challenges - St. Joe Christian we don't usually face, except now we'll face them at districts at least, and Mound City may have to be eliminated from the reckoning of challenging teams. However, I highly doubt that they have declined to the level of some teams...

In other quiz bowl news, we played Craig and North Nodaway last week. Craig only had one team, and so we played both of North Nodaway's teams. Against both North Nodaway teams we scored 165 points, while their JV scored 25 against us and their varsity scored... 10 points. In our game against Craig, we scored 155 points and they scored 40. Somehow I had anticipated that Craig would be the most 'challenging' team.

After tonight, only 3 weeks until Conference championships begin - I anticipate that will, in the end, come down to us against Rock Port, but that of course is if the intelligence I've recieved is factual.

So, apparently I haven't posted an entry for something like two weeks - not really all that surprising, I think it has been about that long. Can't seem to remember a whole lot, and I really don't need to detail the last two weeks of my life anyway...

Thursday February 5th was our first Conference quiz bowl match of the season against Rock Port and Fairfax. Rock Port, as anticipated, was a bit of a challenge - we won all three of our matches, but the match against Rock Port varsity was a narrow thing - had there been another couple of questions, it very easily could have gone the other way, and we could have lost by ten points. I wasn't a big fan of the person working the buzzer system (the timer? It wasn't the reader or the scorekeeper, so I think the woman in question would be the timer) in that room,  oh well.  Listing questions were also a bit of an issue, we usually don't have that many and just that night we had at least two.
The next night I spent the evening withhalopikachu again,. got to see Madagascar 2, we played around with Audacity and recorded a short video that didn't have any sound, which when I learned that there wasn't any sound I thought it was kind of funny. I thought dinner (chili) was good, it could just be because dinner was chili dogs, but usually the chili Mom makes has more tomato and beans in it than meat, it seems like, rather than being meat with a little bit of beans and tomato. Of course, we don't have chili dogs for supper either... There's probably other things from that night I forgot, heh.
This last week our quiz bowl meet was at West Nodaway against West Nodaway and South Holt.
( It was pretty special - South Holt forgot their buzzers at their school, and so our first match (against West Nodaway's varsity) we were playing with 3 buzzers, and that was an old buzzer set that belonged to West Nodaway. South Holt only brought 3 people, and West Nodaway probably had about the same number of people we did, or maybe a few less - I was surprised when Fairfax brought a lot of people to the tri-meet at Tarkio against Rock Port and Tarkio, usually Fairfax seems like one of the schools that sort of has trouble getting a team together. We still haven't broken 200 in a match yet, though we did hit 190 playing against South Holt's one team. Since South Holt didn't bring a JV team, our JV team was split into two teams, and I'm not sure how well they did. We used to take the school's 15-passenger (or whatever it is) maroon van all over for meets, but since it recently has been deemed unsafe or whatever so we couldn't take it (i'm not really even sure why, but the main door is broken and there are probably some other issues with it I'm not aware of.), and so we got to take a bus, which I wasn't terribly excited about, but when I got on it Thursday before the meet I realized that with a bus (I think that bus said 77 people at full capacity) we could transport our entire team (12 people on a good day, meaning no basketball or wrestling or anything like that) plus some parents, and each person could have a seat to themselves and it would work out. )

This last week was FBLA/FCCLA week. I'm an FBLA member. Wednesday was an early out and an ice cream social, so after lunch (I usually don't take my lunch on early outs, and I usually take my lunch instead of eat the school food, so really it was more like as soon as we could go back to the high school from the cafeteria) we went to the high school, and then to the FACS room for ice cream - there was neopolitan, vanilla, and chocolate ice cream, and then a variety of toppings - crushed oreos (or some other chocolate cookie), some kind of peanut butter-flavored powder (I'm not sure what, reese's cups maybe?), and caramel and chocolate syrup. You were supposed to eat the ice cream out of a plastic disposable bowl with a plastic spork.
Anyway, Friday the sophomore world history class that I cadet teach during started watching 300 - which I, due I believe to various parts of the movie having become internet memes ("This is madness! Madness? THIS. IS. SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARTA!" and Spartan remixes), I was incapable of taking at all seriously. Aside from the inaccuracies (the oracle, ephors, "those philosophers and boy-lovers"... Yeah, I'm pretty sure that homosexuality was pretty widespread in ancient Greece, actually, not just in Athens. Anyway...), the battle of Thermoplyae was just about to begin, I think, when the bell rang and it was time to go to the next hour. About five minutes into first hour it started snowing.
I think it pretty much snowed all day for the rest of the day - a lot of people, it seemed like, were saying that they wanted to get out early, or were saying something about getting out early; we had a pep assembly for district wrestling (I don't think anyone from Tarkio made it to State) and the principal just said that it wasn't his decision when somebody asked him about it. We ended up getting out at the usual time, and it was something of an ordeal getting home (I was just glad we had power, I was informed about 3 that at least as of about 11 a.m. we didn't have power at home, and I was getting frustrated by thinking about then just before school got out.)

Science Olympiad was today - up before 4, drive into town, warm up the van, pick up people, drive off, and I fell asleep somewhere after Mound City and woke up just before Cameron. We stopped and got breakfast at McDonald's, and I was told that I "make a good stalker," which I thought was hilarious. I'm not really sure where that quote came from. We ended up getting to Trenton a little bit later than we were supposed to, but we managed to get to our events.
I was signed up for Physics Lab, Experimental Design, Ecology, Chemistry Lab, and Fossils. Experimental Design didn't seem too bad, but my partner and I made some errors in the design of the experiment and probably some errors on the write-up. Physics Lab and Chemistry Lab were full of things I didn't know (frustrating, especially since I get the feeling that I might have actually known how to do the Chemistry Lab stuff at one point) and haven't seen before, and there were a few errors I'm certain when my partner and I were doing the physics lab. After chemistry lab, I was kind of hoping that Fossils would be something quick and easy, but instead there were 20 stations, each with a fossil, and we got about 2 minutes per station. My partner and I didn't prepare, and we didn't buy a fossil guide or put together a binder or anything, so we spent a lot of time sitting around waiting to be allowed to move to the next fossil. After we were finally done with that, we left and got on the van because a girl's cousin was getting married in Gentry county.
. I wasn't a big fan of what seemed like a breakneck pace (event to event to room to event to room to event), and overall it seemed slightly disappointing compared to the past. Don't get me wrong, it was fun, but frankly the physics and chemistry lab tests seemed absolutely ridiculous. My partner and I did  get 3rd in Ecology, but in the past I've placed in multiple events. I don't think I've ever gotten first in an event....
It was fun, but seemed overall disappointing - Rock Port didn't get to go, first of all, if they had we probably would have taken a bus; the tests being full of stuff I haven't the foggiest clue of how to do, and the aforementioned breakneck pace. I blame our small team, and the fact that it had to be the same day as District Wrestling - if District wrestling could have been another day, we probably could have gained at least two or three more people, but instead they had to go off and wrestle or be a wrestling cheerleader. We did eat Chinese food for dinner, that was good, and we didn't get home after dark - it was getting dark as we pulled into the driveway, in the past we probably would have been home another few hours later than we were.

Anyway, it wasn't my favorite year, I don't think. I seem to remember in the past doing most of my events with a friend and randomly guessing and taking no time at all on several events because I had no idea how to do any of it, and then somehow getting 2nd or 3rd in the events, but that could just be me misremembering, or a distillation of a couple years together (like last year and sophomore year). From what I heard, Missouri Academy got 1st, Plattsburg got 2nd, and Stanberry got 3rd overall, which isn't really surprising because in the past Plattsburg seemed to win everything, and last year what Plattsburg didn't win Missouri Academy won. At least the years that I've been on the team nobody has ever done any of the building events, and all of those schools that win all the time probably have people for every event.

It sure would have been fun, I think, if Rock Port would have gone, but oh well... I think this entry is long enough, and I would have had it posted 12 hours ago except my internet decided to die about 12 hours ago, which was aggravating in the extreme.