After a day of recuperation, I am finally ready to get back on the blogging wagon! The past three days have been long and draining. Anyway, it all started on Thursday, at the NOC Quiz Bowl meet at Tonkawa. We had a great day at the tournament! I enjoyed going to this tournament because it is set up in a different format than regular quiz bowl is, so it was a definite change of pace. The regular format for quiz bowl is 20 toss-ups, speed rounds (for both teams), 20 more toss-ups, and one more set of speed rounds. The format at this meet consisted of two-twelve question halves. Also, if your team answered a question correctly, you were given four bonus questions for your team only. It was harder to get in a groove with that format, but it was a good change of pace. Personally, I had a good day, by means of how I did answering questions. My favorite questions that I answered were actually in two sets of bonus questions. One set of bonus questions was about the rules of Blackjack, which is one of my favorite card games that I play often on a game on my computer. The other was about random hand tools, including Vice-Grips and a crowbar; I think I can attribute most of that one to living on a farm and having to familiarize myself with various handtools while fetching them for my dad on occasion.
We went 4-2 for the day. Our first loss was bogus, if you ask me, because our moderator didn't do a very good job. She misread some things that gave the advantage to the other team, and she also didn't abide by some basic quiz bowl rules. Also, did I mention that during the aforementioned round that the temperature of the room we were in was at least 85 degrees? Yes. It was like stepping into an incinerator. Apparently, the entire heat/air system for that building was ran off of a single unit, and the thermostat in the room itself was merely decoration, because it didn't help the situation in the slightest. After we left that room, things started looking up. We did well in the next three rounds, despite the fact that two of the three rounds were in the hot room, consecutively. After those rounds, Mrs. Grant (our coach) told us that all of our faces were red from the heat. The next round, we were down 125-0 at the end of the first half. However, we managed to get 110 points in the next few questions. It all came down to the last two questions. As it turned out, we didn't win, and were consequently eliminated. We ended up in 4th place, and had we made it one more round, we would have gotten a team plaque, but that's sometimes the way things go. Besides, we did get a token of good news. I happened to make the NOC All-Tournament Team, as one of the top scorers for the day! I ended up with a decent sized plaque of my own, that now hangs on my wall!
Friday was All-Area Honor Band. I love going to this, and I felt a little bit sentimental at the end, because I realized that it was the last time that I would ever get the chance to participate in something like that. The whole clinic was an overall success. Our clinician was Mr. Parham, who was familiar with the area because he used to teach at Garber and Hennessey. I thought it was interesting, because he gave both Gina and Emily private lessons during his tenure at Hennessey, and here he was, over ten years later, directing the honor band for my Senior year! I liked the songs that we played, although one of the songs consisted of me playing a pattern of four quarter notes, on the same note, for a total of 65 measures. Although those measures weren't consecutive, it was very monotonous by the end of the song. I liked my stand partner; we were also stand partners last year, so we got along just fine. She is a senior like I am, and we both expressed our frustration with the fact that the girl in first chair was a sophomore. My stand partner and I were 6th and 5th chair, respectively. Every year I somehow manage to forget how cerebral playing your horn for six hours can be, because I was completely exhausted on Friday night. It's the same every year, but I somehow managed to overlook the fact. The concert went well, and I will miss this next year.
Today, I guess one could say that I made progress, of sorts. I finally decided to make time to fill out college "stuff". I completed the bulk of my St. Gregory's & USAO applications, and also a scholarship form. I have a few things that I can't quite answer on my own, so I will be taking those to school tomorrow to ask Mrs. Golay. Also, I will have to get at least three notarized copies of my transcript, so I'm sure that Mrs. Dees will just love me. Along with my high school transcripts, I will have to get three college transcripts from NOC. I am hoping that it won't be as much of a hassle as I am anticipating it to be. I also hope that I will be able to send in all of my college applications by the end of this week, or the end of next week, at the absolute latest.
Tomorrow will be my first day of my English Comp class, and I hope that it will go well for me. I have rambled long enough, so I'll end it here. I hope everyone has a great week!
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