IC 2023 – Part 2; Evaluation

Now it’s Thursday. The day starts with the Opening Ceremony. It was an a new venue this year – the Mullins Center (which is the Ice Hockey stadium) instead of the performing arts center. The venue wasn’t as nice, but the performing arts center wasn’t big enough. Sadly, the Mullins center was probably a bit too big and it felt a bit empty and small. However, they had set seating this time, meaning that all the affiliates sat together, so it was great to be amongst all of the Australian contingent.

After the opening ceremony it was back to housing, with a brief respite before the craziness of evaluation begins. I’ll try and keep this fairly brief as I imagine evaluation isn’t the most interesting for anybody else. At 12 we had the evaluation meeting. I thought the FS was good, but also pretty tricky, especially for the juniors and this played out in the work that we saw. During the evaluation meeting the room we were in lost power and we discovered that this also happened in the junior competition rooms – they lost power and then internet, so they all had to switch to paper booklets. We went through the usual discussion of the FS, UPs etc. There was some vigorous discussion (read arguments) but probably slightly less than last year.

After the meeting I walked down to the campus centre to get a coffee – I knew I was going to need the caffeine! About 45 minutes later I got a call from Suz to ask if I could pick her and a few others up from the Campus Center as it was now bucketing down. We managed that without too many people getting too wet. It turns out unlocking a car from inside can be quite difficult.

At 6 pm some of the booklet were released. I had a quick look and was concerned by the number of problems that weren’t relevant because they were focussing on a major part of the FS which was gone by the end of the FS, rendering any problems about this no longer problems. I grabbed dinner and then it was time for shout outs. This went fairly smoothly and was quicker than last year as I was with the juniors rather than middles.

Then evaluation. Only there were some problems. I’ll spare you the details, but due to the combined booklets (paper & virtual) because of the power outage we had some problems with FPS Online. It was unavailable, them stuff we had was lost and we needed to re-evaluate all sorts of problems. We also had people banging on doors so the junior evaluators could have a meeting about this at 11.30pm! In the end, I got a couple of booklet done and then decided I had to sleep. I was very glad we had more time to do the booklets this year. I got about 5 hours sleep which was pretty decent. Evaluated at got the junior team booklets done at about 2pm – they were due at 4pm. Then I got coffee (notice a pattern!) and got started on the middle individuals.

Oh, I almost forgot the saga of the wine! This was the night before – at about 12, after the evaluation meeting. Some of you know that I find a glass of red helps with the evaluating, so I thought I had have a glass and knock off a few more booklets. I peeled the foil off the bottle and it had a cork. I did not have a corkscrew. We talked about getting one at target, but decided they were probably screw tops. To say I was unhappy was an understatement.

Anyway, upon my walk to get coffee I ran into Suz and we confirmed out plans to have dinner with Anna and see others at Berkshire Dining Common (down near southwest housing, where all the students and coaches ate). After that I went back to get as many of the individuals done as I could (they were due at 9pm) especially as I wanted to make it to the CmPS fair this year. Despite my briefness, this post is really long, so we’ll pick it up here in the next one.