USA 2025: IC is underway

Well I awoke on Thursday and I definitely had a sore throat – not ideal. I decided that I was going to skip the opening ceremony and try to get some additional rest and hopefully feel a little better. I’m glad that i had packed precautionary medicine and the extra rest helped a little. It was then time for the evaluator meting. Lunch was supposed to be provided but never eventuated which was a bit sad. We did the typical FS reading, let’s call it ‘vigorous discussion’ rather than arguing and practice UP scoring. There was a fair bit of talking so the meeting when for a file but we finished just before 4pm and had to be back at 6pm for shout outs.

My evaluation had me down for 2 packets of middle team booklets (16 booklets, later down to 15 due to one critical error) due by 4pm Friday so it was quite a lot to do given that middle shouts outs take the longest so we didn’t get to start evaluating til after 8pm. So 20 hours to do 15 evaluations and get any sleep possible. I made a start but I wasn’t very productive as I was super tired. I decided I had to sleep first so I got maybe 5 hours or a bit less, though it wasn’t great sleep knowing I had work to do. At 3am I knuckled down and started working through the booklets. Knowing I could finish by 4 if I evaluated a booklet in about 50 minutes. This is usually pretty doable but the IC standard is hight or at least they wrote a lot and IC still require some comments albeit briefer than normal. I mostly got through it anyway and finished about 4.15 which Kyla, Emily and I all agreed was close enough.

It was almost time for dinner which to my delight was Chik fil a. Kyla and Emily said to take a break and see how I felt after dinner if there were any jobs. As my cough had started (but sore throat mostly cleared thankfully) I took the opportunity to duck down to Target and pickup some cough medicine. This time my Australian ID was sufficient to let me purchase it. I enjoyed my Chik fil a for dinner and then went back to see Emily. I said i thought i had about an hour of brain power if she had jobs for me. In the end I agreed to do another packet of individuals – 7 booklets. I said I probably wouldn’t have the done by the individual deadline 8pm but should have them done by 9. In the end they did my head it, they weren’t good booklets – they seemed to keep forgetting to use the FS. I suspect my tiredness also didn’t help. At any rate I got them finished around 10pm and Emily was very appreciative. My initial plan was to make a start on my remaining assignment – a packet of senior MAGICS but I was too tired to decided to go to sleep and start fresh in the morning. That takes us to Friday night.

Sorry, no pretty pictures in this post.