Entries Tagged 'Travel' ↓

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.

[Edit: This must be about the 4th time I’ve come back to this post, I keep getting distracted and never getting round to finishing it]

So Wednesday starts. IC hasn’t officially begun – Wednesday is the day that all the students arrive, but IO staff, ADs and BoT members mostly arrive on Tuesday, with some coming later when they’re able. That means that we tend to use Wednesday for activities for those people who are there. So from 9 – 3 we had AD sessions. It was good to share with others, thinking about our affiliates and IO and how we can continue to support and grow the organisation. We also had sessions on DEIB and Project Management both of which were interesting.

After that I went for a quick trip down to the bottleshop to buy a couple of bottles of wine for myself and others. The story of that wine will come up later… Once I got back I went to Target with a couple of other ADs to get a few things we needed. Things that you forget about because you have them at home and then when you get to uni accommodation you remember that nothing is provided! As part of the conference we get a pillow two sheets (both unfitted ☹️) a blanket and two towels. That’s all – nothing else. So a few of this things we picked up included a bath mat, a tea towel, sponges and detergent and wine glasses.

When we got back we swung by Cyd & Brenda’s (former AD/AD) who always do a huge amount of cooking and put on an amazing spread for all the staff staying in north housing. We then had a little bit of time before the appreciation dinner. I headed down early to go to the alumni get together. I met some new people and knew a few others from last years, it was fun to hang out. We then headed downstair to the appreciation dinner. Both the food and the wine was good, although the wine wasn’t cheap at $US10/glass.

Probably the coolest thing at the dinner though was one of the people I met. There was a lady called Jane who was there with a few others from Kentucky. One of those ladies is from Irvine. She knows the Smiths, who I stayed with when I competed in IC back in 2006. How amazing and how cool is that! It was very exciting. After dinner we headed back and I decided to go to bed pretty early – I knew Thursday would be a long day once evaluation begun. And that’s where we’ll pick up tomorrow.

So I’m back again – only two days later, we’ll see how long the regular updates last! I have a bit of time to kill before evaluation starts so I thought I’d bring the blog up to date. The flights were relatively uneventful, though there is more turbulence across the US than we usually have in Australia.

I had an exit row from LA to Chicago but the leg room wasn’t too bad on the shorter leg from Chicago to Hartford. There’s no food on these shorter AA flights, so I took advantage of the Admirals Club at Chicago too so I could grab a bite to eat. I arrived in Hartford pretty much on schedule. My luggage didn’t take long and then I headed off to Hertz, exchanging a few messages with the people I was bring to campus with me.

There was a long wait and Hertz, but we eventually got it sorted out. We go to choose the car from a few options, but in the end we had to go with the van, because it didn’t look like we would fit all our luggage in anything smaller. If I remember I’ll take a photo of it to put in a later post.

The drive to campus was relatively uneventful. Ir remembered that the right was the right side of the road! There were quite a few cars around and it’s really pretty easy to remember what you’re supposed to do when you’re following others. We arrived about a bit later but grabbed a golf cart and headed over to the welcome dinner, where I caught up with some familiar faces from last year. We didn’t stay too late as I was pretty tired and others were ready to leave too.

When I got back to my room I ummhed and aahed between going to Walmart and going to bed. I decided to head to Walmart even though I was tired, so I could get some supplies. Came back, made my bed and had a good sleep. This post is long so I’ll end it there, but there’s a photo of my dorm room below. It’s very standard American, a single room when you often see doubles in TV shows but it does the job.