This should be pretty short (though whenever I promise that it never seems to happen!) I woke up earlier that I would have liked, it wasn’t especially early, I just hadn’t had a lot of sleep over the past few nights. I drove down to Mullins Center again for the closing ceremony and again sat with the Australian Crew and Suz,.
It was a pretty standard award ceremony, not quite as long as I thought it would be. Australia did pretty well, but we were definitely beaten by New Zealand. You can see the Australian success and results at FPS Australia’s Facebook post.
After the it was goodbye to Suz, Dylan and some other Australians who I saw at the awards ceremony and were leaving. Then it was back to North. Unlike last year I hadn’t had a chance to pack yet, so I did that. This was one of the easier trips as I was driving back to Hartford, and had a night there I could take bags with things in them as well as my suitcase.
I packed my car, had some goodbye chats in the lobby. I found out that Julie, the AD from NZ is going to be at Disney, staying in the same resort as me, at the same time, so we’ll see if I run into her! Then, with sadness, but having had a good time I left UMass Amherst. IC 2023 (and my 3rd IC) done. I’m looking forward to the 50th IC next year and hope I can make it to Indiana.
Well, it almost over, we’re up to Saturday arvo. In my experience the end of conferences, camps, conventions are always sad, you’re so energised my the event and the people that the end can be a let down. That was true, but maybe less so this time. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
I headed down to the Campus Centre again for, you guessed it, coffee! At least that was my plan, but sadly the coffee place was closed 🥲 However, my second purpose, which I did achieve was to grab an early dinner – some chicken & some Mac & Cheese both of which were very yummy. Then it was off to the variety show. Compared to last year I think I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong it was very enjoyable and I had some good laughs, but overall I think I enjoyed last years acts a little bit more. I think one of the disappointments was the act that was so good last year (see this post) were back. When I heard they were doing Defying Gravity I was so excited, but it wasn’t quite what I expected and I don’t think they had quite as much time to rehearse.
As the choir was performing I raced off to the dance, which I was again chaperoning. I had to dig through my phone to find the Crowd Manager certification from last year. I had spoken to Paige earlier and she said that she was doing the DJing as the person we lined up had fallen through, so I agreed to help her out with that. The night was good fun, we spent a lot of time taking requests and then looking up lyrics to see if they were appropriate – a lot weren’t. But, there were a lot of good songs and plenty of Taylor Swift which kept me happy. We had all the classics too, Macarena, YMCA and the like.
One of the Variety Show acts that included AustraliansA shot from the dance
The ride back on the golf cart wasn’t quite as impressive as last year, but we still got 6 of us on it (down from 7) with me standing and holding on the whole way. When we go back there was a party in progress. Apparently, this is the first time in many years at IC that all the results were organised and done before midnight.
We had quite an enjoyable time in the lobby of North A, lots of IO people with other evaluators and BoT members. For me at least, it involved light beer, tequila and red wine. It was great to chat with people, Damien and Erwin among others. I kept planning on going to bed but got held up, especially when April came out with red wine! But I eventually made tracks for bed. I think this last little party was what made the post-conference blues that I referenced at the start of the post less acute. I want to put in a few more photos, so I’ll do one more IC post after this. Below are a couple of photos I took of the campus as I walked to the dance.
In some sense, I’m just trying to give you slightly shorter posts to read at a time, as I’m typing this immediately after I’ve posted the last one! So I headed down to meet up with Suz so we could drive over to dinner. On the way I saw Emily who asked me if I would mind doing another batch of individuals as we were missing a few evaluators. Confirming these wouldn’t have to be done by 9, I agreed.
Suz and I went off to dinner and it was night to catch up with Anna and Katherine. As well as a few other Australian coaches and students. Dinner at Berkshire was good, but there was too much choice! At the end we saw Dylan and he and Suz went off the CmPS. Sadly, as I had more booklets to evaluate I had to miss the CmPS fair for a second year in a row. Back to evaluating! I got the booklets done by about 11. I ended up doing the last few downstairs as I needed to avoid being distracted by my bed in the dorm!
Suz and I saw Damien and he apologised profusely for the trouble we were having with FPS Online, now that he has seen it with his own eyes, when he had the problems we had, he is determined to get it fixed. I sat around and chatted with the other evaluators for a while once my booklet were done and then headed to bed. We had a 7am start the next morning for PCAs.
So, PCAs. Some general Idea, bit a little different to Australia. It was still good, and Sandy was surprised that she was working with people who knew what they were doing. It took a while and we made an error the first time because one of the booklets got caught up with another but we go there in the end and had the final order for Senior booklets. We were disappointed with the quality of some of the booklets but the overall winner was fairly decent. We finished about 2.30. Luckily we didn’t have to do individuals too, as somebody else had started them. As that’s the end of evaluating, let’s keep this post shorter and end it here.
