Life, The Universe & Everything

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.

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.

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.