So we’re up to Saturday night. After the Variety Show I rushed off the find the student union. I was one of the chaperones for the dance. Not long after arriving Paige came up to Andrew and I and said the games haven’t arrived at the games night, does one of you want to walk back to North and deliver them in a golf cart. I said that I as I had a car parked at the variety show I could take that back and do it. I got back to North, was looking for the games and found April who said she had already taken them over. So I headed back to the dance, getting to drive one of the FPS golf carts for the first time! After a few wrong turns I parked it at the back entrance.
The dance was entertaining. The older students only stayed for the first hour and I don’t blame them. I know from my experience as a student at IC the best times were sitting outside at night talking to people from halfway across the world and singing song together with a guitar (also drinking Ale-8, but we were in Kentucky! it’s a mostly Kentucky only drink that I still love.) It was your typical high school social. amazingly they seem not to have changed much since I was in high school.
Turns out this is still a thing:
Watching, sometimes singling along and reminiscing about our lost youth was enjoyable. After my lamenting the lack of Taylor Swift, Paige spoke to the DJ and we did get You Belong to Me. We didn’t love all the song choice, appropriateness wise and Paige vetoed one sone, but overall it was a good night. We finished about half and hour early as there was only a handful of people left. We managed to squeeze 6 people on to the golf cart back to north, but Andrew and I standing up and holding onto the roof. Paige wasn’t too sure, but it went fine. I did a brief bit of organising to pack in the morning and then hit the sack. Final night, sad.
So evaluation done, 2 days to go. I had a great sleep and woke up around 10ish, I think. A good 10+ hours to catchup. I opened my phone and was somewhat bombarded by emails. It turned out that there had been a minor incident involving an Australian team the night before that I had completely missed. But it has been handled and everything was under control. Dylan had been around and able to assist which was helpful.
I showered, which I hadn’t had time to do on Friday and had a breakfast / lunch snack of pop-tart coffee and mussel bar. Healthy, maybe not, but it was great! The I headed over to the variety show auditions. As my share of the evaluating was done I was scheduled to help out with these. The variety show is great fun it has to be made up of teams of people from at least 2 affiliates and they do music, jokes. magic tricks anything entertaining. I was only there for the second half of the auditions, but there were some excellent one and some good ones. In the end everybody who auditioned made it into the show. Lynn worked on the show order and Janet and I got the seating and movement sorted out, then headed back to North as the FPS choir started practicing.
I had a bit of a break and rest before I headed down to the campus centre to buy an early dinner. I had to be back at the variety show for setup at 6 so I had an early dinner before I waited in the lobby to see if there was a lift. There wasn’t but I did run into Dylan. He came with me as I drove to the variety show and filled be in on the details of the minor issue from the night before. It turned out that everything was under control.
The variety shows was fantastic, it was so encouraging to see kids from different affiliates working together to produce acts to entertain each other. The logistics didn’t work quite as we planned, but it was nothing noticeable that affected the show. All the acts were enjoyabel. My second favourite wasn’t really an act, but one of the co-ordinators Lynn did a parody of I’ve Been Everywhere Man on the Ukulele, adapted to IC and the variety show it was funny & very well done. The key refrain being ‘we’re from everywhere man’ and she worked the affiliates in remarkably well. But my hand down favourite was two girls from Connecticut and Illinois. They’ve performed together in the variety show since they met and this year they did a duet of Breaking Free from High School Musical and it almost as good as the original. I don’t have a video of they’re performance but I’ve embedded the original below for you’re viewing please. I’ll leave that there and come back to the rest of Saturday in another post.
This is the third post involving evaluating. Sorry, it was a big part of my role at IC. This one should be a bit shorter.
So about 5.00 I got an email with round 2 assignment. They way they do it is get an evaluator to make a whole step of the top x number of booklets in the division so they get another whole evaluation. I was given step 1 juniors, which is probably one of the longer steps. I think there were 17 booklets for me to mark. They were due at 10pm. I was hoping to make it to the CmPS fair, but time wasn’t looking like my friend and unfortunately I didn’t make it.
I got through 1 and bit booklets, trying to be a bit nicer as they were Juniors and then it was 6 and time for dinner. I realised that I’m really going to have to pick these up if I want to get them done. So I got dinner and ate and as I marked trying to race. I got it down to about 10 – 15 minutes a booklet which was tight but should let me finish in time. I was very tired by this point, but got into a rhythm working quickly and got them finished around 10. By the time I was done I got my second wind and wasn’t especially tired anymore.
I went down and chatted to Emily and ran into Dylan on the way and we got some data entry jobs. First, we stopped into Brenda & Cyd’s (other / retired ADs) who always do a big cook up for people staying in North. I had completely forgotten and foolishly eaten dinner – there was SO MUCH food. Next time I’ll definitely skip dinner and plan to spend more time there to hang out with others.
So Dylan and I did our data entry, then he had to go off. I did a bit more data entry, then Emily didn’t have any more jobs and I decided sleep was overdue. So Evaluation (for me done) and after having about 3.5 hours sleep since Thursday morning at 11.30pm, Friday night I went to be. And that’s it for evaluation. It was a new experience and fun albeit a lot of work. Not a lot of sleep, but that’s manageable for one night.