A Nearly Perfect Day.

Nearly perfect? How can something be nearly perfect?
Like this.

I woke up sick.(This sounds like the perfect day, eh?) Mom ran out of her magical medicine stuff, so we had to use some "home-remedy" style of medicines. In case you ever wanted to know, gargling with Listerine is a GREAT way to treat a soar throat.

Varsity Quiz Quarter Finals were on this day... and I found out about it just the day before. It was being filmed at the Channel 10 PBS news station at four. (I thought it was live, so I told my friends about it...oops. That was a little naive, but is showing sometime in February.) There were only 8 people who could play, and I was one of "the chosen ones!" So I brought a quiz book to"study" from throughout the day. This ended up being a good idea, as 3 of my classes had nothing planned for the day.

I had a quiz in US History. I did alright. What was really cool, as what happened in English. But first, (as always) you need a little background. I wrote a killer essay for the "Practice AP test" we did for our midterm. (Humility never was my strong point.) It was so good, in fact, that Mr. Bressler had me type it up and email it to him, and it would work as a homework pass for anything this semester. (In fact, his only comment on my rhetorical analysis was "One word...unbelievable.") So I did. For English on this day of days, we reviewed examples of  a good analysis. One was an example from the district. The other one was mine. Now everyone in my class has a copy of my essay in their binder. Oh. That and we analyzed it in class. It was about five seconds from the time my essay was passed out, to the time everyone knew it was mine. Everyone was impressed and Mr. Bressler said that everyone in the class should try to write up to my level by the end of the year, and he'd never expected to use a student's midterm essay as an example of a "perfect" essay. Ok. My pride just went up through the roof.

We had a Varsity Quiz meeting right after school, but we never actually get around to practicing nearly as much as we plan to. I mentioned I was sick, right? Well, it didn't go away, so I planned to leave early. I was there in time to argue my way into the 1st round (I hate the bonus round, round 2), get my personalized team sweatshirt to wear to the studio, fill out my info card, and create my name-tag, before I went home.

I originally, planned on taking a nap. (I believe I mentioned that I was sick.)  But what would a plan be, if it didn't fall through every now and again? Instead, I went home and opened mail. (Re-read that again, for impact, I'll wait.) I haven't gotten mail (except for e-mail, but that doesn't count as much) for a REALLY long time. But today, I got no less than 8 parcels of mail. 6 were letters from colleges, one was a large Harry-Potter-related post card from a college (props for that one), and one was a package from UNLV!
<<Insert Hallelujah Chorus Here>>
UNLV has finally made good on it's promise of three years ago. I got a plaque commemorating my 1st place prize from the 2008 Space Camp (Even though, I went in 2009.... but at this point, I am not complaining), and a check for $300. Finally.

Mom and I had to leave pretty soon after that to go to the game. And so we did. There were a LOT of people on the other team. And no girls. In fact, because of one reason or another, Dawn and I (and Ms. Barnish) were the ONLY girls. Period. Mom was the only parent representing our team (Go mom!)

It was REALLY cool to be on a TV set, and the set-up was awesome too. Somewhere between school and  the start of the program, I was switched to the second round (Grrr...) with no better excuse than "We want a Mormon in every round in case they ask religious questions..."
Nate Tannenbaum was our host. And that was cool.

Oh ya. And we lost. Badly. I didn't answer any questions, (I believe that I mentioned, I HATE the bonus round.) but at least I didn't look dumb. You see, we had to fill out an information sheet so Nate Tannenbaum could introduce us on T.V. Most of my team members sounded really lame (sorry). He had to ask them stuff like, "What is your favorite YouTube Video?" and "What is your favorite Video Game?" and " What is your favorite Comic Book?" because that was all they put on their info. sheet. When he introduced me he said, "Tell me about the Garside Quilt Club." Wow. so I said, " We make quilts from donated fabrics, and then donate the quilts to Child Haven." and smiled. :D

So, after my round, I sat back and watched the destruction with Dawn. One of our proudest moments was when Johann answered the question "A Monster that turns objects to stone with it's stare..." with "A Basilisk."  Obviously, the announcer didn't know that Harry Potter is always the right answer...
Anyway, they told us that when the last round was over, they wanted all of the team member to "mingle" in the camera area while they rolled the credits. Dawn and I decided to run out there as soon as possible, and do a handshake. Represent the girls, you know? And so we did. It was awesome.

The T.V set up

All of our  awesome sweatshirts.

Funny faces. Maybe it's a good thing that all of the people on Varsity quiz don't follow my blog....

Mom had a need to take photos every step of the way.... and these are a few of them.

After that I drove on the freeway during rush hour. It sucked. I had a major case of "Freeway driving Failure." This was the part of the day that was... not so perfect.

We finally got home, had a hurried dinner, and then went straight off to Eliza's dance concert. It was really cool, but a lot of them were kind of weird. I was still a little sick ( as I am constantly reminding you guys), so the ice cream we had afterwards really hit the spot.

And now I am done. That took awhile. And I bet everyone skimmed it. That's ok though. I'll try to be more brief in later posts.