tonight i am reminded of something that happened in eighth grade. jeff and i were in science olympiad and had spent many days after school in a science classroom preparing for competitions. we went to a few that year. some events we just did on the fly because no one else was. (this wasn't the world's most organized, etc team.) we were particularly proud of our apparent good performance on "road scholar" (or something like that) where we ended up placing 4th at regionals. we had never done that one before, and we ended up making more than a few educated guesses while taking the test together.
jeff and i were (are : ) good friends and you could say we had that good sibling chemistry that aided us in many events. additionally we loved working together!
so some events are more like tests, some are more like show-up-and-use-these-materials-for-something, and some are competitions with prepared objects/contraptions/etc.
that year we took on the rube goldberg event "mission impossible"(?) (not to be confused with everyone's favorite game in pe: "mission possible"... ha : ) maybe that wasn't the name, but whatever, it was a rube goldberg. each year they said what the end goal was (get a ball into that cup that must be at least 3 inches above, or knock over the such and such), and you wanted to get as close to one minute as possible (maybe every second over counted as two against you?)... anyway.... i don't think we'd say that we were geniuses at it, or that we spent all manner of blood, sweat, and tears on it, but we did put some effort into it. we did benefit greatly from a suggestion from our teacher/leader, but this was still our project and we put time into it and were excited to take our sure-fire contraption to the competitions.
i really can't remember any more if it was ready in time to take to the competition or two before regionals. those ones were just for fun and practice anyway. it was regionals that got you real prestige and gave you the chance to be advanced to the state competition, so that was a big deal. the year before, our team didn't do quite well enough for me to get to go to the state competition like several of my older siblings did. so, as you can imagine, this was the year! it was eighth grade or nothing! this just had to be our year! and by golly, that rube goldberg was going to finish right on 1:00, win us first, and send us to state! right?
wellllll....... the day of regionals comes. if it's a object/contraption event you have to sign up for a time/say you're really there and doing it/check in/whatever. but the kids/students can't do it themselves!! so it's up to our teacher/leader to check in for us.
well what do you know... he missed the check in time....
out of our hands! out of our control! not something we could have done! we did our best! can't change it! too late! disappointment! had to rely on someone else! deep breaths, deep breaths! not fair! what can ya do? oh well... time to move on...
i kinda think they let us still run our machine. maybe they even just gave us a severe penalty?
well, without that glowing score/place our team just didn't cut it and we didn't score well enough overall to qualify for the state competition. they can only send the top __# of scores and we weren't among the highest... (so maybe we just wouldn't have made it anyway.. ha : )
too bad the tshirts saying we went to state were already made! haha : ) so i still have and wear (sleeping, running, around the house, etc) my shirt that misleads people to believe that we/i went to the state science olympiad competition. ha : ) it even has our names on the back!
that was enough for me... i chose to participate in other things in high school... : )
i guess i was just being prepared for the rest of my life, where the top of my nylons is about the extent of the control i have over things... : )
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