The State Competiton

Yesterday was a very busy day. First of all, I would like to congratulate my aunt and new uncle on their marriage yesterday. I wish I could have been there, but I hope you are enjoying married life. Not only was it my aunt's wedding yesterday, but also the Science Olympiad state competition. And to top it all off, my friend also had a horse show, as well. I'll begin with Science Olympiad. Well, I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning, which was horrible. We wanted to get to the Michigan State campus as soon as possible so we could claim the homeroom that we wanted, before another team did. Because the rooms aren't assigned beforehand, we had to get there super early, as soon as the doors were unlocked. I slept the car drive there. My first event, Picture This (a science related pictionary), started at 9:35, and I had two other events (Environmental Chemistry and Ecology) back to back after that. It was pretty hectic, running all over to opposite sides of the campus for each event. After that, I had a 3 hour break, which was nice. Then, my last event of the day, Anatomy, was at 3:00. It was really nice in that classroom because they had the windows open and the air conditioning on at full blast. As for the weather, the first half of the day, it was rainy, cloudy, and extremely humid. But, around 12:00 or so, the sun came out and the weather was beautiful.
Since the awards ceremony didn't start until 6:30 and was scheduled to end around two hours later, my family and a few other people on the team went out to eat for dinner. Dinner was fun time (one of the people eating with us stole another person on the team's cell phone and started texting people randomly, pretending to be a Chinese person named Sung-fu), but the award ceremony was a different matter. Our team sat at the very top of the bleachers in the auditorium that the ceremony was in, and it was hotter than blazes up there. There was no air circulation/conditioning, thousands of people were crammed in, and I was sweating bullets. It was pretty boring, as well, because it went on and on and our teams (high school and middle school) only won 4 medals (which were given out to the top 6 teams) and we weren't allowed to cheer for them individually. I still cheered. Near the end, some of the scores were still being calculated, so this one guy came up and made a speech. It was hard to understand what he was saying because he had a pretty heavy accent of some sort, and at one point we misheard "a career in science" as "Korean Science." Since he was an astrophysicist, we concluded that he was secretly creating nuclear missiles for North Korea (we were a little tired by now). Also, there was this random stranger that kept on taking pictures of one of parents, which was really strange.
Even though I thought that I did pretty well on 3 of my 4 events, my placings were a little disappointing. I got 19th out of 48 teams in Anatomy and Ecology, 17th on Environmental Chemistry, and the high school team got 18th overall. That's not bad, but I could have done better. The middle school was also a little disappointing; overall, they got 23rd, and the team that I coached, Ecology, got 40th, which is last place. If your confused of how 40th could be last place when there are 48 teams: they stop placing at 40th because they "don't want to hurt people's feelings." I don't know about you, I'd rather know where I placed. Even with all these complaints, yesterday was really fun. I love the state competition and I spent the day traversing across the MSU campus, which is actually a really nice campus. I'm still glad it's over; no more all day Saturday practices until next year! Once again, I offer my congratulations to my aunt and her new husband on their marriage.