District Finals And Other Stuff

This past weekend was packed. I had a lot going on, and I was really tired once it was all said and done. In fact I think I’m still tired and it’s Tuesday night. It was a good time all around, but boy did I get worn out. I need a weekend to take a break from my weekend. :)

It all started with District Finals for quizzing which was being hosted by the Manteno Church. It was a two day event starting on Friday night. I picked up all the girls (5 of them, including 4 quizzers and 1 adult leader) and we headed down to Manteno. We had a swell time on the way down. All the girls were pretty wired since they had just gotten out of school a few hours earlier so you can imagine how crazy they were.

We had 5 rounds of quizzing on Friday night, along with a few equipment problems, but nothing overly serious. After quizzing weheaded over to Sara’s house to stay the night. Sara and her family (still not used to saying that in relation to her, Scott, and Ruby) were gracious hosts. The girls played some Catch Phrase and we just hung out for awhile.

Saturday we started quizzing at 8AM. Thus started the super long day. We had 6 more rounds of round robin quizzing, lunch, then 5 rounds of tournament quizzing, awards (more on that in a minute), and then the top 16 tournament to decide which of the quizzers were going to represent the district at Regionals. We left the Mantno Church a little after 8PM and I didn’t get home until almost 10PM. When I got home I was ready to crash.

Now onto the results. My team took 5th on the day, which is pretty good for where we started the year. We entered the tournament seeded 6th, so taking 5th was a little bit of an improvement. Agnes took 6 individually for the day and 5th overall for the year. That put her in the Top 16 tournament. Angie almost made Top 16, but missed it by a few correct tossups. Agnes then took 4th in the Top 16 tournament to put her on the district team (the top 6 get to represent the district). So all in all it was a very enjoyable day, just long.

So that was Friday and Saturday. Sunday we started offering two services at my Church. That puts a little more strain on the sound crew, which puts more strain on me.  Luckily I have a new guy stepping in to help and I have another girl fully trained, so it won’t be too bad. Sunday I had to run both services, which wasn’t too bad, but it was just a long day. By the time I got home after lunch I was fried. I probably would have been OK if I hadn’t had quizzing the 2 days before. Oh well. Such is life. The services themselves went off without a hitch, though we did start a little late. I’m sure we’ll tweak it all out once we get a few more under our belt.

After Church my friend Matt stopped by to hang out. We ended up watching a movie and just chilling. That was AOK with me. I’m not sure I would have had enough energy to do anything else. After Matt left I pretty much crashed and thus ended my weekend.

Below are some pictures from the quiz. You can see the all the pictures at the ccdquiz gallery.

Northside took 5th place!

CCD District Team 2009

The Missing Month

Ah yes, it’s about that time again. The time to fill everyone in on my comings and goings over the last month. Since Sterling there’s been a whirlwind of activity. I won’t go into all the detail, but I’ll give you a bulleted list of various things. If you want more detail you’re certainly welcome to ask for it.

* We hired a new guy at work. He’s working out great.
* After a rough Sterling quiz, the K3 team returned for more quizzing at the Indy quiz. I actually watched them this time (4 or 5 rounds out of 8) and they got 10th. It was a funny joke to think I had anything to do with them placing that high, but in all reality Sara’s a great coach and she has great kids.
* I attended Erika’s 29th birthday party. Happy Birthday Erika! This was immediately following Indy and included meeting some new people, playing Apples to Apples, and performing improv plays from a little girl’s princess devotional book. I got to play mom who was playing Jesus.
* We finally fully moved out of our old offices and cut all ties. Unfortunately a bunch of pop machine money was stolen, but then someone returned it. It’s a good story. I should post about it.
* CCD had it’s last regular district quiz at Chicago Heights (or Cheights as they like to call themselves). My girls combined with Manteno and took 11th out of 13 teams. I quizmastered since all the college students had spring break. Seriously, who said they could have a week off? I remember when I went to school I never got a spring break. I also had to walk 27 miles in the snow uphill both ways all year round.
* It snowed again. I officially added winter to my “I’m mad at you” list.
* I bought some new clothes at the Gap. I still need a big boy jacket.
* I thought there was more.

So there you have it. An entire month of my life condensed into half a page. I hope you’re happy.

Sterling

So the Sterling Invitational Quiz was last weekend and since it’s been a week, I figure I should write about it. Several of you have already made several statements about me not posting, so hopefully this will quell any riots that may soon break out.

Sterling is an invitational bible quiz that’s been going on for many many years. I’m not sure exactly how long, but Karl (one of the other adult volunteers at the church I coach at) has been going for 29 years (back to when he was a quizzer). So it’s been going on for a long time. This was the second time I’ve attended. The first time (last year) I was a content judge in room 1. That was pretty fun, but a little stressful since I had to content the final round which consisted of the two best teams. Some of these kids really know their stuff, and you’d be amazed at how much they can say in 30 seconds.

This year I was a stats geak. Since the stats guys have figured out I’m a computer guy and that I know what I’m doing I’ve been sucked into their little group. Basically it consists of making sure all the computers are working since each quiz room has one, collecting stats inbetween rounds (basically you run around with a USB drive), and generating team and individual stats so that we know who goes where once the tournament starts. Generation of the stats is pretty straight forward. A lot of it is done via qmserver (the server application that links to quizmachine), but some of it has to be manually done. Sometime a name is wrong or a team name is wrong, and these things need to be corrected before stats can be verified as correct.

Basically I helped with running around and grabbing stats and fixing computer problems. I also helped generate some of the final team standings. Inbetween all of that I worked on a website for Q2008 which is coming up in July. Q2008 is the national quiz tournament that’s held every year and this year I’m responsible for the website. It’s a bit of an undertaking as they want quite a few things, but during the quiz I was able to work on getting some of the stats pieces working so that people who view the website can see where people or teams rank. It should be a pretty fun project, but it’s just a matter of finding time to work on it. Anyways, I had time to work on it during the day, so I got quite a bit done. Part of that involved talking with Barry (the writer of quizmachine) and figuring out the best way to do things.

I did get to watch some quizzing, though as Sara and Lena have both pointed out I didn’t watch K3 at all. The quizzing that I did watch was mostly in the afternoon (after the tournament seeding had been decided) and K3 didn’t make the tournament (I almost cried). In the morning I was busy doing stats stuff and in the afternoon I was trying to work on the website that I knew I wouldn’t have time work on any other time. I have yet to work on it since then. I probably could have made more of an effort to make sure I watched them, but I didn’t. I think I probably would have made them nervous anyways. :)

The trip itself was very fun. My team from Northside didn’t go (they would have gotten creamed), so I drove with the K3 gang. We played a bunch of Rook on the way there, at the hotel on Friday night and on the way back on Saturday. We also stopped at Culvers (I love Culvers) on the way home, so that was fun. It was a little extra driving as I had to drive to Kankakee to go with the gang instead of going straight west, but hanging out with them was way more fun than driving alone.

If you want to see some pictures from the trip you can go here. You’ll notice from the pictures that there’s no actual evidence that I was even there. Sara didn’t take any pictures either, so it’s doubtful my presence was documented at all.

Naperville Quiz

Yesterday was the February quiz at Naperville. It was a good time, albeit a little frustrating. My kids did OK. They took 11th out of 13 teams. That isn’t fabulous, but Agnes did quiz out without error in the tournament round. I was pretty excited about that. She almost did it in the last round of round robin quizzing, but missed question 20. I told her to take the jump to try it, but she didn’t know it. That was a distant memory when she quizzed out by question 10 in the tournament round. Of course that left LeeAnn sitting by herself for 10 questions, but what are you going to do?

We did have one really bad round. We quizzed New Lenox and Kankakee First in a three team round. Kankakee 1st took first at the quiz and New Lenox took second. So pretty much the entire quiz everyone was prejumping on questions. My girls are new to quizzing this year and they don’t know the material well enough to prejump, so they were kind of left out. I think there might have been two questions where noone jumped right away, but my girls didn’t know the answer, so they didn’t jump. I think we ended with a zero, so that was a little frustrating. Karl tried really hard to get them motivated on the way home. He told them if they studied really hard over the next few months they could get into the top 8 (we’ve never gotten better than 9th). I think they can do it too, but they just need to be motivated about it. Agnes could be really good if she wanted to. She’s only in 8th grade too, so I’ve got some time to work on her. I guess we’ll see how the next few months go.

I also got to quizmaster for a little bit. Scott and Sara had the top 12 quiz off against each other at the end of the day and I got to quizmaster the round. I think they were trying to get them to start thinking about regionals (where the top 6 go to represent our district). Barry had come up with some new rules (you have to prejump or the question is thrown out, you have to get one error, etc.) in order to get them thinking about competing at a higher level. It was a lot of fun. I really like coaching, but I also really like quizmastering, so the fact that I got to do both was pretty awesome.

Oh, I also had a fish eating penguin following me around all day. Even quizzing isn’t safe for me anymore.

All Stars!

Last weekend was the St. Louis All Star Quiz. Our district (Chicago Central) sent 10 kids to compete against several other districts. Several people who read my blog were there. Thus my not writing about it could have been quite distressing to them. If I don’t write about it, did it really happen? :)

Anyways, the trip was pretty cool. We left Thursday night, drove to Springfield and stopped at Steak and Shake for dinner. At Steak and Shake we met up with a bunch of the other quizzers and some other adult chaperones. After Steak and Shake we drove the rest of the way to St. Louis. For the most part the trip was uneventful, however we did start calling my car the “rave car” because of the music I listen to and the streaking cell phones Paul and Joe were waving everywhere. This was done in opposition to Sara’s “party van” which joe and paul did not get to ride in. We split up the boys and girls, because well….they’re boys and girls.

After getting to the hotel, we played a little Mafia and hit the sack. I never sleep well in hotels. I think it’s because it’s not my own bed, and the fact that I’m sleeping in the same bed with someone, so maybe I feel constrained. Either way I didn’t sleep very well and the morning came earlier than I wanted it to. Scott and I, along with several other volunteers spent the better part of Friday setting up for the quiz. We had seventeen rooms to setup, including chairs, tables, and quiz equipment. Sara, Erika, and the rest of the kids headed to the Science Museum where they did some stuff. I’d fill you in more, but I haven’t seen the pictures yet. I hear they’re coming soon.

The quiz started Friday night. I started out as a content judge in one room, but after 5 rounds I got pulled to help with stats since I’m computer savvy. I did a lot of running around for the entire quiz, mostly because we didn’t have a working wireless network, so to get the stats from each computer we had to plug a usb key in and manually download the stats. 17 rooms is a lot of rooms, especially when you have to grab stats from each of them every 3 rounds or so. Barry and Bill would have gone nuts if I hadn’t been recruited I think. It was also cool to hang out with Barry (since he wrote QuizMachine - the program we use to quiz) and talk shop with him. Somehow I let it slip that I love COBOL. Turns out he’s a big fan too. :)

So anyways, we had 10 rounds on Friday night and and probably close to 12 rounds on Saturday. It was a long quiz. Originally we were supposed to head back on Saturday, but the weather was pretty horrible between St. Louis and Chicago (lots of freezing rain, ice, and snow) so we opted to stay another night. We got back to the hotel, played some Egyptian Rat Screw, Mafia, and 4 on a couch (though we made up the couch since we didn’t have one. After that the kids played some “bang ahh ahh” game (yes that’s really what it’s called) where you shoot someone in the circle (by saying bang) and they have to say ahh, followed by the two people next to them saying ahh. Then the original person who said ahh gets to shoot someone. I guess the point is to try and get everyone out by making them make mistakes. I didn’t bother trying to play.

Sunday morning we got up, had some breakfast and it the road. We stopped a couple of times, including Subway for lunch (more on that later). We got back to Kankakee around 4 and I was home by 5. I ended up taking a 2 hour nap because I was so tired. You’d be amazed how much driving makes you tired. So that was my trip. I’m home safe (and I’m still safe 4 days later..imagine that!). When Marilyn puts up the pictures I’ll drop a link in the comments so you can check them out.

Only One Hug

The third quiz of the 2007-2008 quizzing season was this past Saturday. Our team (Chicago Northside) took 13th out of 17 teams. So that’s an improvement of 2 places. We still didn’t get very many jumps, but my girls seem to be getting better. I didn’t actually coach them this time as we needed extra quizmasters. Luckily I have a rock star volunteer from Moody Bible Institute who helps out with my team. Mary coached them for the day and I was able to quizmaster. They were in my room once, and I was able to see half of another one of their quizzes when my room finished super early. I did miss my team for most of the day, but I also got to quizmaster which I had been missing over the last two quizzes since I had been coaching. Quizmastering was fun. I was a little nervous for the first coupld of quizzes, but I quickly settled into a groove. It’s like riding a bike I tell you. :)

All in all it was a good day. I was able to reconnect with some of the kids form other teams I hadn’t been able to hang out with and I was able to hang out with my team for lunch, some of the quiz, and of course on the way there and back. The ride back was pretty interesting, in that Angel (one of my quizzers, a 6th grader) wanted to go to a pizza place before I dropped her and her sister off. She had been asking for it all day and I had already told her no several times. By the time I dropped them off it was almost seven pm, so I wasn’t going to ruin their dinner by taking them out to Pizza. This is the quote she used in the van before we got back to the church (I’m sure you can all relate)…

>”I like it when I get what I want.”

Don’t we all….don’t we all. Mary and I had a good laugh at that one. She asked again when we got into my car so I could take them home and I again said no. She then proceeded to tell me she got mad when she didn’t get what she wanted, and she wouldn’t talk to the person who made her mad. So I tried to explain to her logically what she was doing and how that wasn’t a very nice thing to say, but just as my sister doesn’t get my logic, neither did Angel. Normally when I drop them off I get a hug from both Agnes and Angel. Yesterday I only got one from Agnes. One can only hope that Angel won’t remember this very long. It didn’t really bother me, but I couldn’t help thinking if parenting would be like that when I have kids who are that age. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

The Week In Review

I was going to put these all in separate posts, but the last time I did that I set unrealistic expectations on the number of posts that could be expected, and we all know how that story ended. :) So here it is, the last week in review in shorts bursts. Buckle your seat belts and hang on.

**Last Saturday**

Last Saturday was the second quiz of the 2007-2008 quizzing season at Kankakee First Church. It was originally supposed to be at Danville Southside, but because of overbooked hotels we had to move it. My kids did OK, taking 15 out of 17 teams. At our first quiz we took 16th out of 17 teams, so we’re definitely moving in the right direction. I’m still working on getting my kids motivated to study. If I can do that I think we’ll be able to crack the top ten. After the quiz we went out to Blue’s Cafe for pie with the team. The girls (Agnes, Angel, and Leann) didn’t want to try the pie (supposedly the didn’t like pie), so they just got ice cream. Of course after all of us adults got pie they had to try each one and they said they liked it. Kids are funny sometimes. :) If you ant to see pictures from the event check them out here.

Also, a tragedy occurred when I woke up. As many of you have been following my eye injury (the stat on the right hadn’t changed since march), I am sad to report that I injured my eye again as I woke up on Saturday morning. My eye just got really dry and stuck to the inside of my eyelid. Fortunately it injured to the right of my pupil and not over my pupil so my vision wasn’t affected. However, it did make for an interesting morning as it felt like I had something in my eye for 3 or 4 hours. I have since updated the stat on the right to reflect the newest date. Oh so sad. I’m beginning to think I’ll never wear contacts again. I have started putting ointment in my eye before bed again, so hopefully that’ll help. I think the onset of cold weather is what’s causing it and I’ll just have to be more careful in the future. I’m also going to reinstate the use of a humidifier in my room.

**Last Sunday**

Sunday was pretty standard; church, small group, a brief nap, and then some volleyball with my small group peeps at an open gym in Glenview.

**This Past Monday**

My boy Peter visited me on Monday. He flew in to town for a client meeting on Tuesday morning, so he took the opportunity to visit me by flying in Monday night. I picked him up form the airport, we headed to Lou Malnoti’s for some deep dish pizza, and then hung out and talked for awhile at my house. As I’m sure Joshua will bring up in the comments (so of course I’ll preempt him here) we watched my performance in the Wizard of Oz when I was in 8th grade as well. Boy was I short back then. It was great to see Peter, and was a slight preview of my trip next month to see Joshua in Arizona. Of course when Joshua gets involved we’re going to take it to a whole new level.

**This Past Tuesday**

Tuesday was game night. We played the Age of Renaissance game again, and I think I finally figured out how to play it. It’s a rather complicated game of trading/attacking set during the Renaissance. I did terrible the first few times I played it with the guys (mostly due to the Crusades card which gives a player a free sport on the board), but this time I was able to pull out a win.

**This Past Wednesday**

Wednesday I had German as usual, but I left during the break to head to Glenview to play some volleyball with my small group peeps. They joined a league on Wednesday nights and I was subbing for one of their guys who couldn’t be there. It was a ton of fun. I don’t think I’ve had that much fun playing volleyball in an awful long time. I was just playing well, getting blocks, hits, good passes. It was pretty amazing. We won 2 out of 3, though the game we lost was by a score of 29-28, and the last point was actually ruled incorrectly, so we might have still yet won. Ah well.

**This Past Thursday**

I got to play racquetball with Ben, something we haven’t done in forever. I also got my YMCA ID card made, after a year of being a member. Ben whooped me in 2 games (15-6 and 15-7), but it was a ton of fun to play again.

**This Past Friday**

I was pretty sore on Friday after playing volleyball and racquetball on back to back nights. It was a good kind of sore, but I was sore none the less. I also had quizzing practice on Friday night, which was fun, but a little stressful. Mary and I spent a significant amount of time trying to explain the Trinity to Agnes, Angel, and Leann. I never realized how hard a concept that is to convey to junior highers. I think they got it, but they’re still young so they’ve got some time to figure it out.

**Yesterday**

Yesterday was semi relaxing. I went to worship practice in the morning, and then spent a majority of the afternoon relaxing. I really meant to do some work / work on my room, but after my super busy week at work, etc., I just had no energy. I also attended the second annual Chili Party at Simon and Becca’s place. That was a ton of fun. I arrived late (due to reading the start time incorrectly and helping my mom with something), but I arrived just in time to have my chili judged in the competition. After sampling the myriad of chilis available mine didn’t have any taste anymore. :) We also played this super fun game called Telephone Pictionary. The concept is that you draw a picture, pass to the person on your right, they write down what they think you drew, then they pass it to the next person who has to draw what the first person wrote. You continue this way around the circle until everyone has drawn everyone elses’ picture or word. It was pretty hilarious to see some of the progressions of things. I think my favorite was the word “Half Zipper Fleece” turning into a “Magnetic Bear Trap.” Try drawing it, I dare you. :)

**Today**

Toay was also pretty standard. I had church, then hung out with some church peeps while I waited for small group, then had small group, then watched the end of the Bears game. After that I went home, cleaned off my desk and my night stand, did some work on my computer, and watched game 7 of the ALCS pitting the Red Sox against the Indians. I wasn’t really routing for either team, as I’d be happy with either making it, but it was a fun game to watch regardless. We’ll see how the Sox do against the red hot Rockies come Wednesday.

There you have it; my week in review. Please remain seated until the ride has come to a complete stop.

I’ve Been Slackin’

So I’ve been slacking. To anyone who knows simple math, the time period between this post and the last is roughly 5 days. That’s 3 days more than my promised post of every 2 days. Oh the travesty. To be honest things have been a bit crazy, but I could have taken time to write and I didn’t.

Anyways, I’ve had a lot going on. This past weekend was pretty fun, but by Sunday night I was pretty run down. That’ll happen when you get no sleep and run around everywhere. I really should take better care of myself. It all started Thursday night. I stayed up a little too late because I wanted to watch Smallville. The preview just made it look too good. It turned out to be a heart breaker, so it probably wasn’t worth my time. Then I had to get up super early for my Men’s Breakfast with Eric and George. Last week I had to get up especially early because I was staying at my friend Corinne’s condo while she was away, and she’s a good ten minutes in the wrong direction from where Kappy’s (that’s where we meet) is. That isn’t so bad, but I had to pack and clean up, etc. It turned out Eric couldn’t come, because he went to a Teacher’s fair, so it was just George and I. The discussion was really good, and we finally went over Chapter 6 of The Pursuit of God. We’ve been trying to do that for months!

Friday night we had our The Journey at Yuki’s apartment. George taught, and I thought he did a great job. Hopefully he’ll do some more teaching at some point. I also was very convicted that I need to do some hard work in order to do some of the teaching. Eric is going to be very busy this coming semester, so I need to help pick up the slack. I’m pretty sure that’s what God wants me to do, but I’ve been kind of avoiding it I guess. Well, not really avoiding it, but more holding off on it. Anyways, I think I’m ready to move full speed ahead, though I’m not sure what that looks like. Anyways, I stayed up way too late again, and of course on Saturday I had to be up early again.

Saturday was the quiz at Joliet First Church. That was a lot of fun. It was over Acts 1-20. Quizmastering has become a lot of fun for me, and I think I do it fairly well. I think I need to do a better job of preparing though. I read through the chapters we were doing, but I really need to study it a little more in depth. I guess one of my mistake was saying Sosthenes incorrectly. Whoops. It all worked out in the end. I did the old timer’s quiz again, but once again failed to get a right answer, or a jump even. Though I did get a bonus. One of these days I’ll get a jump and a right answer. I probably just need to bite the bullet and spend a Sunday night practicing with Sara’s team down in Kankakee. After the quiz we had dinner at a Chinese buffet, which was yummy.

After dinner I headed back home to hang out with my friend Godfrey. I hadn’t seen him in a great while, and it was nice just to hang out. We went to Buffalo Wild Wings (or BW3s for those in the know) and watched the Saints, Eagles playoff game. The game was good as was the conversation. The kid is getting married in a few months, and moving to California, so I have to get in my guy time with him now. :)

After the game I headed to the Edison Park Inn (orthe EPI for short). It was Brian and Kore’s 29th birthday celebration. I should have left sooner than I did, but I was having fun learning the secrets of DJing from Perry, and it was all around a lot of fun. I ended up leaving at around 2:30 in the morning, which was roughly an hour and a half past when I wanted to leave. Brian was pretty much gone by the end of the party, and I guess they went out after that. I have no idea how they do it.

Luckily I had Sunday off from my sound/setup duties at Church, otherwise I would have had to have gotten up around 7:30. And that would have been no fun at all. I went to Edgewater Baptist Church to hear by buddy John preach. It was his first time preaching at that church and he was preaching on the Call of Abraham from Genesis 12:1-9. He did a really good job. I really enjoyed it. After that we went over to John and Joje’s place for lunch along with Joje’s mom and grandma, and John’s friend Milton. Lunch was a lot of fun, and after that we were able to watch the end of the Bears/Seahawks playoff game. Luckily the Bears won! :)

After that I pretty much went home and crashed. I had planned on getting lots of stuff done, but that didn’t really happen. I was just so tired. I ended up watching the end of the Patriots/Chargers game and did a little work. After that I watched Without a Trace with my mom, and then pretty much went to bed.

Of course my saga continues as this morning I woke up with a really bad headache. I’d guess it was probably a migraine. So I spent most of today in bed. I probably needed it, since I was pretty burnt out. What with work and all of my extra curriculars, I probably just needed a day off. I think I figured out what caused it though. On Saturday I had a ton of caffeine to keep myself awake, from Starbucks coffeee to pop. I had a ton. Then I had none yesterday which is my norm. I think I suffered from Caffeine withdrawal today. Not so much fun, but at least it’s over.

So that pretty much should get you caught up. If you actually made it this far give yourself a pat on the back. You deserve it. :)

Productofun Weekend

Yes, I realize that isn’t a real word. But I needed to come up with something to express that my weekend was both productive and fun. It was a long weekend, since it started on thursday night when I flew out to Charlotte, North Carolina. I was heading out there for my cousin Jay’s wedding.

So here’s the recap of my weekend. Thursday afternoon I arrived at the airport at roughly 4:15 PM. My flight wasn’t until 5:40, so that gave me plenty of time to check in and get through security. I arrived at my gate by 5:00, so I was there in plenty of time. Unfortunately, the plane we were going to fly on didn’t arrive at our gate until 7:00 PM. Such is life I guess. So I ended up working on the quizzing website, which allowed me to finish up some more stuff in regards to the registration of teams for district quizzes. The plane finally arrived, and after a short delay on the runway we ended up taking off around 7:40, a full 2 hours after we were supposed to.

It was about 10:15 PM (eastern time) when we arrived, and because my mom ended up getting lost on the way from the airport to the hotel, I ended up hanging out on a bench outside the airport for almost an hour. It was cool though, because I did some more thinking about the quizzing website, and I was able to finish memorizing a few more verses of Romans Chapter 1. My mom arrived at about 11:15 PM, and by 11:30 PM we were back at the hotel. After some putzing around with installing some packages in linux I gave up and went to bed.

Friday started off with us having breakfast. I would have preferred to sleep in, but my mom had other plans. She got us up at 9:00 AM so we could make it to breakfast before 10:00 AM. We made it with 25 minutes to spare, and then ended up meeting up with one of my cousins when she came in for breakfast half way through. We had a nice chat and were able to catch up a little bit. MOstly it was her and I catching up since my mom and sister had hung out with her the night before at dinner.

We didn’t do a whole lot until lunch, when we went and ate with Jay, the rest of the family, and everyone in his wedding party at the rehearsal luncheon. We didn’t goto the rehearsal, but we were invited to the luncheon, which was really nice. The food was really good, and I got to catch up with some family. The person I talked to the most was John (Jay’s wife’s dad). He was a doctor from the Charlotte area. He was super smart and the chat we had was quite fun.

The good doctor and I…

There was a cocktail party planned for Friday night, but we hadn’t planned on going. Cocktail party just seemed too high class for us, so we had made that decision a few weeks ago. Everyone at lunch had differing ideas. They finally convinced us to come, so we went back to the hotel, relaxed for a little bit (by which I mean I took a nap), and then headed to the cocktail party. The cocktail party was a little crazy. It was at this warehouse type place on the 4th floor. It had a really good view of the city, which would have been awesome if it hadn’t been raining so bad. There was an open bar and probably 250 people. It was quite the showing. Jay and his new wife Paige are both in film in some way or the other (se’s an editor and she owns a casting company), so most of the people that were there were related to that biz in some way. The only way I can describe it is that everyone seemed very high class, whether they were or not. Regardless I felt a little out of place, partly because of age (everyone was older), but also because I don’t think I fit into that crowd at all. Anyways, the party was fun, but I mostly hung out with my cousins and my mom and sister.

It’s a party!

Saturday we went shopping for a little bit at a mall in a suburb of Charlotte, and then we headed to the wedding. They had actually hired a limo for the various people being picked up, which included us, so we got to ride in a stretch limo to the event. That was pretty cool. The wedding itself had the same feel as the cocktail party, but it was very beautiful. They actually had an open bar all night (including before the wedding :0), so I can’t even imagine how much the entire wedding cost, especially since they invited 200-300 people. It was crazy. Anyways, the night was filled with toasting, dancing, hanging out, alcohol, food, etc. God wasn’t mentioned much, even in the ceremony (the only mention was “Lord, keep the one who wears this ring in thy peace.” when the priest/pastor prayed for each wedding ring.), so that was kind of depressing. I was also berated several times that I was going to be the next wedding (wait? did I get a girl when I wasn’t looking?), so that was a little awkward/funny. We left just a little bit before the party ended (since we had to take the limo back), and then we just hung out with the extended family for awhile longer at the hotel.

The newlyweds Paige and Jay…

Sunday we just got up and came home, though our flight was delayed for several hours on the runway, so the trip felt like it took forever. Plus the fact that I couldn’t watch the Bears game since it started at noon and I was stuck in an airport. Oh the horror… :)

All in all, the weekend was great. I had a lot of fun and I was able to accomplish a lot of things. I finished the registration stuff for the quizzing website, finished memorizing Romans Chapter 1 (only 13 more chapters to go!), upgraded lots of packages on my computer, and got some work done. The wedding was a ton of fun, though awkward at times, and seeing family I hadn’t seen in 15 years was a definite plus. I’m hoping to keep in touch with some of them more in the future, so I’m glad the weekend allowed us to reconnect.

The full gallery of the weekend can be found here.

Quiz Festivus!

So this past weekend was Quizfest. It’s an invitational quiz that the Chicago Central District hosts once a year. This was my second Quizfest, and actually my one year anniversary of quizzing, since my first ever event was Quizfest last year. It was a good time. It was a regional event, so I was a little nervous at first. I’ve only had experience at the district level, which isn’t nearly as hard. Not that its hard, but some of these kids coming from other districts really know their stuff. In the mixup quiz (kids get to quiz with people on other teams) on Friday night, I had some kids jumping on the second word of the question, saying 4 different questions and 4 different answers and getting it right. It was nuts. I didn’t have any of those kids on Saturday, since I was a quiz master in JV, but it was still a lot better competition than I’m used to on our district. I was in JV room 1, so I got to quiz master every round of the finals, plus the final round. In the end, New Lenox (who is on our district), took the JV crown with a come from behind win to beat the only other remaining team. I was really proud of them!

All in all the day went really well. I had a really good content judge, so it was nice to be able to bounce questions off of someone else and not have to rule just by myself. The content judge I had the week before didn’t really help me in that way, so I was kind of on my own. I also did my best to try and follow the rules set forth in the rule book, and make fair rulings, so by the end of the day I was much more confident in my quizmastering skills. I was also able to hang out with some of the kids from our district, so that was fun. I took some pictures (which can be found here), but none of them are really good enough to post here. I was too busy all day to take any pictures and I wish I had taken more.