Regionals

    Today was Regionals again...once again, it was amazing.

    I woke up at 6:30, thought I was desperately late, and rushed to competition, getting there at around 7:00. It turned out that I was about an hour early,  but our coach had told us to be there by 7:20, so technically I was only 20 minutes early. Still, as I'm usually there anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour before our coach tells us to be there, this was considered late for me.

    I went into the Student Center Ballroom, and sat down with the rest of my team. I was also trying to finish highlighting my resource sheet for one of my events--this was difficult, as the people around me were rather distracting and  we were required to put on duct tape. I was creative and made the duct tape into my initials--first initial on the front, last initial on the back.

    For the first hour, I did that and panicked muchly about, well, everything. Mostly Sounds of Music, but that was because our entire thing sucked for that. We had a pretty bad-sounding chromatophone that played the notes, but had no quality or resonance or anything. My PVC flute thing was airy, horrible-sounding, and way out of tune if you just played it. I had to reshape my embouchure every single note.

   My first event was the written portion of Sounds. This was somewhat tricky because, well, I hadn't studied much for it at all. All we had to go on was my partner's and my musical affiliation and my deep affection for physics. I thought we were so screwed over.

   Immediately after that, I went to go to Helicopters. We had two--one better than the other. This room had really bad rafters up on the ceilings, but we had to take the risk, because the other option? An eight foot tall ceiling. So we opted for the thirty foot, raftered ceiling.
The first time, our heli got stuck in the rafters--just wedged in there.
The second time, our other heli flew for 32.45 seconds.
This was about half the time we usually got from the first heli, but we just held our heads up and was like, "you know what, we did what we could, and we will learn."

     Next was Rotor Egg Drop. This one...well, let's just say we crashed and burned. Our device broke so completely, it wasn't even funny. It flipped over, the balsa wood broke in several places, the Mylar completely tore...
However, the egg didn't break and we got 3.16 seconds.

     I had a free block after this, so I watched another Rotor Egg Drop and then went to go practise my Sounds instrument, because it still sounded like total crap. I did this for a while, went to watch a few other helicopters (amazing times, 1:34 and 1:21).

     And then...Disease Detectives. Probably my least favourite event. I went in there, did the test with my partner, and left. A crazy kid from the team below was so...loud. And then, "PIZZAAAAAAAA!" 

    I ate after that--just pizza, like everyone else. Then...it was DOOOM. SoM. One team had two octave instruments, and our was one octave and pretty out of tune.
We practised, went in there, played, and was sure we had failed. It was so bad.
I had time after that, so I went to homeroom and hung out for a bit, and then went to Reach for the Stars.

    The test for Reach was the exact same as last year's, and ridiculously short as well (20 questions). We finished in less than ten minutes and left.

     Following this, we went outside and played Wuah! for a while (I am not going to describe it--takes too freaking long. All you need to know is that it's bloody LOUD). Then, we proceeded to go to the ballroom and wait. For an hour.

      Awards came, and...oh my God. Just...oh my God.
Disease, we didn't medal. No surprise there.
Reach for the Stars: 1st. I expected this one.
Helicopters: 3rd. wtf?
Rotor Egg Drop: 2nd. This was just like, "really?"
SoM: FIRST FREAKING PLACE OHMYGOD

Yeah...SoM was just like total "wtf just happened really whaaaat?" 
I am so proud of that first place...just, that has got to be the best Regionals medal I ever got. Hours and hours of tiring work...come to fruition...

I love Science Olympiad