My great, great, great grandson...

OK. So, I would say a lot happened in two days. I'll take this step by step.

Day 1(thursday):
I have to give my friend Shivy (short for something else) a BIG thank you, cause she's letting me borrow her Rosetta Stone... German version. Anyway, thursday was basically a preparation day for the Constitution Competition so I went to the library. After some serious work, right before I went home I started to fool around on my laptop and so the following conversation occurred....

Acquaintance: *mildly loud, across a fairly far distance* Florence, is that your laptop??!
Me: ....yes.
Acquaintance: *nods*
Friend: *next to me, whispers* Why'd you say that?! You should have lied and said 'no, it's my... great, great, great grandson's'!"
Me: I didn't know I had one.

And then we proceeded to laugh, really hard.

Also, I also got a call from an AFS volunteer that night, she reminded me to get my application in by March 1st, not the 21st of February as I'd thought. I think maybe it's the CB that's due on that date. Also I have to have an in home interview done. ACK.

Day 2 (friday):
Friday, February 4th, was the day we would all go to school at 6:15 in the morning to go to Trenton for the Constitution Competition. We were all dressed nice and spiffy, with tired faces as we loaded on to the bus. We got to Trenton as the only sophomore class amidst seniors. To this point we had already beaten six senior classes that hadn't made it up to this point. Now we were going to face another five school to see which would move on to nationals. As you can imagine we were all nervous. But the nerves hit us at the wrong time.

Once it was our turn to answer the questions, it was up to us to go back to those brain cells that held information that we could process into an answer. Based on our answer we would be scored. At the time you speak you think, that what you say is good, you may think that what you answer makes sense. However, after it's all done and your judges have left the room you pick out minimal details like 'Oh, I stuttered,' or 'I didn't say enough,' and in other cases 'I paused to long and too much.' You think about every possible thing that could make you seem like you could have done better...

To move on with today's happenings, after the questions, we went to a buffet to eat. It was really crowded, but we found seats and I was very happy that they had a vegetarian lasagna and chocolate chip cookies! They announced the winner and we received....
THIRD PLACE.

Yeah, I was disappointed. It was not what I expected, hoped or aimed for. But when you really put it into perspective, we went against a total of twelve schools, and out of all of them we placed in the top three. To add on to that, we were the ONLY sophomore class there, all of the others were seniors. So when you really think about it, we did really well. In fact, we did great.

So the bus ride home wasn't as quiet and sad as you might think. It was actually pretty wild, especially in the back, where I was. We were accompanied by a crap load of teenagers with a real heavy stress taken of they're back, with candy, juices and soda, plus our teacher who ran down the isle handing out brownies like a flight attendant and almost falling into people's laps every time the bus turned.

By the time we got home we were pretty much happy with our third place achievement. I'm pretty sure everyone was tired after the long day, I know I was.

And to conclude I want to say that tomorrow I'm taking care of my passport business, so that's another thing that I won't have to worry about. Also, just got an e-mail, my letters of recommendation made it to Oregon, so relieved.  And on Monday, I'll have to harass my teacher to tell me if we made it to the talent show. Two more things before I go...

Awkward situation
Sal: I'm hot.
Nicole: Your mom's hot! Wait.....that didn't come out how I expected.

The Jonas Brothers can rock my title....kinda. "And your great, great, great granddaughter is doing fine."