Post-World

World was great. We had lots of fun. I don't know what else to say.
...

Reader polls just in indicate that the above paragraph is not long enough to be a post. Well, you readers are too demanding, but I'll say a bit more.
We placed 25th out of 41 Division III Tech Transfer teams. I believe we scored 102 on long-term, which is better than we have ever scored in the past. At state, we scored somewhere around 80, and at regionals, we scored much worse than that. So although I know that objectively, we did badly, it was a learning experience for everyone, and we did better than 39 percent of the world! Yeah, that's right. We are better than 39% of the world. Hooray!! Just kidding; don't sue me, lower 39 percent.

Anyway, back to something of at least a little importance...
We transferred four (4) items during the performance, which is more than in any previous competition. But we transferred all 20 items during practice 15 minutes before the competition. Grr.
I have a feeling that one of the wires broke while we were moving the elephant into the OS. It was this connector.

Well aside from the competition, there was a lot of sweaty and exhausting great stuff to do in Iowa, which is now my least-favorite state. There was no air conditioning (in the entire state, according to some disgruntled visitors), and we had to take 57 steps up to our rooms. (Thanks to Anthony for that number). By the end of the trip, everybody was in better shape, and Kris was much faster on the stairs. But I digress.
There was a Creativity Festival with lots of fun stuff to do, including basketball, fake baseball, rock-climbing, and hypnotism. Anthony still doesn't know that there is a videotape of him in hypnosis. And of course, there was pin trading galore! I couldn't walk 100 feet without seeing a pin trader. There were some cool pins from other states and continents. I still don't understand why pin trading is so popular, but it is, and it's not going away any time soon. But why couldn't they have chosen something easier to trade, like Odyssey Pokémon cards? To trade pins, you have to carry around a huge towel, and the pin backings always fall off and get lost on the bus, and you have to use two hands to remove the pins from the towel, and blah blah.

This is probably the longest post yet on this blog, and possibly the last, as the elephant nears its doom.

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