Fayetteville

So I know I haven’t blogged in roughly forever, but I’m here now so I won’t make any excuses about school or debate or facebook. But school has been crazy, we just got back from our 2nd debate tournament, and facebook can occupy a great deal of your creative energy.

I guess I’ll talk about the NC tournament we just got back from on sunday. We started speech and debate last September and to tell the truth mom forced me into it. I begged I think I even cried, I mean the prospect of giving speeches in front a crowd terrified me, but I’ve learned to enjoy it so much that I’ve decided to join the club and return next year. One reason I love it so much is because of the kids involved. They are all God fearing, super smart, hilarious people with amazing speaking abilities. I’ve learned lots about water pollution, our topic for this year, and how it affects people and the environment. I know it sounds boring but there really is a lot to it. I’ve learned to prepare a 5 minute speech on a random quote in just 2 minutes.
Thursday afternoon we dropped off the incubator at a friends house, picked up Thomas’ partner Joe, and Joe’s dad, then we were off to NC. We also brought Lily along because she’s got a ruptured disk in her back and the kennel would've been way too stressful for her. On the way there was a bit of really bad traffic where we just turned the car off and snacked on Oreo's for about an hour and a half. Because mom is still inactive reserve we got to stay at Pope Air-Force Base. We didn’t get through all the security and checked in till about 1ish which was unfortunate because we had to get up again in about 5 hours. Philip didn't have any events the first day so he watched a few debate rounds

The tournament itself was awesome, there were seven 1.5 hour long rounds and 3 individual event rounds over 2 days. Waiting around for the postings on the next round

There was a lot of down time between rounds, but we filled this with intense card games. At the end of the 2nd day we all watched the Final debate round and had awards. Thomas and Joe

Thomas won his individual event round with his 8 minute memorized speech on the perils of HID headlights. Philip is in a separate age group and he won both his impromptu round and his prepared speech event. Considering the other 60 or so kids that were there, these were pretty big accomplishments. Me and my partner Nadia
Little ole me didn’t win anything but the satisfaction of beating an experienced team.The Richmond "RADIX" club
I’m still really tired from the weekend, because three nights in a row none of us got much more than 5 hours of sleep. Because it’s Thomas’ last year we’ll probably end up going to the last tournament in Charlotte NC where we’ll go through the whole thing again.
Just a little side note I got an incubator as an early B-day present and this is day 14 for 31 duck eggs cooking away inside. They’re scheduled to hatch March 30.See the veins?
Another note is that the disc in Lily’s back has pressed up against her spine and now she drags her back legs. =’( This has happened before but a dose of steroids has always snapped her out of it, only this time they’re not working. We don’t know if she’ll pull through or not.
~Anna