Sunday Evening

It's been a very long and stressful weekend. School starts again tomorrow. In addition to the quiz tournament - which took up all of my time from 6:30 pm Friday through 9:30 this morning, there was also the big society meeting at Western.

So this post will be about the quiz tournament. I need to reflect a little more about the upcoming changes at Western before I can write about them.

I ended up on billeting nine for the quiz tournament. However, I had requested two couples and up to six teenage boys and ended up with nine teenage boys. It all worked out just fine though. They were very well behaved; and aside from only having one bathroom, (and therefore only one shower), things went very well with them. Apparently the last one had a cold shower this morning. Oh well, nothing I can do about that.

Friday night Western's team had two matches, we had a third match Saturday morning. We won some, came in second on others - and by the time the stats had been calculated, we were in 14th place - at the bottom of the A division. However it meant that we weren't bumped down to the A consolation side. During the eliminations, we won our first match, and then lost the next two matches, so we ended up in 12th place. Bram was 7th overall for points in the A division, so ended up in the top ten, which was very good.

Friday night, quizzing and other activities ran until 10 pm; then I had to meet my billets and get them home. Because I had nine billets and two of Western's quizzers, plus myself to get home with only an eight-seater van, this was also a bit of a challenge. Leslie and Loopie were also billeting two boys, and they took two others, and another coach took two boys and then I had enough. Because I needed to drop off one quizzer at her house, this meant that we were home before 11 pm. The boys were wired, however, and I'm not sure when they finally all went to sleep. I can tell you that the living room looks a lot smaller with that many boys in it. Every couch was taken, including the little love seat; and I think only one ended up sleeping on the floor.

One interesting side story was that Radio Canada (CBC TV in French) interviewed Bram on Saturday afternoon. They said the interview would be on the website, but I haven't been able to find it there yet.

Saturday night we only had eight billets as one left after the quizzing ended. However things ran later, so we weren't home until around 11:30. I got up this morning at 7 (after laying in bed awake for a couple of hours). The boys weren't as quick to get up, so finally at 8 (when I had breakfast all ready), I started frying bacon, and in less than ten minutes, they were all up. Saturday morning I fed them cold cereal with toast, milk and oranges. Sunday they got sausages, eggs, toast, orange juice, oranges, and a little bit of bacon. The bacon was primarily to get everyone out of bed.

This may be my last year to coach quizzing (wait for my post later about Western for the reasons for this). I will miss it when it's over; I have really enjoyed it and cannot stress how good it's been for the kids involved in it.