In Word

After an enormously tiring weekend, things are looking to be fairly normal around here, at least for a couple weeks.  This tournament was by far the hardest yet.  Maybe things get more difficult as the year goes on?  In any case, the speech and debate season is slowly winding down.  Only two more tournaments left.

ARC had a great tournament.  We broke four Team Policy teams to double octafinals; two to octafinals, and one to semifinals.  Christina, our wonderful Lincoln Douglas debater, made it to octafinals as well.  I won’t even attempt to recap speech breaks…there’s too much to say.  Check out arcblogs.com for the full scoop.

A group of us were able to head over to the Alamo after the tournament ended, and I hear the event was a great success.  Unfortunately, I had to abandon ship and head over to Fredicksburg to play in a wedding.  Somewhere along the way, my body went into that completely unexplainable energy drive that comes about when you haven’t slept at all recently.  (I think the Starbucks contributed.)

Next time, I’m going to sleep more.

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This past weekend found us out-of-town yet again for the first NCFCA tournament of the year.  For me, it was a good four days spent with friends and family–even in spite of my personal failures throughout.

We stopped on the drive up to swing by Bluebell Creameries.  It’s fast becoming a tradition–who can resist Bluebell ice cream?  Certainly not a bunch of homeschoolers who practically fill the whole store.

Our club banner.  ARC is a pretty cool group of people.

Josh gets ready to compete in apologetics, a speech event in which students explain their personal faith through a number of pre-written questions.

Grace and Christina, two of the wonderful people I got to spend time with.

This, my friends, is a wonderful flow of one of my debate rounds.  Please understand that it isn’t supposed to look this way.  There ought to be four, neat columns of notes, succintly summarizing the arguments in the round.  Instead…well, you see what I ended up with.

Brian and Toni, debating in outrounds.

The Pig.  As the unofficial ARC mascot, he bears a very important message: Don’t take yourself too seriously.

I love these people.

…and these people…

…and yes, even this person!

Excitement and congratulations for those breaking to the next round.

Saturday night, after the awards ceremony, a group of us gathered at IHOP to have fun and look over ballots from the tournament.  Festivities continued until nearly 2:00 AM, after which we straggled back to our respective places of rest in order to grab a few hours of sleep before heading home the next day.

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Day 2 is complete!  Today we had our final classes for the speech portion, and tomorrow we’ll be competing in a one-day tournament.  My classes today were actually enjoyable (*collective gasp*), since they dealt with photography and were quite informative.  It was also great to be going to the same classes as my friend Lydia–I have this immature fear of going places alone, even if it’s in one facility.  Call me weird.  I am pretty weird.

As for the tournament tomorrow…that will be a stretch.  Thus far, I’ve felt good about the whole thing, probably because I haven’t had to stretch myself too far past my comfort zone.  Tomorrow will be a whole new level of growing, since competition has always terrified me.  Like, seriously terrified.

A few pictures from the past two or three days:

Mrs. Moon talks about the conference’s theme, “Lead the Escape.”

Katy looks pretty happy in the car on the way to the church.

Dueling cameras!

A partial shot of this year’s RAP graduates (I was sitting too far forward to include everyone).  Actually, I managed to get all three ARC students–Toni, Kathryn Grace, and Christina.  Congratulations to them!

Justin Louis lectures on the importance of visual communication via mediums such as photography, film, and art.

Christina draws a connection between bananas, and…lightbulbs.  Get it?

Avery looks cool in sunglasses.

The final event of the evening was the “Dinner Theater,” put on by the CFC interns–a play that had everyone laughing over the course of the evening.

Every good comedy has to include a proposal scene.

So, that was my day.  Still a long ways to go…

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