It's such an accomplishment, the hiskule team has been awesome, the volunteers have been awesome, and never will I want to cut out letters from vinyls ever again.
Time to type out a long summary of the day, and well, of the night before too.
Actually no I'm way too tired to type, so here's a series of photos documenting the crunch night:
The war room, aka gb204, not a pretty sight.
To do list for the night...and subsequent morning.
What I spent 6 hours doing: cutting letters and gears out of adhesive vinyl. Never do I want to touch that ever again, my thumb on my cutting hand was legitimately shaking when not holding the pair of scissors. Though somehow it's still shaking now, so I have no clue haha.
Also my heartfelt gratitude for whoever did this last year, I completely emphasize and appreciate your hard work.
lim n -> infinity...and beyond (actually there were 25, the extra N now sticks to the back of my phone case as a reminder of this night).
Resupplying at around 11, my eating schedule has gone to hell for Hiskule.
Results of my night, fancy decorated hard hats given to the top 3 teams.
Got roughly 5 hours of sleep that night, and surprisingly I feel more awake than days when I've got 8. And this is with a measly cup of timmies versus espresso shot(s). This is what the engineering course load does to you e_e" Walked to campus in the complete dark, the Oasis songs blasting in my headphones made the experience much less miserable.
The actual day of the competition started out quite hectically. Majority of the exec team overslept and we were rushing to set up registration & a billion other things. Sad that I missed opening presentation, which thanks to the talents of our promo director, is pure gorgeous. My ppts ought to be at that level.
Moving onto construction time, I somehow ended up manning the store despite multiple, explicit expressions of unwillingness. The morning rush was just...not fun. There were sooo many kids scrambling in the room scourging for the best materials. This is definitely part of the competition that requires yet more improvement on (to be honest we did try pretty darn hard to revamp the materials sign out process this year). All was good after morning rush though.
Testing was also nerve-wrecking at first. 40lbs of weight should not be above a large tank of water... Luckily most teams' bridges were quite sturdy and none were tested to failure. Unfortunately, testing rules, despite our best effort, were not communicated effectively and caused some confusion amongst the teams. We also lagged behind schedule and had to scramble to get ready for presentations.
Presentation wise, there were really good ones and...doubtful ones. Many had solid justifications for their design, and tried their best to use APS terms (to great effect too). Others, the bs was very apparent, at least to me. I'm tempted to look back to my own presentation and see how badly I would grade myself haha. I've definitely learned a ton in these 2 months of university XD
The highlight of the day for me would have to be when I convinced this one group who wanted to forfeit the presentation to give it a try. By "I" I really mean Kenny who gave them a giant pep talk xD The group pulled off a rather impressive presentation given that they had roughly 4 minutes to prepare.
Overall, I am so so so so so so so thankful for the volunteers that helped out. If I had the financial ability, I would totally buy them all drinks. They are super awesome and cleaned up the all the rooms while the final presentations were going on. So if by some fluke they ever see this, THANK YOU SO MUCH. And the amazing executive team, I honestly don't know how we pulled this together & I would have gone insane cutting all those letters without you guys.
...k that was way too much thinking for such little sleep, or rather all this typing should have been done for my BC assignment. I would finally like to thank the Honey and Clover soundtrack for keeping me awake until now.
One last photo :D
Giant Christmas tree at City Hall!
Can't wait to see the Swarovski one at Eaton *u*
