Keeping Connected

Last Thursday was a fun little evening – I went to a nearby location of the super-cheap pizza buffet chain called Cici’s. It only costs five dollars to eat all the pizza you want (I think my Spite was $1.50 more). I met five of my CVCA Connections-group guys there for an evening of eating pizza and talking, plus a few arcade video games thrown in for good measure. I had a really good time, and we spent about an hour and a half there.

On Saturday, I was supposed to go with Meredith for her state-level junior high Academic Challenge meet. Academic Challenge is sort of like competitive school Jeopardy!, where students answer trivia questions against other teams. I was supposed to be a question reader, which is actually pretty interesting, since I like trivia. However, all of those plans were thrown off, as I was still recovering from a light flu or heavy cold, and I was not sure I would have the stamina to make it for the seven-hour day it would involve. In retrospect, I think I could have done it, but there was no way to know that when I woke up still feeling slightly sick.

Anyway, Mer entered three CVCA teams – a seventh-grade team, an eighth-grade team, and a team made up of two freshmen and two eighth graders (two freshmen are allowed on teams since some junior high schools go up through ninth grade; there are even some sixth graders who compete in these big competitions). Mer’s teams did very well, going a combined 17-1 in the qualification rounds, and all three teams qualified for the playoffs, which was a feat that had never been done by any school at that tournament (sending three teams to the playoffs). Sadly, all three teams lost very close matches in their first-round matches, but two of the three teams placed highly enough to qualify for a national-level tournament in Washington, DC, and if any team from a school qualifies, then they can all go; so, Mer has the option to send any and all members of her team who can make it. Unfortunately, Mer and I will be on vacation that weekend (we have plane tickets already), so Mer will have to send a proxy coach in her place. Still, it was a wildly successful day for her team.

Saturday evening involved another success – our friends Eric and Shanna have a band called Bethesda, and they held a CD-release party in an Akron club called Musica. Mer and I went with our colleague Craig. The place was packed out, and Musica finally did a great job mixing the sound for Bethesda. Eric and Shanna had both been struggling with illness, with Shanna even losing her voice on Friday. Happily, Shanna had tons of people praying for her, and she saw a doctor who gave her some medicine, and she sang effortlessly. She later said it was the easiest she has ever sung. The audience was really into the music, and you could tell the band was excited to be playing – the CD was recorded last summer, so this evening was a long time in coming. Bethesda played for about an hour, and put on one of the best shows I have seen them do (the one we saw them play at the Kent Folk Festival was pretty close, in my opinion).

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