Odyssey of the Mind, World Finals 2018

This little journey began early in the school year and the group has been meeting and making props for all of these months now.  Well, it hasn't been all work, there has been plenty of screwing around too, but they made it work.

Back on April 8th, I posted here that they had won their state level competition and would be heading to World Finals.

So we headed up to Ames Iowa on Wednesday night, May 23rd to get Robby delivered, registered, fed, squared away in the dorm building of Geoffrey Hall, and then finally, back to Hilton Coliseum for the Opening Ceremonies.

And that brings us current! Off to see some pictures.

This is early on with some dancing and talking about various things.  You can kinda tell that it's early based on all of the open seats at this point.

At this point, nearly all of the various countries had been announced and marched in.  Those are the people that are filling up the floor. We had kids competing from Qatar, Russia, Canada, Japan, China, Taiwan, India, Germany, Hong Kong, Poland, Mexico and roughly 20-25 of the United States.  I'm sure I've forgotten a few countries.

At this point, they had just emerged from the back room with their props and are receiving instructions from the... uh, instruction peoples.  They chose to solve the Emoji problem, so they couldn't talk at all, which if you know Rob, you know that had to drive the boy nuts!

This is the first race in which the subject of their story wins the big race and eats the victory cookies, causing him to become fat as he ages.  The prop on the left is a cell phone that had text messages to help tell the silent story.

This is the race after he becomes fat and he loses and becomes depressed.

Close up of Robby, because I like him... obviously, the race is still going on.

This was the choreographed dancing sequence in which they experienced an equipment malfunction when the song from one of their phones would not play.  They got it going eventually and finished, with only about a 30 second delay.

The team: Serena, Ashlee, Alie, Joey, Noah and Robby.  Sadly, they're down one member (Aidan) who experienced a serious medical issue only a week before and wasn't able to attend worlds.

And once they perform, you haul the props out the back of the building to the dumpster and bust up all of your hard work and pitch it...  Notice Robby is that little silhouette who is down off of the loading dock as he apparently did not understand the concept of throwing stuff away.  He threw garbage OVER the dumpster and onto the ground.

You can barely see Rob's head again at the right of the photo.

Robby barely visible again...  This is most of the group and most of the parents in attendance as well.

So how did they do?  They dropped points from their performance at State and were roughly middle-of-the-pack (25th, I believe) from the teams that presented the Emoji problem and 10th for their spontaneous presentation.  It could have gone better, but it is what it is, and I'm proud of them.

Robby wasn't going to do it again next year, but he said after his 3.5 days on the Iowa State campus that he's about 99% sure that he's doing it again.

Also,  a HUGE thank you to Coach Christie for her time, use of her basement to build/paint props, drive the kids to the store, and probably all kinds of other things that I am not even aware of!  Not only that, but it was obvious at the state competition that not all coaches followed the rules of NOT helping with props and the presentation overall. Our coach followed the rules and the kids are better for it!

The Caleb Tree

I will let this post serve as a reminder of when we planted the "Caleb Tree". 

Our school district gives out pine trees every year to the 4th grade class as a part of the Fourth Grade Foresters USA Project.

I'm hoping that the Caleb Tree last longer than the Robby Tree!  

I planted Robby's pine tree back in 2015 when the lad was tearing up the 4th grade.  

We live in a pseudo rural area so we have our fair share of wildlife come thru the yard.  As a result, I put little fences up around newly planted trees, shrubs, bushes and what not.  

We also have a LOT of hills in our yard, in fact, the only real flat spot is immediately outside of our walkout door as I had them level that when we were building as the only spot where we could have a basketball hoop for our, at the time, newborn baby to play basketball.

As a result of the hills, mowing is quite often an adventure.  One day while mowing the back yard, which has the biggest hills of all, the tractor started to slide towards the pine tree and protective fencing so quickly that I could not stop either the tractor, the slide, or the tractors blades and pulled the whole mess of metal and tiny tree up under the mower deck into a tangled up mess...  

Bye, bye tree.

On the packaging from the tree.

The aforementioned tree!  She's about 1 foot tall as of posting this on 05/24/2018.

The Running Man

A weekend or two back, my sister Dianne took her three kids along with Caleb to a 5k run held in downtown Des Moines.  The weather wasn't great for such an outing, but near as I could tell when she brought him home, they all had a blast!

Left to right: Jonah, Dianne, Zoe, Caleb and Sam.

The kids with an excellent little restaurant in the background called Mullets.  I would recommend their Fish n' Chips.

A Day To Behold!

Yes,  you've seen it before. 

Yes, I've seen it multiple times and still enjoy it!  So should you!

Yes, you will probably see it next year, when we hit 27!

Happy 26th Anniversary to this lady!!!

Mow, Mow, Mow Your Yard...

So, I can't mow. I had back surgery on April 26th and should be out of commission for this kind of work for roughly 90 days. That takes us all the way until the end of July, roughly speaking. 

This is the time of the year that I dearly love mowing! It's the first part of Spring, everything is greening up like crazy, the rains are falling heavy and often.  

And to mow is to fit your schedule into natures, NOT the other way around.  

But here I am, if I want to heal, I need to NOT do the stuff that I LOVE to do this time of the year.

So who will do it for me?  The 2 little critters of course!

Robby has already been mowing some of the yard for the past two seasons but this is the first year that Calebber has enough meat on his bones to mow by himself.

I gave him some quick lessons tonight about safety and how to shut'er down quick if the beast gets out of control on a feller, and so on.  He did great, mowing slow and taking it carefully!

That's Robby out cutting the main, unobstructed area in the front yard.

That's Caleb on his maiden voyage!

And so the summer will go!  I will mow little dangerous areas and the boys will get the "joy" of doing the bulk of the work.  I think they'll learn to love it!!

Hawaii Vaca, Post 25 - Day 9 Part 2 - North Shore Drive

After the ATV tour, we didn't have anything planned for day 9. So, we went exploring. It really doesn't take all that long to drive the entire Kauai Island, so we drove as far as the North road will take people and made some stops along the way.

The first stop, with pictures anyway, was the Kilauea Lighthouse.  The pathway to walk down to the lighthouse was guarded by a gate that someone had rudely locked.  No matter, we stretched our legs and took some good pics!

We were warned by Cousin Dwight on the Pearl Harbor tour, that the leading cause of death on the Hawaiian Islands was coconuts falling onto people's noggins.  He went on to say that while they don't cause as many deaths as coconuts, pineapples cracking the cranium will certainly ruin your vacation!  I can see why!  The pineapples were great, by the way.  They are mostly white in color with only a hint of a yellow hue.

The bridges out here are quite narrow.  Not sure when they would have initially been built, but two cars could not pass each other.  The brown signage under the yield sign says, "Local courtesy, 5 - 7 vehicles".  That's Hawaii nice.

I cannot say where this was at, but we had not seen the ocean for a few minutes so Robby wanted to get out when we did!  It was just a little roadside stopping point...  with chickens.

Along with chickens, they also have monkeys!

Lot's of monkeys!

Another oddball bridge.  You can kind of see it over/thru the foliage starting just to the right of the pickup.  You had to make a hard right, and go up a steep, but short, incline onto the bridge.  There's also a telephone pole on the very left edge of the photo.  If you didn't take a hard right, you would go down a treacherous looking driveway as somebody decided to build a house down by the waters edge.

Just one of many little treasures that you run across on this road!  Look at how clear that water is!

Cave #1.

Cave #2.  This thing was MAMMOTH in size!

Another prime example of a picture not doing nature justice.

I note that we are missing some more pictures here.  I know this for a fact because when we got to the end of the road (literally!) at Hanapea Beach (I don't have that spelled right), it took about 15 minutes to get the car turned around because of the enormous amount of vehicles present and virtually no parking lot.  During this time, Mama got out of the vehicle and took some photos of the beach and they are not present in the picture folders that I organized after we got home...  Hmmm...   first with Robby swinging on the Raiders of the Lost Ark rope swing and now this!

This is the entrance to the Limahuli Garden & Preserve, National Tropical Botanical Garden.  This would have been our kind of thing (Me and mama, anyway) but we had hungry boys and the place was closed, so the hungry boys won this round!

We finally paused for lunch.  Found a little local taco stand and had some fish tacos among other items.  Good food and we ate on their front porch with this as our view.

The birds hung around to get scraps of food that sloppy, ravenous people would drop in their haste to jam their pie holes full.  I believe that makes them smarter than us, even though we have a term like "bird brain".

This is one sculpture that did not get torn down last Summer/Fall, which is surprising since you can see her boob.  Surely, somebody, somewhere has to be offended by this!

Happier boys with some food in their guts.  Shortly after this pic was taken, Rob starting pitching his arguments for being in some body of water, whether it was the pool at the plantation or the ocean, it didn't matter. He just wanted out of the car.  Oh, we got out of the car alright when dad spotted a guitar store!  We got out and played some guitars to help sooth the soul!

Nothing special about this pic, but I included it basically because if you weren't driving next to the ocean, your roads pretty much looked like this, and it was beautiful!

And so it was.  Back to the cottages to cook some dinner and let the boys hit the pool!

Hound Patrol

I had a herniated disc in my back which caused me to find different ways/places to sleep as comfort was hard to come by.  The hound seemed to understand that all was not quite right and she was sticking by me.  Here we were all huddled up for a nap when Calebber snapped an unknowing picture that I later found on my phone.

After surgery when I'm trying to work from home... It seems my laptop has grown a furry, and quite cute, head.