February Madness, Destination Imagination Style

We don't have March Madness around my house even though I do like college basketball. This is a holdover from a previous relationship. I used to be able to do those pools at work and end up in or close to in the money every time, but I have let me knowledge slip away and now I am not nearly as familiar with the coaches (the key to college basketball) as I once was.

But we do indeed have February Madness, also known as Destination Imagination. This program used to be called Odyssey of the Mind for those of you old-timers. The kids on the team pick a challenge in the fall and spend all year working toward the goal of doing an 8 minute presentation at tournament. You would think that this wouldn't take very long to prepare for, but you would be wrong. The kids are supposed to do ALL the work; the coach or Team Manager is just a facilitator. I even took various ones of them shopping with me when we had to buy materials, although I drew the line at taking them to Perth Street where the discount fabric stores are located (I did get them some $1 a yard fabric though!) The parents out here wouldn't like it if I took their little darlings down there, since it's off of Harry Hines. This is kind of like the Red Light District in the DFW area, and most people who live out here in Pleasant Valley have never been there, so they are scared of it. I guess they think someone is going to steal their Rolexes or something if they go down there, but since the only Rolex I ever owned was a Hong Kong knockoff, it doesn't scare me much. They are more than welcome to the less than $20 in my purse, and if they can figure out a way to get money out of those debit cards, more power to them. I have a scrapbooking friend who quilts but she refuses to go down there with me, even though the fabric stores are only open during the day, but she would be amazed at the deals.

Although some of the Destination Imagination challenges are more scientific and technical (for example, requiring the kids to build a device that sends hacky sacks over a wall for points, or a robot), our group usually picks the theatre arts related challenge. They are an excellent improv group but they never pick the improv challenge because they want to MAKE stuff!!! This year with all the cold weather and the garage being a mess (never got it fully cleaned up after Harvest Fest because the weather got nasty--got the camping gear reorganized but there's still SCA crap out there in piles)--well anyway, it has been a challenge this year. They had to make a puppet and they decided on a large one. I can't say what yet because the tournament is March 6, but after Tournament I will share all of our secrets. They also have to do a live art form on stage that relates to the character flip or change in point of view that has to be in their story. They have come up with a great idea for a story and a decent script, after much research and angst. I thought we were going to have to paint our backdrop outside yesterday but they even decided on their own to use markers and scraps of felt and craft foam to decorate it, and they did one of the backdrops from a picture that one of the girls had drawn. I am going to attach her picture to my tournament forms because these little fourth grade girls (not my two but two others on my team) can draw better than I can. I am not very good at drawing and these kids could kick my butt at it--I could never have drawn what they did yesterday, not in a million years. My own kids worked on the technical and decorative aspects of the puppet, and the script yesterday. They have inherited our brains and creativity but unfortunately they have also inherited our lack of drawing talent.

We also have to practice instant challenges. For an instant challenge, the kids are taken to a room where appraisers read them a challenge. They generally have 4-5 minutes to use some random materials (like straws, paper clips, etc) to build something and plan a performance around it, then about 2 minutes to actually perform. Sometimes our team is awesome at this and sometimes they don't get it and it's a big mess. This is worth up to 100 points at tournament so it is important to practice and practice and practice, but at this time of year there is so much to do! I don't let them start building and making stuff until January because I don't want my house torn up at Christmas, but now all bets are off.

We have a backdrop sitting in my foyer on a lovely piece of warped plywood. It's propped up by a table where I am trying to make clay Viking brooches (and I am finding out that carving Viking designs in clay is not really something that I am particularly good at! Maybe I'll get the fourth graders to do it.) Plus Gulf War fabric all over the living room, with the feast gear and period games and embroidery stuff and calligraphy stuff and Ministry of Children stuff and God knows what else. I will say again, if you want to visit me, I need 30 days notice. Really.

The dining room table still has the good china on it from our brief Valentine's dinner. The china has been there since New Years so I think it is probably time to put it away now. I don't think I am going to leave it out until April (R's birthday), and we have precious little to celebrate after that as all family birthdays will then be done until the following January.

Every year I say in January that i am going to take a cake decorating class, but then by April, the desire passes into the wind like bad gas. I make the girls a coconut cake based on Grandma's recipe (I have to refrigerate this cake and I have the Tupperwear cake taker just for this purpose). I don't make myself a cake and I didn't even get one this year because we had Twelfth Night that day and no one like my husband thought about getting me a cake, and I refused to buy my own, so no birthday cake for me this year. I didn't really care that much but it would have been nice. I did make a boar's head out of rice krispy treats and frosted it so I guess I really did make my own cake, but we didn't eat this. The frosting was gray and I used some old black food coloring to achieve this, so I really didn't want to eat it. We sliced some of it up at DI the following Tuesday and we all said, "Yuk!!" and threw it all away. If you think blue and magenta cakes are nasty, just wait until you try a 4 day old gray Boar's Head rice krispy treat cake. I will probably just buy R a cake because I don't think he will care one way or the other whether I make one from a mix or not (I don't usually do scratch and even grandma's cake starts with a mix). I can do a cake from scratch, but we don't need a lot of extra desserts around here so my dessert skills are rather weak. My cookie sheets are shot (probably because I keep using them for trays for rain boots and crafts, not cookie sheets), so even my Christmas cookies suck. Every year about November I think about getting some new cookie sheets with Martha Stewarteque sillipat mats (rubber mats that aid in baking and don't melt in the oven), but that desire always passes, again like bad gas, by New Year's. Well, maybe this year. I haven't been to Williams Sonoma since I quit working full time but we did get married more than 15 years ago and maybe it is time for some new fancy WS or Pampered Chef gear. In my dreams!

Well, seems like I am just rambling today. Last year for DI the kids made a tree using girl scout cookie boxes and chicken wire and paper mache. They did bark out of brown paper and painted it, and made a hole in it for the Featured Creature using cardboard and duct tape. Miranda was the featured creature and had feathered wings (fortunately she got sick the week of the tournament and I made her sit there with a fever and glue her wings together, feather by feather, but we got a great score on her costume!) This year we are trying to focus on the key elements of the challenge and on the instant challenges so we don't do too much extra work that doesn't get graded, but we will see what happens. It is a hell of a lot of work for 8 minutes, but DI isn't really about the tournament or even winning (the scoring is extremely subjective even on things that could be seen as objective, so you really can't predict how you are going to do). DI is more about the Process of Learning how to do things and learning teamwork. And our whole house is more Process than Product right now, let me tell you!!

I did get my Valentine's Cards and the Birthday Card made at 3 am on Valentine's Day (couldn't sleep again so I got up and did these things since I was too tired right when we got home from Kingdom A & S). I dropped my Dotto adhesive and broke it though (broke the wheel off the whole container somehow), and now I need more in order to put together the damn snowmen. One of my new Cricut cartriges has lots of snowmen on it, kind of like snowmen paper dolls. I thought it would be fun but it's a nightmare putting these suckers together!! I can see why it's Limited Edition cartridge--it's damned hard to do, and by the time everyone figures it out, they will be all sold and off the market. I have snowmen pieces all over my scrapbook table (and they have been there since I returned from my scrapbook retreat almost a month agao). The plan was: put these snowmen together in about an hour the day after returning from retreat, and get back into the Christmas scrapbooking. Well, a month later it still looks like a terrorist attack on a colony of snowpeople on my scrapbooking table, and I just keep shunting it aside. I am about ready to put the whole damn mess in a baggie and move on with my life. Especially now that I broke my dotto adhesive, and my acid free gluestick is all dried out for some reason, and my glue pen isn't working (and I hate those anyway), so I really don't know how in the hell I am supposed to glue these tiny pieces together.

So, at Kingdom A & S the other day there was pewter casting, wood working, weaving, sewing (a whole dress and all four layers, even undergarments, made totally by hand), basketry, medicine (cough syrup), calligraphy and illumination, middle eastern cooking, blacksmithing, a variety of sewing and jewelry projects, etc. etc. There were over 50 entrants and it was AWESOME!!! Maybe I cn actually do something for it one day if I can ever figure out how to get the snowmen and my dreadful attempts at Viking Brooches off my work table.

Well, a mysterious alarm is going off somewhere in the house (I think it's the DI stopwatch) so I hope I haven't bored everyone to death today. This is the time of year when I get really serious about DI so I'm just not feeling very funny today. Plus I know I have to go to the dentist this morning, and have the DI kids this afternoon, and we are almost out of Crown after Valentine's Day, so that sort of stinks. That stuff is now about $25 a bottle and I feel like I just bought one, but I may be hitting the liquor store again on Friday. After all, it's just across the street from the girl scout store, and I'm sure there's some reason I need to go there (oh, yes, to sign up to rent a COOKIE Costume for our booth sale March 8!!!)

By the way, Girl Scout cookies will be here Wednesday so if anyone is interested, please know. I have to pay for them March 10th and we are selling some at All Con, but that's not until March 13th. I would really like to be able to pay for them on time so I will be selling them as fast as I can. They freeze well (at least I have told my husband this because he doesn't fully know how many he is buying yet). This year we made it almost all year with cookies--used the last box of Thin Mints up about 2 weeks ago. So I am ready for more! I don't buy any other cookies year round except for a few Oreos now and then--we just eat Girl Scout cookies all year. So that's why I don't have to learn to make desserts!

Pleasant Valley Mom, mired in Destination Imagination and other obnoxious projects