JETS/TEAMS

It was too good not to write about it.
At about 7:00am, my mother decided that she wanted me to slowly eat the sandwich that she had made. This would sound normal, but this is a Chinese mother who almost never makes breakfast because there is no need. It was two slightly toasted pieces of white bread with honey ham and cheese inside. Very plain, but I wouldn't get picky over it. In addition, she actually made hot chocolate. I was pleasantly surprised, and late to get into the car at about 7:41am, but first following my father out of the garage.
Driving downtown was slightly nerve racking because it was blatantly obvious that we were not going to arrive at the Challenger Learning Center by 8:00am. My father accidentally missed a street, and since it was one-way and at one point he was going the wrong way until I said "You're going to the wrong way," and he say a car coming the correct way, so he had to back into a driveway to a parking lot (the wrong way) and assumed the correct way eventually.
I pretty much ran into the building, where I found an assortment of Chiles upperclassmen, including Clara and Carolyn. All of us stood around the lobby sort of area, and someone I didn't know took pictures of Chiles Team A (Clara, Carolyn, Kavita, Won, Gaku, Ann, Roland, Patrick) and Chiles Team B (Brandon, Jerrod, Jinoo, Tom, Peter, Calvin, Nelson, Epsieanniishct).
Each team was given four rectangular tables, which were placed in squares. Nelson and Calvin removed the plastic covering for Part I, and distributed the eight scenarios. Each scenario began with a few paragraphs, and gave a multiple choice question that we calculated for the answers. A couple paragraphs were added, and another question was given. This was basically the format for each scenario, which included things like baseballs, soccer, the Beijing Olympics, architecture, and multi-channel communication. Brandon stole my scenario after a while because his was pretty much impossible. I felt really special for solving a problem or two on Jerrod's, and before we knew it, we had guessed "C" for all the problems we hadn't finished, and submitted our answers.
Most of us had hot dogs for lunch, a bag of chips, and some soda. We ate in the planetarium, where I accidentally spilled my soda... The water bottle in my bag really helped. The show was about the possibility of discovering an earth-like planet in space, and the simplified explanation about how they would do this.
We sat back down to do Part II, in which four of the eight scenarios had "extensions." This provided more paragraphs to read, and a few free response questions. I received the extension for Scenario 8, the multi-channel communication one. Brandon tried reading it too, and we basically realized how screwed we were about it. He left early for something band and tuba-related. Jinoo and Jerrod took turns in futile attempts to understand the concept better than me. Nelson and Calvin finished their scenario early, so they tried to make some sense of the concept too. Peter ended up "fluffing it up" by using our words to gather some English into a short paragraph. Nelson sketched an extremely rough graph of a cosine wave, which I quickly reminded him was a sine wave, so he had to draw another one. And another one. I really have a headache from reading about analog systems and bandwidth.
Later, Gaku said he also had to read about Scenario 8, and he didn't have a clue what was going on.
After standing near the entrance to the planetarium for a short time frame, we walked to the awards ceremony, which was basically the lobby with a table and t-shirts and trophies on it a few feet away. Soon, it was announced that 2nd place varsity went to Chiles Team B ("Chile's", according to the labeling of our tables). Oh we were happy. After that, it was announced that Chiles Team A got 1st place, so you can imagine the relief of those seniors. The t-shirts were all large, some of our certificates said things like "Jarrod" and "Jang," but it was all good. We were all surprised, and "Coach Johnson" was proud of us.
And we lived happily ever after.