January 22, 2005 - 2:56 p.m.

Extremes

I stayed up all night last night doing the radio based Trivia contest that goes on each semester at my alma mater. I assisted a team of alums and non-Williams folk based in DC, but I played from my house. Since I was here alone and hadn't managed to take a nap in the afternoon as I had hoped, I figured I would last a couple hours at best. Staying up late has never been one of my strengths. However, I stuck it out for the entire contest! I got sucked into the first super bonus, which teams are given four hours to complete, and spent the first half of the contest plugging away at indentifying the roughly 120 song clips on a Michael Jackson theme. Really, once you've made it to 4AM, it seems silly to not go the distance. By about 6AM, I was feeling exhaustion set in, but with the help of lots of Diet Coke and judicious applications of junk food (tortilla chips with Velveeta sauce and Hostess Ding Dongs, for the record), I made it.

In the end, our motley band appears to have won the contest, which was never our intent. The winning team gets to write and run the next semester's contest. Having no current students on the team hampers that process, since it becomes a challenge to make sure all the logistics are taken care of and being from out of town exacerbates that. On the other hand, we're a really fun, creative, geeky bunch, so we definitely have the potential to write a fantastic contest. There may be some uproar amongst the Triva die-hards about a remote team winning, but it's not really our fault. We weren't even trying to win, though we never actively tried to not win, either.

Anyway, since the contest ended, I have gotten about 3 hours of sleep. I don't feel sleepy now (in fact, I tried going back to sleep, but it didn't work), but aside from that, I don't feel much better than I did at 9AM. My neck is sore from cocking my head at a computer screen all night, my stomach is feeling distinctly wonky from the aforementioned soda and snack food, and my brain is just fried.

Now I get to hang out and wait for the blizzard to hit. Yep, they have stopped calling it a storm. They've also upped the expected sno totals to 20-30 inches in my area! That's a lot by just about anyone's standards. I am very glad that I went to the grocery store yesterday, have no obligations for the rest of the weekend, have some DVDs I haven't seen, and that the family is up at the lake house, which leaves an empty garage bay for me to park my car in.

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