It suffices to say, I told God my plans.
Incidentally, if you're going to believe in a creator, one should always believe in a creator that has a sense of humor. Otherwise, why would they saddle their creations with something like that.
Thursday morning, Catie was at the doctor's for her shoulder. About three weeks earlier, she thought she pulled a muscle or something in her shoulder. It meant she couldn't do the full extension up on a couple of steps at the Christmas show, and she had her arm in a sling otherwise. We couldn't get a handle on what was wrong and we didn't get a good answer the first time at the hospital. So Thursday was tests to see if it was just a muscle pull or a full tear or something weirder. We didn't get an answer this time, just advising to keep it in the sling and work it back up slowly.
Thursday night, we had her confirmation. This was delayed a full year, and the diocese has had to move to weeknights to cover the backlog of the three past years running behind. This was an important thing for Catie and my wife's side of the family, but it was also important for me because I got to see Catie take something seriously from beginning to end. I've seen her apply herself for this in a way I hadn't before, and I've seen her take that right into her studies this year and into quiz bowl. She's growing up and taking charge of the things she wants out of life.
And immediately after this, as we had a tray of sandwiches, she said she had a sore throat.
Friday morning, she took the test and was positive. It was at this point it all fell down.
She didn't go to school, and she was obviously out for the tournament on Saturday. While I hadn't been near her more than a minute on Thursday, I was not going to be able to take the team to Pitt, and the coach called off the team by 2 Friday. Of course I still had to give Pitt the buzzer and prizes so I rolled out Saturday morning, after a negative test, masked up, and took the buzzer and books from my office to the Cathedral of Learning and headed right back home.
Like I said, I told God my plans.
Monday night I was preparing to run the practice Tuesday afternoon, when I realized three things:
- I only had two players for practice.
- I didn't have my buzzer back from Pitt.
- Despite having tested clean all through this, there's no way the coach would let me run a practice Tuesday.
And so this week’s plans turned to laughter.
Catie is fine at this point, she spent four days at that exact level of miserable that you would worry if she stopped telling you how bad she felt, but because she was telling you, her body was fighting it like a champ. I spent most of that time worrying a little, but doing my day job in the office on the other side of the house.
In addition to stating my plans here, I saw a lot of signs I should have expected things to blow up. I mean, I had the tone of hubris about myself last week. As we come out of this triumphalism is unsatisfactory when nothing bad happens, and gutting when something happens. And after I had submitted the article last week, I started writing the next one, something I never do. I had half a page of draft material written, assuming it was going to require just filling in details. That's part of why I was so confident about changing schedule last week. I was working ahead.
Of course, I wasn't the only one doing this last week. Tuesday morning I was able to print a schedule for the tournament with the teams in place. I should have just prepared for chaos at that moment. I am not by nature superstitious, but that is a cursed document. I never put the team names in the schedule until after 8am Saturday, to do otherwise is like running out in a thunderstorm wearing copper underwear shouting "all gods are bastards!" You're asking for unusual events to happen, and specifically, for them to happen to you. And well, they got unusual events, but it only meant they went from a logistically infeasible 13 teams to a more than manageable 12.
So what would I have been writing in this space if we had gone to the tournament?
The Saturday night task would have been to write up the morning announcement for Monday for the school. This is one of those things that a coach should do to encourage awareness of the team, but in our case it would have been especially good to do because no matter how we played on Saturday, the team did it with an open chair. That means they always have the potential for improvement, and having a notice during the morning announcements could bring someone who believes they can contribute to the next practice.
Sunday and Monday would have been spent reviewing the scoresheet and sizing up where the holes in the team are. I know they exist from the first four practices, but with a sample of that size, I don't trust I know all of the holes. And once I have the holes enumerated, sized, and sorted, I can start work on finding the articles and study guides they need. I would extend out the flashcards, and put the right articles to read before the team, and give the actual coach guidance on what kinds of articles videos and podcasts they can read/watch/listen to. And if this seems familiar, it’s because it goes back to the things we had here before.
What I was able to do was set up a folder in google docs. It's short on information yet, but I put a document showing which packets we used in each practice, and a document showing the lessons taught in each practice. I then pulled out an old document I had shared with Pitt and CMU about podcasts and youtube videos I had listened to for quiz bowl purposes, and after I stripped out all the ones that weren't appropriate for the high school distribution, I still had enough to keep interested minds busy for a couple weeks.
The last thing I did was send the coach a link to the online buzzer systems. I hadn't planned to need them until Christmas break, but the online buzzers would have helped us this week to run practice, even if we weren't in the same place. But before it can be used in practice, we have to ensure it can be used with the school's computers, and that's something I can't do from here. That I didn’t introduce it in the first four practices is a failure on my part, I have included it in the book to come; but because I had a physical machine, which is more impressive for recruiting, I hadn't gotten to it yet.
The last thing I did Friday night was go through one book which I had had for years but never completed extracting questions from. An Encyclopedia of Naval History covers mostly a British Navy perspective, but gives a nice cross-section of other navies through other wars. I had meant to go through this years ago, but it had languished on the bookshelf until now, and with the stack of things given as prizes from my aunt's house somewhat thin on military history, I figured it was time for this one to go. I'll turn this into some questions for the team which will get stored on flashcards, and maybe it will help.