The Spelling bee?

It was good and not so good. Firstly I tied for first. There was a big crowd and so many good spellers they didn't have time to break the tie. I can't complain as my prize bar tab was still large enough to have a margaritea and a couple of beer.

The downside was that I had volunteered to write the live blog during the event. And while this seemed like a fun, carefree opportunity to express myself in a lighthearted newscaster style, it was actually a marathn of typing in the near dark while trying to listen and describe stuff. I was drenched in sweat by the end and hadn't even had time to order a beer or have a cigarette. I can't even remember the words I spelled, and I think I spelled more correctly (and more that I didn't know and had to guess correctly) than ever before. I was in a certified daze.

I posted a prelude. Then posted the first update after the first round. But suddenly at the end of the second round, before I posted, I mistyped (something like a back command or a close window) and lost the whole post except for a quick paragraph I typed up in word before the round actually ended. Oops.

The third round, as I said rather stressful from a spelling point of view, I typed a gigantic paragraph describing the goings on in quite good detail, though I think I repeated too many verbs. I mean, how many ways can you describe someone spelling a word correctly or missing it? I started running out of metaphors.

Now, keep in mind my computer had been running on battery power for about two hours at this point. But no worries, becasue I have a Dell and had swapped out my CD-Rom drive for a spare battery giving me a theoretical battery life of 6 hours or more (and I had made sure that they were both fully charged). Nonetheless, at this moment, as the bee came to an end, my computer inexplicably went into hibernation due to low battery power. When it woke up my browser window was closed and the whole third round text was gone. Since I was on autopilot while typing, I had no possible way to reconstruct what I had written.



This was very embarassing. And I felt great exerting all that effort only to have it disappear into the ether. Them's the break.


~A