Home Again

Home from Boulder

In the end Leland's OM team placed 22nd in the Division 1 Crazy Columns. The kids were disappointed after the awards ceremony last night. 22nd in the world doesn't sound very impressive if you don't know how big the world is.

In the Minneapolis airport on the way there airport officials kept paging "Jason Kozlowski." Every time they paged him the kids would ask me "Who's Jason Kozlowski?" At first I thought that they just thought it was a funny name, but when they kept asking I realized that they expected me to know Jason Kozlowski and tell them where he lived or whose cousin he was or who he was married to. It hadn't dawned on them that there were people in the Minneapolis airport that I wasn't acquainted with.

So 22nd in the world seems way far back to them. On the way home a lady in Minneapolis saw their shirts and told them that she was from Traverse City and how proud she was that they had gone to worlds. She made them feel a little better.

The scores are online at this link. The first place team was a second team from Shanghai; their structure held 1270 lbs. Our team lost some ground on the spontaneous problem. Anna tells me that they misunderstood the nature of the problem (they thought it was a "verbal" and it was really a "verbal hands-on"). I'm not surprised, since they been too excited to listen most of the trip.

Anna fell asleep on the way home from the airport. She told me she liked Boulder because "you could walk everywhere." I remember Shelagh and Liz being excited when they were that age to go to Washington DC and ride the subway. To go somewhere without your mom driving you opens up so many more options....