Super KIA saves the day / What a day!!!
Originally published at Walking on Christopher's Street. You can comment here or there.
So after being sick for a couple of days with a fever as high as 102 and sleeping most of the day on Friday, it really wasn’t any surprise that I woke up at 4:30am on Saturday morning drenched in sweat as the fever finally broke. I finally lost that whole light headed feeling and was pretty much back to normal, with a slight congestion. I didn’t really go back to sleep from then as I had to get up at 7am anyway and begin my day.
I had previously agreed to judge a high school speech tournament for my friend Alison who coaches one of teams. Since I competed in HS Speech back in Illinois, I was pretty excited to do this. Also, since it was about a hour away, the other judge needed a ride, and it was perfect as Khary lived literally on the way. After picking him up we make our way to Forest Lake.
About 10 or so miles away, the pickup truck about 300 yards in front of us tries to change lanes and begins to swerve and quickly looses control and goes off the road. I try to slow down and the black ice causes my car to fish-tale and we end up going off the road, down a steep incline and stop about 20 feet from the road, in tall wet grass with about 5 inches of fresh snow on the ground - Facing the wrong direction.
I get out and don’t find any obvious damage, no blown tires, nothing seems out of the ordinary. We begin to try to get out of the ditch, going back up the way we came down does not seem to work as the incline and snow make it impossible to move up the hill. Khary notices that down the way a bit the incline reduces and I manage to turn the Kia around and start driving sideways up the hill to the road and eventually make it to the top and pop up on the shoulder pretty easily. I was also mindful of the oncoming traffic and tried to make sure there would be enough time for them to see a car suddenly appearing on the shoulder. Even though there was a good 500 yards to the nearest car, giving plenty of time to react and change lanes if necessary, a large pickup zipped by and laid on his horn in the outside lane, simply to be a jackass.
After all this excitement, I noted the coffee hadn’t even spilled and we continued on to Forest Lake High School and made it there on time. “Super KIA saves the day”
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It is been a number of years since I competed in H.S. speech, but it really is the same type of kid that I was that does Speech. Although I have never judged at a competition, I was familiar enough (and with a crash course from Allison) I was ready to Judge. The first category I was assigned was Extemporaneous, in which the contestants draw a topic and have 30 minutes to prepare a 7 minute speech that must include an opening summary, three points and a closing. A challenging event indeed. The topics were all of current events so mainly political in nature involving Bush, Obama or Palin.
I didn’t have an event the second round and the third round event for me to judge was Drama, which is pretty self explanatory. After three rounds they post finals where an additional round is used to determine the winner. Usually ‘extra judges’ aren’t selected for these, but I guess I am special as I got selected to judge Prose, which is what I competed in High School. I was hoping Khary and I didn’t get selected to judge because of my tight schedule in the evening, but oh well. Since this was the event I was in and it was finals i was excited to see and experience, and the hardest to Judge, because they were the best of the best.
It was a fun experience; I hope to get to do it again.
Judging in finals however presented a tighting on my time of getting back to the cities, dropping Khary off, picking up tickets downtown and making it to my 5:30 dinner reservations. Through the magic of my “Super KIA” I made it downtown, found a meter space to quick run into the orchestra box office and then on the road to Richfield for dinner, arriving precisely at 5:30.