I am writing this as allergy and flu season is upon us, leaving everyone a little sick. We have block schedule this week, and now I have to listen to all of them talk about their periods at the same time… At least I have my headphones.

I went to state journalism and to be honest, I had a blast. The girls put me up front with Digmann. Thank God. I looked to the back seat about an hour into the trip and they were all passed out and leaning on each other.

Once everyone was awake, we realized that the Flex didn’t have an aux cord port, so we had to listen to country music and static the WHOLE way there. Digmann didn’t like it, but I didn’t mind.

Lunch was fun. We stopped in Valentine and ate at Pizza Hut. Digmann ate a “Genetically Modified Chicken” while Safyre ate a whole pizza to herself. Autumn got the hottest wings on the menu, and when they were served, the heat burnt our noses. She ate them though, and I was impressed.

While we were in the restaurant, our waitress explained that they had a new cook and he kept messing up orders, so by the time we left, we had a couple extra meals for free. No one complained.

The rest of the drive to Norfolk was filled with arguments on whether Norfolk was pronounced “Nor-Fork” or “Nor-folk”. By the end of the trip, we were convinced that it’s “Nor-fork” but I had heard both pronunciations on the radio.

I had never been to a Hibachi grill before until we went to one for dinner in Norfolk. We sat at the grill with a couple that we assumed was on their first date, because they were super awkward and barely made eye contact with each other.

Our chef seemed kind of strange. He asked about Aubrie’s arm and made a lot of weird jokes that weren’t funny. He even called me Justin Bieber, what the heck. Our chef threw “a whole omelet” down Autumn’s shirt when he tried to have us catch egg in our mouths. He made good food though.

After dinner we went down to the hot tub. There was a group of guys that thought they were way better looking than they actually were. They made this clear when they kept trying to impress all the girls and splash them from the pool. I don’t think they realised that the girls were wayyyyyy out of their leagues.

At the competition the next morning, there were very interesting people present. One teacher called the state competition a “nerd fest” and was proven to be true as there were a lot of weird kids. One guy wore a compression shirt style tank top with a scarf. A girl was being a snob to the advisor in the room when she didn’t know how to change her story to a PDF. Another guy in my competition didn’t know what class his school was in and only wrote about a page in an hour and fifteen minutes and spent the first thirty minutes just staring at his computer screen.

At the awards ceremony, one school became very obnoxious. Every time a student from their school got an award, they yelled “LETS GO” very loudly. Every. Single. Time. I then recognised them as the group of annoying kids at the pool last night. We hate them now.

We had a successful year at state. Autumn and Aubrie both got 6th in their events and Safyre won her event. Sadly, Sharia and I didn’t place, so we decided to take a picture of non-medalists, hence the picture above.

The drive home was a lot more fun than the drive there. Everyone talked the whole way and we had a group discussion that lasted about the whole drive. All in all, it was a great trip.