Thursday, March 24, 2005

Not Jetstop, Jetsgo

Nats was incredible. I really enjoyed myself. Right from the start when people started rolling in on Thursday, it was cool to hear people from outside of province say that they'd never been to Alberta before and they were excited to be here for the first time. I'd never really thought of Alberta as somewhere that people from elsewhere in Canada would have those views of (particularly since a couple of them were from Atlantic Canada).

Friday, it was also surreal seeing all these people I associate with Nats milling about Ed North. At times the Tabs room was fairly stressful, but at the same time I enjoyed being in there with Greg, Kevin and Morag. I think things ran reasonably well. It was really good to see people that I hadn't seen in a while, as well as seeing lots of old school UADS types come out in support. The Adjudication Team (or A-Team) stuck around Ed until about 1:00 am on the Friday putting together panels, so we weren't able to make it out to the bar that night (getting lost and swinging by McDonald's probably didn't help either).

There were a few delays Saturday, but no real disasters. The banquet was a lot of fun. That's probably the best public speech final that I've ever seen (and I think I've seen some pretty good ones). While the police coming to get us to turn down the music was unfortunate, it was nevertheless good times, only enhanced by the presence of Alberta Beef. As well, given that I was crashing in the A-Team room for the duration of the tournament, it meant that I could imbibe.

Morag and I stayed up until about 4:00 am, and the entire A-Team slept in the next morning, luckily everyone else seemed to as well. The rounds I judged on Sunday were all good (as one would expect at Nats). I was planning on going home right after everything wrapped up on Sunday, but I was hungry so I wound up hitting Earls. Given it was already fairly late, and it's not everyday that you have a fair chunk of Cusid ready to party in your city, I wound up hitting Wooly Bully's afterwards. I'm really glad I went. The Kinesiology Games were wrapping up as well, so there were a bunch of drunk kinesiologists with a trophy of some sort. Rahool came in with the Nats trophy, and the bartender (thinking we were with the Kin Games types) kept sending us free shots. It was good times. Kat and Christy also seemed to enjoy the selection of music in the car there. At any rate, even though I didn't debate a round, the whole weekend reminded me why I enjoy the activity so much.

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