Medicine. M-E-D-I-C-I-N-E. Medicine.

Myself, my fellow judges, and the top 3 finishers

This past Friday I had the good fortune of being able to judge the Lake Hood Elementary Spelling Bee, and it was a blast. I was one of three judges from GCI, including myself, Sharee Tserlentakis (a cube area mate...if that is even a remotely legit term), and Sue Lindquist (runs Call Centers and ITS for the company). In addition to us, there was a nice lady from Fed Ex whose name I cannot remember for the life of me, and the person announcing it was local TV personality (giant? who doesn't know her in Anchorage?) Jackie Purcell. It was an extremely good time, but I have to of course go into more detail than just that, because as per usual, ridiculous things happen in anything I do.

Of course, given that Sharee and I are similarly bizarre people, we decided we were going to pick our "horses." We each chose our top 3 finishers beforehand, our last place finisher, and an additional sleeper pick. How did we do at guessing random children's success at spelling words?

Terribly.

Apparently this is something that is not based off appearance whatsoever. We were good at picking one thing, and that was who was going down first (Sorry Billy Fischer, you were sitting in the first chair and you looked like a bad speller...yes I am going to hell). Our combined six picks spelled two words correctly. If we were betting on literal horses, we would be broke and living on the streets right now. However, thankfully we were just betting on children in a competition we were judging. But thankfully we had ethics mostly, although if any parent wanted to discuss bribes, we may have been open to it.

Additionally, myself and Sharee found it very interesting that Jackie Purcell got delicious Dasani water from the springs of Colorado, while us judges received Kirkland Signature generic water, from the taps of Lake Hood Elementary. What are we? Second class citizens? I can't wait 'til I'm a weatherperson so I can get my own choice bottle of water.

All the kids before the Spelling Bee started

Back to the competition. After it was all said and done, a 5th grader named Katalina Kioa won the Bee by spelling the word medicine correctly. She was confident and always asked for the definition, and those were the two main things that seperated her from the pack. Well...besides spelling every word correctly. I did find it pretty interesting that obsequious was a first round question, yet medicine was a final round question. Who decides that? Those words are not even close in difficulty!

Regardless, congratulations to Katalina. She gets to go on to the State competition in February, and I got myself a couple free coffees from Kaladi Brothers for sitting at an Elementary school for a couple hours having a blast. Seems like a fair trade to me.