Distraction

It seems that every time I think of writing a post, I get distracted. I suppose that's to be expected with me. I have so much going on lately, I think I'm going totally crazy. Always first in my mind, and scariest, is my impending surgery. It's similar to the one I had a little less than two years ago, but... well worse. In many ways. First and foremost is that I will be having it here in Alabama. So while I recover I will not be home, surrounded by friends and family. Yes, I have great friends here and they have already told me they're going to help out tons. But it's not the same as being in my own house, with my own family. I hate being weak, and now I'm going to be relying on other people heavily for probably two months at least. But more on that later.

In January through March I was occupied with helping mentor the local FIRST Robotics team (usfirst.org if you don't know). Their season ended with an amazing second-place victory at the Smokey Mountain Regional in addition to the Graciousness & Professionalism award! Going to competition with those great kids was awesome and all sorts of fun, but then it was over and I needed something else to occupy myself. This is where I'm pretty sure I lost my mind.

For those of you not in the know, FIRST has programs for all school age levels, the robotics competition is the high school level. I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that since there wasn't a team for the middle school level here, that *I* would start one! Anyway, the middle school level of FIRST is called LEGO League (LL). Yes, LEGOs! And robots! All in one awesome program to get middle school kids interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields! I mean seriously, how could it get any more awesome than robotic LEGOs?!

After the glow of the glorious new idea faded I realized I had NO idea how to start a new team! I searched the website and started reaching out to anybody I knew in my company that had anything to do with FIRST programs. I also contacted the middle school (which I had visited for e-week) and arranged to come and speak to some students about LL to see if there was even anybody interested. For my activities with e-week, one of the folks in my company who handles money for this kind of outreach program, I got a nice Amazon gift card. With that I got my own LEGO Mindstorms kit, which is the robot set that LL uses. I also started poking my coworkers to see if any were interested in helping me make this thing happen.

Well, the day of my presentation arrived faster than I expected (procrastination doesn't end with school!) and I jumped in head first with no plan in mind. I had followed the instructions that came with the kit to make a simple robot that moved around and shot little plastic balls (insert giggle about saying "balls" here). So I arrived at the school with my little robot, some sheets of info copied from the website, and my plucky personality! I'm pretty sure I made a total fool out of myself in the first class period. But if there's anything I got from my mom's family is stubbornness in the face of embarrassment! So I kept at it and somehow bumbled through the rest of the classes that day. The teachers at least thought it was great.

A couple weeks later I went back to the school, intending to speak to another couple classes, but the 8th grade science teacher had bigger ideas. He put me in the library, and on the spur of the moment had all of the science classes come in for me to speak to, at one time! So, over the course of the school day, I spoke to, by myself, the entire school! This time I embraced my inner dork and just went with it. It seemed to work fairly well, I even got some laughs! I handed out some fliers for a parent meeting about LL in a couple weeks. I figured maybe one or two kids would show up, but I wasn't really expecting much.

Fast forward to the parent meeting. Again, I didn't really have a plan except to talk about what LL was and try to answer any questions that came up. I figured that if there were enough kids interested I could figure something out before the season started in August. Well, more people showed up than I expected, but I muddled along. In my infinite wisdom, I told people to contact me, instead of having them give me their info, but hindsight is 20/20. At any rate, I had enough interest to start seriously looking into funding.

I had a few leads so I started to do what I hate most in the world: make phone calls. Ok, maybe I didn't start with phone calls... I'm absolutely terrified of making phone calls. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I've always been this way. Anywho, I sent some e-mails and instant messages. The high school team had gone to an event hosted by my company's client and gotten a contact in their outreach program. After several weeks of agonizing messaging back and forth with him (heaven forbid I tried calling him *sheesh*) he sent me instructions on registering and ordering supplies and sending him the bill. I was totally ecstatic!

Then my contact with my company got back with me. She said that my company had put funds aside in their grant to FIRST for my team and that I could go ahead and use that to register and order the supplies. I was like this is awesome! And then I realized that I had already ordered all that through the other company! Well this is an interesting dilemma! So I finally made a phone call. It was slightly easier since I had spoken to this person before, but not much. After a lovely conversation we figured out a solution. I could use the grant money to get the team a special laptop/tablet made by LEGO for LL, and another account for additional stuff like travel costs, t-shirts for the team, etc, for "encouraging employee participation."

I was super excited! I not only got my new LL team completely funded, but I also got a nice grant for the high school team! Then I got my official e-mail stating all the above from my contact. Maybe I read it wrong, but it sure seemed like I get to be a lab rat, not that it's really a bad thing in this case, she wants me to test out the laptop and report back on whether I think it's a good idea to get it for other teams. And she wants me to talk to the "council" about how I got the client involved (um... they already were?). Oh, and I possibly somehow volunteered to coordinate/host a LL event next year! And possibly help create a LL team start-up kit to help other people start LL teams in their areas. What have I gotten myself into?!