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Who had just shouted "Hey hey hey!"? It's the White Rabbit there.
- Where are you rushing? - Sorry, Dodo, so much to be done.
In Wonderland you don't dare leave undone any affair,
And so I'm dashing back and forth, just like some scalded hare.
I lost ten feet of weight in twenty pounds of distance run.
- Vladimir Vyssotsky, "The White Rabbit's Song" (for a radio play based on Alice in Wonderland)
I have been feeling a lot like that poor rabbit recently. The Disney one, with his chatter, "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date," just doesn't convey my feelings well enough. I have two assignments due tomorrow, one in Topology and one in Socio, but I have finally finished them - and, in a surge of diligence, written almost half a Reach pack while at it. The things I do to procrastinate...
The reasons I am writing a Reach pack form the main story of this post. It is mid-January now, and , remember o snowbound Canadians, in some ways June is almost upon us. Evaluating my finances gave me a desperate need to raise more money for our Chicago trip. Lady Mollweide suggested that she had heard Reach pays for questions, so I promptly emailed them asking whether I can sell them some. They replied that they would pay $100 for 30 pages of acceptable questions (yes, they do have rules for what could go on a page) and I vowed that this weekend I will write a pack. A hundred bucks does not come along every day. Alas, my major(s) show through, and there are, be warned, quite a few math-terms questions. But if I wanted to raise even my own airfare, I would need to write at least five packs. Still...trying today, I found writing questions quite easy - until I took a closer look at the Who Am I? question guidelines. And shrieked. The reasons why I always hated those questions are right in the instructions to the first clue: "It should be deliberately vague. Even an expert in the field should not place it. However, it should be guessable."
"My pigment contains iron" (hemoglobin, a 40-pointer I got a few years ago)? "My people call me Suomi" (Finland, which my boys got last year on 40 points)? On the other hand, there is the archetype of those questions that follow the instuctions, "I am a region in the Northern Hemisphere." Serbia. The Sargasso Sea!
On Tuesday there was a school council meeting, and someone, at least, from our trivia team was due to talk and ask for money. I used a bit of the weekend to check the stats we had racked up in the November tournament and compare them to the NAQT statistics from last year's high school national championship tournament (HSNCT). I wrote this to Lady Mollweide:
I just checked (the school) B's statistics in the November tournament - and then the statistics of the top teams at the National tournament last year. I hoped to find something sweet. The results surprised even me. Here is roughly what I would like to say to the school council:
Lady Mollweide wrote back saying that she had to supervise a hockey game in Smiths Falls, so she could not be there; it was up to Oliver and me. Then, at the practice, it turned out Oliver could not make it; he had somehow assumed an entirely different date. So it was up to me. Lady Mollweide kindly printed a transparency of the cost breakdown as it had been in December, before I had gotten the exact entry fee from the NAQT organisers - and I, nerve-wracked, went to History of Math.
I have done public speaking before, many times, but not since at least grade twelve, if not grade eleven. Once I am up there speaking, I do not get stage fright; it becomes only the topic, myself, and whoever may ask me a question. But before a performance, I get the frightening jitters, although I know they will all pass when I am right there on that stage. Ensemble dancing never gave me nerves; all that mattered is the choreography, the music, and the people in whose pattern you must fit, as you cannot even see the audience past the floodlights and your concentration. Public speaking, though... Concolor and I had a discussion in the hall about it. He said that audience numbers matter, while to me, they did not. If I know what I am doing, I would rather it was more people watching me than less. Lady Mollweide said that last time she gave a talk before the school council, there were only fourteen or fifteen people there.
I dashed home after History of Math, completely forgetting that there was a Topology discussion group from 4 to 5:30. At home, I pulled out my email with the lovely praise song, and tried to print it out.
My printer does not work. And no one had told me before.
The council meeting was at 7:00. At 5:30, I packed my briefcase - no bag this time - and rode over to the university office lab, to print the email, as well as my Topology assignment, on the printer there.
There was a new email there, from Bedivere's father, who is head of school council. Keep a friendly crocodile in every swamp!
Last year, the school orchestra went to Italy over the March break, and to fundraise, in February they held a dinner at an Italian restaurant. I went, and although the dinner ran contrary to my hopes, it turned out well in other ways. I happened to be put at the table with the perfect cross-section of the school life: the principal, a teacher (Society Max's Career Studies teacher), a student (Bedivere), an alumna and volunteer (yours truly), two parents (the parents of Morgana, whom I have known since grade five, and who is now studying harp at McGill), and the head of school council, Bedivere's father. Thank goodness, over two weeks short of a year, he remembered me (Bedivere might have helped), enough to send me an email that I was third on the program, after a summary from the school co-presidents and a talk from someone at Carleton University, and so I will present at around 7:30-7:40.
"Thanks, that really eased my nerves quite a bit!" I wrote back.
My printouts done, I considered the transparency, and the fact that the office lacked transparency markers, despite its many other resources and its "Show Some Respect" sign (that was the title headline in the Dose rag back in August, and for a while Concolor and I used it as a joke prop to show when teasing got too far). So I headed to the school, to call on some old grandfather-claused rights.
A double spondaic knock on the math office door, and I heard the grinding roller wheels of the Dark Lord's chair inside. Already in his coat, he opened.
"May I borrow a transparency marker?" I asked innocently, as if it is perfectly normal, in the second week of the new year (has it only been two weeks of school? It feels like forever) for the math office's prodigal daughter and gypsy follower of a wandering star to knock at 6:20 on a Tuesday night, and expect transparency markers. "I know it is an odd request..."
The Dark Lord looked grim at the sight of me, but then I have already accepted this as the norm of things, and he went over to pull out a marker from the package on the filing cabinet for me, and returned to his office. Lady Runfar, on the other hand, said hi to my greeting. I explained that I was preparing for a school council meeting, as I laid out my transparency to write in the correct price of Nationals admission. She enquired how school was going, and I waxed eloquent about Sociolinguistics, and about how we are studying how geeks use intensifiers. 'Geeks don't use adjectives."
"Well," Lady Runfar laughed, "then I am not a geek."
"Now if you ever want to pass for one..." I laughed, "use fewer adjectives."
Then I started telling about how I am nervous and about how I am going to ask the school council for money. And an idea stuck me as I looked on the back of the man who, an old school joke had it, got the mysterious money for the Robotics kits being the head of a secret Asian triad with a monopoly on rice sales. He had always claimed he had a sponsor.
"Dark Lord," I asked, "what do you know about getting sponsors?"
"Well, first of all, you'll have to hit people who do trivia," he began.
And the ideas began to flow. Toys stores that sell trivial pursuit, Air Canada...
"How much money do you need?"
"About six thousand dollars. We will probably take four students..."
"Cargo hold. Of course, you should travel first class, but them, cargo hold. Stuff them in, package them well..."
I smiled. That was beginning to sound a little like the Dark Lord I used to know (I have never travelled first class in my life - yet). He kept on talking until I had to ask him to pause so I can start jotting his ideas down. Hotels, even though the hotel is pretty much a given. All kinds of food franchises, in case we can get free food vouchers and save some money that way.
He mentioned high tech, and I recalled that back when I was in grade nine, we had tried to get sponsorship money out of Corel and got a Suite package allegedly worth $400, but we barely managed to sell it for $90... "Sounds about right."
"Hit a bank. Bank of Montreal is good. Or, since you are the first Canadian team ever to do this, you can get at RBC through their "FIRST" campaign...What you should do is actually write a cover letter, but attach to it an ad design, so that you can show you have already done some of the thinking for them. Use Photoshop or whatever you use. Put a sort of layer of all the headlines you've received already."
"We've gotten one. The Centretown News."
"Didn't you get into the Citizen last spring?"
"That was the university team. A different team. That was a different 'we' than this we."
"Put it in. Coaching experience, after all."
"Well, we can put the Centretown News headline on top, since we had already gotten it..."
"Scan the newspapers, since photocopying does not look good at all...Use at least 25-lb paper. Feel this, this is 28-lb paper. Seventeen dollars for a package of 500 - you can't screw up that many times..."
I felt the invitation he proferred me. I realise now, after Society Max told me, that this must have been the invitation to his graphic arts' club's exhibition. The one that he had first invited me to, then when I asked him about it later, he had said, grim and bitter, "It is not happening," and I had withdrawn. It had happened today. He had lied to me. And I am currently wondering whether I should actually care. I mean, since I cared enough to type this, I obviously care, but I have the feeling that fate had interfered, and that presentation had not been worth my time.
At that moment though, I was thrilled at the sponsorship ideas, and fled downstairs to the library. Bedivere's father recognised me there.
The first presenter was a gentleman from Carleton University, who had developed a program to ease the students' tough transition from high school to university. I agree with most of what he said, although, apparently unlike 82% of students, I do not skip class at least once a week. Then the co-president's father spoke for the co-presidents, and then I needed to turn off the Carleton U gentleman's InFocus machine and turn on the overhead projector. Meanwhile, Bedivere's father briefly introduced me.
"Tourmaline Variety is here to speak to us about Reach for the Top. Tossup question," he said. "If I played Reach for the Top in 1966, does that make me an old geezer or a know-it-all?"
Everyone laughed, but I answered first. "It depends on how you are playing now."
"Top marks," he replied, laughing.
I began to speak, and forgot the actual sentences I had carefully written in my office. I may have hesitated here and there, retraced or retraced with correction or resturctured the sentences - nothing like transcribing conversations for a living (well, for an education and a jewelry box) to make you notice all the false starts that people make in everyday speech and think: "pound sign"; "single slash"; "double slash"; "triple slash" (CLAN data entry codes for the errors listed above). But I did all right; I knew the topic, and I handled the questions as smoothly as I could, when they came.
Then came the decision as to what to do about me. "I have spoken to the people in charge of the school fund," Bedivere's father began, "and the school fund is for "building up the school." So it seems to be a no-go. Any other ideas?"
"Well," a woman spoke up, "since it is such an honour, shouldn't the city pitch in some?"
The principal said that she has yet to speak to the superintendent concerning funds. The round table (by the way, there were far more than fifteen people there this time) seemed to be stumped for ideas. I played my trump card.
"Actually, if I may," I spoke up, "coincidentally just before I came here I was talking to the Dark Lord upstairs, and he made a great many useful sponsorship suggestions..." and then I core-dumped to the school council what the Dark Lord had core-dumped to me.
They seemed a great deal more relieved at so many ideas. A woman asked me, "Supposing you get sponsors, would the students be willing to, say, wear T-shirts with the sponsors' names on them? Is that allowed?"
"In my experience, the teams wear anything they like, and team shirts are the exception rather than the rule. So I would definitely approve of T-shirts and any and all other ways to get support."
I now see what I had said. "Within board policy, of course," the principal spoke up.
"Indeed, this is a school trip like any other, and as such all board rules will be followed." I fear I was almost too smooth.
They applauded me at the end. As I headed out, a woman whispered to me, "Do you have someone in charge of your fundraising?"
"Well," I said sheepishly, "it's kind of...me."
In the outer room of the library, a gentleman approached me. "You mentioned RBC. BMO would be very good too, since BMO is really big in Chicago right now. Write a letter right to their CEO."
Pleased with myself, I walked up to the math office and did the spondaic knock again. A janitor noticed me. "Do you need something in there? There is no one there."
"Thank you, that was all I needed to know," I replied.
As I walked home, I thought of whether I should spend the weekend writing the Reach pack or writing cover letters. I really began to feel like the White Rabbit. I can't do it alone!
But then I talked it over with Lady Mollweide, and she said I definitely should not do it alone; we should rally the students and their parents as fundraisers.
And as for what I wanted with the math office, I went to the school again on Wednesday, for a last math help, and to wheedle the "36 methods of mathematical proof" out of Lady Cauchy. After I did so, I made the double knock on the math office door. Lady Melpomene answered.
"Is the Dark Lord there?"
"No, I am not sure where he is."
"It doesn't matter. Tell him I love him."
I walked away, grinning like the cat that ate the canary, and Lady Cuachy noticed me. "What is it?"
"Oh, I might as well just tell all and sundry to pass on to the Dark Lord that I love him, because his suggestions about sponsors really bailed me out at the school council presentation. Tell him I love him."
- Where are you rushing? - Sorry, Dodo, so much to be done.
In Wonderland you don't dare leave undone any affair,
And so I'm dashing back and forth, just like some scalded hare.
I lost ten feet of weight in twenty pounds of distance run.
- Vladimir Vyssotsky, "The White Rabbit's Song" (for a radio play based on Alice in Wonderland)
I have been feeling a lot like that poor rabbit recently. The Disney one, with his chatter, "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date," just doesn't convey my feelings well enough. I have two assignments due tomorrow, one in Topology and one in Socio, but I have finally finished them - and, in a surge of diligence, written almost half a Reach pack while at it. The things I do to procrastinate...
The reasons I am writing a Reach pack form the main story of this post. It is mid-January now, and , remember o snowbound Canadians, in some ways June is almost upon us. Evaluating my finances gave me a desperate need to raise more money for our Chicago trip. Lady Mollweide suggested that she had heard Reach pays for questions, so I promptly emailed them asking whether I can sell them some. They replied that they would pay $100 for 30 pages of acceptable questions (yes, they do have rules for what could go on a page) and I vowed that this weekend I will write a pack. A hundred bucks does not come along every day. Alas, my major(s) show through, and there are, be warned, quite a few math-terms questions. But if I wanted to raise even my own airfare, I would need to write at least five packs. Still...trying today, I found writing questions quite easy - until I took a closer look at the Who Am I? question guidelines. And shrieked. The reasons why I always hated those questions are right in the instructions to the first clue: "It should be deliberately vague. Even an expert in the field should not place it. However, it should be guessable."
"My pigment contains iron" (hemoglobin, a 40-pointer I got a few years ago)? "My people call me Suomi" (Finland, which my boys got last year on 40 points)? On the other hand, there is the archetype of those questions that follow the instuctions, "I am a region in the Northern Hemisphere." Serbia. The Sargasso Sea!
On Tuesday there was a school council meeting, and someone, at least, from our trivia team was due to talk and ask for money. I used a bit of the weekend to check the stats we had racked up in the November tournament and compare them to the NAQT statistics from last year's high school national championship tournament (HSNCT). I wrote this to Lady Mollweide:
I just checked (the school) B's statistics in the November tournament - and then the statistics of the top teams at the National tournament last year. I hoped to find something sweet. The results surprised even me. Here is roughly what I would like to say to the school council:
(The School) has performed consistently very well at Reach for the Top for the last five years. Almost like clockwork, our team ends up among the top in the province; it gets so that the provincial tournament organisers and our coaches are on a first-name basis! This year in particular, we have an exceptionally talented team; almost all of them still juniors, with little prior experience, they made a big splash and upheld the (school) pride at the Reach for the Top Ontario provincials last year.
This year, though, they had to learn an entirely different format, incredibly popular in the U.S, yet completely new here. Diligent practice twice a week (compared to most clubs at this school only meeting once a week) paid off with a perfect ten smashing victories at the first ever Canadian tournament in this format. I knew I was coaching some of the best young Reach players I have ever met in six years at the top of this game. However, I did not expect the amazing talent they would show in the NAQT format, talent that impressed even the national organisers when they received our scores:
Although we did not score as many points in ten games as last year's national championship team, we got higher than the team that came in second!
Our top scorer, Cuchulain, actually averaged more points in a game this tournament than last year's top individual at the championship!
Both our other top scorers, Oliver and junior Kilhuch, received scores that would put them among the top 50 individuals in last year's national championship, competing with nearly 500 of the best players in the United States.
All of this is enough to make me feel that our team can handle the American questions. The statistics speak for themselves. If we had to pick a trivia team to represent Canada for the first time at the top American high school tournament, (the school) is a choice we will not regret.
And we are not making this up. We've got some amazing boys playing with our buzzers, you and I. Sounds good? I can also do the breakdown of what that would cost.
I think the presentation could go: who we are and what we did, quick cost estimate, than this happy praise song of mine to be the last thing the school council remembers.
Please tell me before Tuesday morning whether I should show up,
I will see you Tuesday lunch
Tourmaline
Lady Mollweide wrote back saying that she had to supervise a hockey game in Smiths Falls, so she could not be there; it was up to Oliver and me. Then, at the practice, it turned out Oliver could not make it; he had somehow assumed an entirely different date. So it was up to me. Lady Mollweide kindly printed a transparency of the cost breakdown as it had been in December, before I had gotten the exact entry fee from the NAQT organisers - and I, nerve-wracked, went to History of Math.
I have done public speaking before, many times, but not since at least grade twelve, if not grade eleven. Once I am up there speaking, I do not get stage fright; it becomes only the topic, myself, and whoever may ask me a question. But before a performance, I get the frightening jitters, although I know they will all pass when I am right there on that stage. Ensemble dancing never gave me nerves; all that mattered is the choreography, the music, and the people in whose pattern you must fit, as you cannot even see the audience past the floodlights and your concentration. Public speaking, though... Concolor and I had a discussion in the hall about it. He said that audience numbers matter, while to me, they did not. If I know what I am doing, I would rather it was more people watching me than less. Lady Mollweide said that last time she gave a talk before the school council, there were only fourteen or fifteen people there.
I dashed home after History of Math, completely forgetting that there was a Topology discussion group from 4 to 5:30. At home, I pulled out my email with the lovely praise song, and tried to print it out.
My printer does not work. And no one had told me before.
The council meeting was at 7:00. At 5:30, I packed my briefcase - no bag this time - and rode over to the university office lab, to print the email, as well as my Topology assignment, on the printer there.
There was a new email there, from Bedivere's father, who is head of school council. Keep a friendly crocodile in every swamp!
Last year, the school orchestra went to Italy over the March break, and to fundraise, in February they held a dinner at an Italian restaurant. I went, and although the dinner ran contrary to my hopes, it turned out well in other ways. I happened to be put at the table with the perfect cross-section of the school life: the principal, a teacher (Society Max's Career Studies teacher), a student (Bedivere), an alumna and volunteer (yours truly), two parents (the parents of Morgana, whom I have known since grade five, and who is now studying harp at McGill), and the head of school council, Bedivere's father. Thank goodness, over two weeks short of a year, he remembered me (Bedivere might have helped), enough to send me an email that I was third on the program, after a summary from the school co-presidents and a talk from someone at Carleton University, and so I will present at around 7:30-7:40.
"Thanks, that really eased my nerves quite a bit!" I wrote back.
My printouts done, I considered the transparency, and the fact that the office lacked transparency markers, despite its many other resources and its "Show Some Respect" sign (that was the title headline in the Dose rag back in August, and for a while Concolor and I used it as a joke prop to show when teasing got too far). So I headed to the school, to call on some old grandfather-claused rights.
A double spondaic knock on the math office door, and I heard the grinding roller wheels of the Dark Lord's chair inside. Already in his coat, he opened.
"May I borrow a transparency marker?" I asked innocently, as if it is perfectly normal, in the second week of the new year (has it only been two weeks of school? It feels like forever) for the math office's prodigal daughter and gypsy follower of a wandering star to knock at 6:20 on a Tuesday night, and expect transparency markers. "I know it is an odd request..."
The Dark Lord looked grim at the sight of me, but then I have already accepted this as the norm of things, and he went over to pull out a marker from the package on the filing cabinet for me, and returned to his office. Lady Runfar, on the other hand, said hi to my greeting. I explained that I was preparing for a school council meeting, as I laid out my transparency to write in the correct price of Nationals admission. She enquired how school was going, and I waxed eloquent about Sociolinguistics, and about how we are studying how geeks use intensifiers. 'Geeks don't use adjectives."
"Well," Lady Runfar laughed, "then I am not a geek."
"Now if you ever want to pass for one..." I laughed, "use fewer adjectives."
Then I started telling about how I am nervous and about how I am going to ask the school council for money. And an idea stuck me as I looked on the back of the man who, an old school joke had it, got the mysterious money for the Robotics kits being the head of a secret Asian triad with a monopoly on rice sales. He had always claimed he had a sponsor.
"Dark Lord," I asked, "what do you know about getting sponsors?"
"Well, first of all, you'll have to hit people who do trivia," he began.
And the ideas began to flow. Toys stores that sell trivial pursuit, Air Canada...
"How much money do you need?"
"About six thousand dollars. We will probably take four students..."
"Cargo hold. Of course, you should travel first class, but them, cargo hold. Stuff them in, package them well..."
I smiled. That was beginning to sound a little like the Dark Lord I used to know (I have never travelled first class in my life - yet). He kept on talking until I had to ask him to pause so I can start jotting his ideas down. Hotels, even though the hotel is pretty much a given. All kinds of food franchises, in case we can get free food vouchers and save some money that way.
He mentioned high tech, and I recalled that back when I was in grade nine, we had tried to get sponsorship money out of Corel and got a Suite package allegedly worth $400, but we barely managed to sell it for $90... "Sounds about right."
"Hit a bank. Bank of Montreal is good. Or, since you are the first Canadian team ever to do this, you can get at RBC through their "FIRST" campaign...What you should do is actually write a cover letter, but attach to it an ad design, so that you can show you have already done some of the thinking for them. Use Photoshop or whatever you use. Put a sort of layer of all the headlines you've received already."
"We've gotten one. The Centretown News."
"Didn't you get into the Citizen last spring?"
"That was the university team. A different team. That was a different 'we' than this we."
"Put it in. Coaching experience, after all."
"Well, we can put the Centretown News headline on top, since we had already gotten it..."
"Scan the newspapers, since photocopying does not look good at all...Use at least 25-lb paper. Feel this, this is 28-lb paper. Seventeen dollars for a package of 500 - you can't screw up that many times..."
I felt the invitation he proferred me. I realise now, after Society Max told me, that this must have been the invitation to his graphic arts' club's exhibition. The one that he had first invited me to, then when I asked him about it later, he had said, grim and bitter, "It is not happening," and I had withdrawn. It had happened today. He had lied to me. And I am currently wondering whether I should actually care. I mean, since I cared enough to type this, I obviously care, but I have the feeling that fate had interfered, and that presentation had not been worth my time.
At that moment though, I was thrilled at the sponsorship ideas, and fled downstairs to the library. Bedivere's father recognised me there.
The first presenter was a gentleman from Carleton University, who had developed a program to ease the students' tough transition from high school to university. I agree with most of what he said, although, apparently unlike 82% of students, I do not skip class at least once a week. Then the co-president's father spoke for the co-presidents, and then I needed to turn off the Carleton U gentleman's InFocus machine and turn on the overhead projector. Meanwhile, Bedivere's father briefly introduced me.
"Tourmaline Variety is here to speak to us about Reach for the Top. Tossup question," he said. "If I played Reach for the Top in 1966, does that make me an old geezer or a know-it-all?"
Everyone laughed, but I answered first. "It depends on how you are playing now."
"Top marks," he replied, laughing.
I began to speak, and forgot the actual sentences I had carefully written in my office. I may have hesitated here and there, retraced or retraced with correction or resturctured the sentences - nothing like transcribing conversations for a living (well, for an education and a jewelry box) to make you notice all the false starts that people make in everyday speech and think: "pound sign"; "single slash"; "double slash"; "triple slash" (CLAN data entry codes for the errors listed above). But I did all right; I knew the topic, and I handled the questions as smoothly as I could, when they came.
Then came the decision as to what to do about me. "I have spoken to the people in charge of the school fund," Bedivere's father began, "and the school fund is for "building up the school." So it seems to be a no-go. Any other ideas?"
"Well," a woman spoke up, "since it is such an honour, shouldn't the city pitch in some?"
The principal said that she has yet to speak to the superintendent concerning funds. The round table (by the way, there were far more than fifteen people there this time) seemed to be stumped for ideas. I played my trump card.
"Actually, if I may," I spoke up, "coincidentally just before I came here I was talking to the Dark Lord upstairs, and he made a great many useful sponsorship suggestions..." and then I core-dumped to the school council what the Dark Lord had core-dumped to me.
They seemed a great deal more relieved at so many ideas. A woman asked me, "Supposing you get sponsors, would the students be willing to, say, wear T-shirts with the sponsors' names on them? Is that allowed?"
"In my experience, the teams wear anything they like, and team shirts are the exception rather than the rule. So I would definitely approve of T-shirts and any and all other ways to get support."
I now see what I had said. "Within board policy, of course," the principal spoke up.
"Indeed, this is a school trip like any other, and as such all board rules will be followed." I fear I was almost too smooth.
They applauded me at the end. As I headed out, a woman whispered to me, "Do you have someone in charge of your fundraising?"
"Well," I said sheepishly, "it's kind of...me."
In the outer room of the library, a gentleman approached me. "You mentioned RBC. BMO would be very good too, since BMO is really big in Chicago right now. Write a letter right to their CEO."
Pleased with myself, I walked up to the math office and did the spondaic knock again. A janitor noticed me. "Do you need something in there? There is no one there."
"Thank you, that was all I needed to know," I replied.
As I walked home, I thought of whether I should spend the weekend writing the Reach pack or writing cover letters. I really began to feel like the White Rabbit. I can't do it alone!
But then I talked it over with Lady Mollweide, and she said I definitely should not do it alone; we should rally the students and their parents as fundraisers.
And as for what I wanted with the math office, I went to the school again on Wednesday, for a last math help, and to wheedle the "36 methods of mathematical proof" out of Lady Cauchy. After I did so, I made the double knock on the math office door. Lady Melpomene answered.
"Is the Dark Lord there?"
"No, I am not sure where he is."
"It doesn't matter. Tell him I love him."
I walked away, grinning like the cat that ate the canary, and Lady Cuachy noticed me. "What is it?"
"Oh, I might as well just tell all and sundry to pass on to the Dark Lord that I love him, because his suggestions about sponsors really bailed me out at the school council presentation. Tell him I love him."
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