S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G B-E-E

Tonight, I'm taking part in a spelling bee.

No, I'm not 12 years old. I'm actually three years more than double that. (Look! She can spell AND do math! Amazing!) The spelling bee is actually an annual fund-raiser for our local scholarship foundation. It's a team (each one is made up of three people) event, and each team has a spokesperson. Luckily (because more than almost anything else, I hate speaking in front of a large group of people), I have never had to be that person.

-----Taking a break to apologize-----

In case you haven't noticed, I use waaaaay too liberal with my parentheses. I promise, I'm making a conscious effort to work on that. ;o)

-----Ok, apology break officially over-----

Anyway, back to the spelling bee. I have to tell you guys that I am a pretty darn good speller. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I have actually WON three spelling bees. One in first grade (for which I was awarded a cool little trophy), one in 6th grade (which actually got me to the regional spelling bee... yikes!), and one in 11th grade (which actually made me the most proud because it was a winter carnival event, and I beat out 12th graders! Go me!)

However, despite the fact that I've managed to win a couple of these things, when it comes to really hard words, I'm really not that great a speller. Therefore, we never win. In fact, we usually lose in horrible ways (ie. One year, we went out in the very first "easy word" round. Another year, my teammate had the word written correctly on his little piece of paper, but misread his OWN HANDWRITING, and out we went). Unfortunately, we are the library team, so we're always expected to do much better than we end up doing. We are the spelling bee disappointments.

This year, though... we have hope. We have drive. And we have awesome matching t-shirts. Hehe... wish us luck. =)