From the desk of Robot Queen/Safety Star

My weekend was full of robot competition in Manchester, and now I have a serious cold and sore throat combo that isn't making me happy. In other words, I'm in the depths of despair.

One hilarious thing that happened at the robot competition is that one of the priorities for this year's competition was safety, so people ran around telling everyone to wear safety goggles and tape the cords to the ground and everything. We had gotten a few safety citations for random things, so my team was kind of disdainful toward the safety officials. At one point, we were working on our robot's arm and the hook was out in the aisle. I thought it would make my teammates laugh if I went totally overboard and made a big sign to put on the hook. On the sign, I wrote, "WATCH YOUR FACE!" My teammates did laugh, and shortly thereafter, a safety official came up, saw the sign, and asked who created the sign. I fessed up, prompting the safety official to award me a SAFETY STAR OF THE DAY nomination! Hohoo! This was wholly unexpected! I got a goodie bag and my picture was taken and put up on a poster and everything. The picture can be found here, and keep in mind that I spent the whole weekend sleep-deprived and indoors and frankly, I look like death warmed over. And I'm wearing safety goggles on my head. I wanted to wear them in the picture, but the photographer said there would be too much of a glare.

Also, look in Boston Magazine in the coming months for an article about our team. We were followed by a journalist who turned out to be totally hilarious. Apparently, most of his stories have either been about losing teams or middle schoolers.

Oh, also, we lost most of our matches and got knocked over and our robot is not as great as we had originally thought. 'Tis a shame!