More Covid Cancellations. A farewell to Machines Behaving Badly.

 Roughly two weeks until the start of school.  Different areas of the country, even adjacent communities, are struggling to figure out what school should "be" this fall.  Some are going all virtual.  Some are hybrid.  Some, and this is the case in our community, are taking the plunge and going in person school five days a week.  It's a tough call.

I had predicted that football would be the bellwether.  If that gets the go-ahead then surely other activities with much less nose to nose contact would be good as well.  But....

With a changing situation and with guidelines from the State that can charitably be described as vague there is a fair amount of "making it up as they go".  And for now it appears there will be no non-district employees involved in whatever reduced extra curricular activities actually do occur.  This hits very hard at the middle school Voyagers program, so it seems likely that Machines Behaving Badly is done.  

So it appears that just short of the 20th year of chaotic pint sized combat robots....it's Game Over.  I had hoped to have a special Total Destruction Tournament at the end of this year's class.  But it is not to be.

Oh, one could try to run it in the Spring but to be honest things will by that point be different.  If they are better I'll have travel back on the menu.  If they are worse, then restrictions will be the same.  Or perhaps tighter.

And as to FIRST robotics at the High School, well, we've had to scrap the ambitious summer program that we had contemplated.  The move into the new STEM center is in limbo.  And if the strictures imposed at the middle school level are logically applied to the high school then our hard working, talented pool of community volunteers will be locked out.  Hardly an encouraging prospect.

Travel, robotics, giving various in person talks, attending the local tech school.  These were all major elements of my post retirement life.  Gone and no clear prospect of return.  So one tries to stay busy.  I've got assorted home improvement projects to take on.  These are fairly good time consumers due to my basic inefficiency at many such tasks.  On a recent trip to the Big Store o' Guy Stuff I spotted something that in any recent summer I'd have considered a real score.

The FIRST robots all have padded bumpers.  The specs are quite specific, they have to be made of foam pool noodles covered with durable fabric.  As the FIRST build season is in mid winter these can be difficult to find, so a late summer sale can be very helpful.  Well...

A dollar a piece.  And I bet the silly dolphin head would be thrown in to boot!  Sadly I ran my fingertips over the colorful hoard, thinking of a season that at this point seems unlikely to be.  And left empty handed.