It seems I have been reduced to one blog post a month, so I better make this one good. Today was my round in the internal debating competition for selecting a school team for national debating competitions that are for the sixth form only, as most of them are. We started off well with a strong opening from me but then I totally misjudged the timing and ran on for a seven minute speech when I was making one of three minutes and so this spoiled the end a little. Nevertheless we were still in with a chance. Katy made her speech, but I think she piled on the facts and figures a little too much and this meant that she seemed a little rushed. The opposition by this point had established a strong case, directly addressing us, and despite the fact that we got a lot more audience questions than them we were still pretty even as it went into closing speeches. But I messed that bit up in general by again thinking I had longer than I actually had. Apparently debating won and we were very close, but overall my team did lose which shocked some others when told about it. I am disappointed that I will not be able to take part in the competition, but really I think in this case the other team was better so it was fair enough that we lost.

I am currently deciding whether or not to join the race for the Arbitration Committee this year. I am told by wikifriends that I stand a fair chance of being voted in (one, a former arbitrator, said that the worst outcome of it all would be being elected…) so it is worth doing as there is nothing to lose if I don’t succeed in gathering enough support to be appointed. I would like to do the job because I think I would be pretty good at it, simply put, and thus it is worth running for the position. It is something I could get into and get good at by being efficient with my time. The sucking of time that the job involves is of course the main reason against running, but I think that I could squash it in by reducing other activities. I think an important factor here is that I need to manage my time better to ensure that I can do all these things as I am sure that I can - the decision on whether to run or not rests on how well I can manage my time, and if I do post my candidate statement I will have decided that I can do it.

It was my seventeenth birthday on Saturday, and it has hit me how close I am to being eighteen, which concerns me somewhat. It was a pretty good day once I got back from work at twelve noon; along with my grandparents we went out for lunch and then opened some presents. Key presents are an exciting flash drive watch and Wikimedia and Wikipedia T-shirts. I also got a rather special box of crackers and various other things to eat, and surprisingly some clothes too, which is not usual for my birthdays. I also got a great deal of money which I added to my savings for building a computer, something which I am now aiming to do either at Christmas or over the half-term after that. Hopefully I won’t have an unreasonable amount of revision for the January exams because they are subjects I am not having problems with. So things are going pretty well in general, even if I rushed this post.