Amy and the Imagilympics

In the spirit of team building, motivation, and fun, Imagine Learning—my employer, my taskmaster, my secret lover—hosted Vision Conference 2008 complete with the Imagilympics. You guessed it: Imagine + Olympics = Imagilympics. And that wasn't the only questionable word-wrangling going on! The theme this year was "Faster Stronger Englishier." Also, someone asked me if prettify was a word. I said yes, and if you're wondering why, it's because you can add derivational suffixes to words to change the part of speech, and that's okay. I mean, you can change beauty to beautify. Plus, you know people say prettify all the time, and it fits quite comfortably within English phonotactic constraints. Anyway, some people tittered when I confidently declared prettify a word, and lest any of you think I have a sense of humor, I wanted to clarify my completely unfunny reasons for accepting such a strange wordification.

I've been waiting to blog about this exciting event because, though I brought my camera, I neglected to take a single picture of any of the exciting things I did all week. Of course, I knew that pictures would be coming from all of the people running around with cameras while I was busy having the best vision conference of my life. What I didn't realize was that any pictures of me would turn out more like evidence of the existence of the elusive Sasquatch Gordon.



Like you might be able to tell from the picture above, the six hours of speakers and presenters were a little much for me. Unfortunately, what I missed during my nap was the entire company catching someone else (much more important than me) taking a snooze too! The reason I was so tired was that I'd had so much fun spending time with buddies every night that week, from shopping, to dinner out, to video games! I really appreciate so many of you getting in touch with me and making sure I wasn't bored or alone. It was so good to see my awesome friends!

For the Imagilympics, we were divided into teams. I was the token female on Team Tahiti. We ended up being one of the "less enthusiastic" teams, especially compared to Mexico's mustaches and sombreros, France's scarves and baguettes, and Taiwan's ability to speak another language. Our prior planning consisted almost solely of wearing plastic leis. Our team was unremarkable in almost every way, which is my excuse for why Mexico and France had so much more photo coverage than we did. Either that, or the photographer has a secret crush on someone who just happened to spend more time with those teams.

We failed miserably at most of the activities, until it was time for the Integrity Challenge, which consisted of building a very tall tower out of a box of random stuff: paper, tape, straws, chewing gum, plastic cups, and the box itself. We beat the next highest score by three quarters of an inch, and took second place! The Integrity Challenge was probably the most fun of the events, and it was the only one in which we placed except for Human Foosball. Those of you who know me well realize that I have a serious sports deficiency when it comes to all games involving round flying objects. What I discovered during Human Foosball was that when I'm tethered to a sliding PVC pipe, my suck ratio decreases from 95% to 83%. My ridiculous face ratio, however, remains the same.



Team Tahiti took the silver medal in Human Foosball, and it ended up being tons of fun. Though certain moments were reminiscent of high school physical education classes, most of my coworkers behaved much better than sixteen-year-old boys.

After an evening barbeque and a good night's sleep, it was time for me to return to Provo. It was so hard for me to leave the old and new friends I'd so much enjoyed spending time with during that week!