Well, I tied for 20th, but my friend Elizabeth (#133) tied for 2nd place! She did really well. Anamika Veeramani, here for her 3rd time, won on stomuhr. Congratulations!

I correctly spelled my first word, kanban, in the Semifinals. Unfortunately, I missed my next word, icteritious, which means jaundiced. I tied for 20th place. My friend Elizabeth is still in the competition and will participate in the Championship finals on ABC tonight at 8pm Eastern. I was interviewed this afternoon by WCCO radio, and am being interviewed momentarily by KS95 again. Good luck to all the remaining spellers!

Radio!!

Just finished being interviewed by Greg and Melissa on KS95! It was fun, and they're good spellers too. Hopefully if you live in the MN area, you got to listen in, but if not they might put an audio clip up on their website in the next couple of days. Off to compete in the Semifinals!

Radio Interview

KS95 will be interviewing me tomorrow at 8:15 am Central Time. If you're able to tune in, I'd appreciate it! The interview will be fairly short- around 3 to 5 minutes.

AAAAAAAAAAAH!

I made the Semifinals!!!!!!! I can't believe it. We just got back from a dinner/logistics meeting, where they explained how the Semifinals work. I found out my written test score this afternoon, and I got 24 out of 25. I also correctly spelled my two oral words, prerogative and Beetewk. They were each worth 3 points, for a total of 30 out of 31. The cutoff was at 27. My friends Sonia, Elizabeth, and Neetu also made the cut. I was happy to see a French word, bouleversement, no the written test. Some other words that were on the test were tocsin, apollyon, and pusillanimous. Today, during the break between rounds, we visited Madame Tussauds wax figure museum, which was very cool. The figures are so realistic! I'm being interviewed again this year by KS95, but I'm not sure exactly when. I'll update when I find out more. You can watch me in the Semifinals at 10am Eastern on ESPN, and the Championship Finals will be broadcast live on ABC starting at 8pm Eastern.

Round 2

Test Day!

Today was the big test! I'm not allowed to say much, but I think it went fairly well. I guess I'll find out tomorrow! By the way, I made a typo yesterday and said I'd know if I'm in the Semifinals tonight, but it's actually tomorrow. Today I got interviewed and filmed by ESPN. I'm pretty sure it will air at some point Friday during the Bee, but I'm not sure. I got to sit in a spinning, egg-shaped chair and be in a music video! It was a lot of fun. After the test, we walked around D.C. We took a tour of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, which was very interesting. I saw several hundred million dollars! We also visited the Holocaust Museum, which was very, very sad but also interesting. I'll see if I can post some of the pictures I took today. Tomorrow morning and early afternoon I'll be competing in the preliminaries, and at about 5:30 Eastern they'll announce the Semifinalists. You can watch round 3 of the preliminaries starting at 1:15 on ESPN3.com. I'm close to last in the first group, so I'll be spelling around 2:45 or so Eastern time. ~Anja Beth