Meanwhile, Guns N' Roses was playing on the iPod.

Let’s see. There’s a new Nostrum up, and I have some plans to do a research lecture for TVFT. Plus there’s a couple of chezzes this week, and I’m out of commission this coming weekend (doing nothing of concern to the VCA), so I’m not quite sure when I’ll get what done. I’ve been putting off Districts planning since getting it up on the Goy because, well, it’s Districts planning, but at least over the weekend we ironed out most of next year’s calendar as much as we could. I also took a nice little nap yesterday because, well, Scarsdale was tiring. Then again, last night when I was cooking dinner I was complaining to Tik pronounced teek that things were awfully quiet and I sort of missed the excitement. I can’t imagine how I’ll feel after the Northeast Championships puts paid to the season (and more about that in the coming days).

Scarsdale was, in a word, busy, primarily because of how complicated it is. Some varsity debaters judge the novices, theoretically in an A-flight Varsity slash B-flight novice setup, and there’s not enough judges to single-flight varsity although there are enough to single-flight novices if you use some of the debating judges, so you end up, first, assigning varsity judges in a single flight and them changing it to a double flight and then making sure the best judges are where they should be, and then you make sure your debaters in flight B are not judging while they’re debating, and then you make sure that you don’t have multiple rounds in the same rooms at the same time, and then you make sure that you don’t have the same varsity debaters judging every round. And then you make sure you remember to do all these things every time. Whew. Lots of reading against schematics and doublechecking, and as far as I recall we never went live with a totally bogus schematic, although we came close once or twice. It really did require the three of us (me, Kaz and O’C) to cover everything every time. Of course, putting out Pffft schematics was, by comparison, a walk in the park.

There seems to be a new (?) wrinkle in E-TRPC’s handling of break rounds, in that it simply doesn’t show you the judges that you have selected for the round. You check everywhere, everything is as it should be, but try as you will, you can’t get them on the schematic. There are worse things in the world, but it’s a pain in the butt, since you end up hand-writing the names of the judges and they won’t show up on results printouts (because they aren’t named). I remember something like this happening at Yale, where the program seemed to just get tired of working (although there I was using Classic TRPC, so go figure). In any case, one can never rest, because you never know when something anomalous is going to happen.

The weirdest thing about Scarsdale was the signs. There were signs everywhere telling people where to go for what, and the signs for tab had my picture on them. So whenever I roamed around, I always followed the signs with me on them to get back to where I belonged. This example of semiotics gone wild amused me every time I ventured out of the tab room. Needless to say, I should have been wearing my What Would Menick Do t-shirt, which also has my picture on it. Anyhow, I did do my best to look like me all weekend, so there wasn’t any confusion for other people.