I’m sort of happy to be gearing up again for a new season. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t do institutes or anything else even remotely connected to forensics during the summer, aside from endlessly blogging about it—which for me doesn’t count—so after a couple of months I really start to miss it. For all practical purposes I was done before CatNats this year, since I couldn’t attend with my couple of entries due to a previous engagement, and as usual I didn’t spend a week at NatNats since I don’t have a week at my disposal to even consider doing such a thing. (The DJ, which pays the bills, would not appreciate my gallivanting off to whatever godforsaken wilderness NatNats happens to be at when I should be bearing down on today’s most popular fiction back at the office. Not that I think everywhere in the country aside from New York is a godforsaken wilderness. Just some of it. I have fond memories of the Pacific Northwest and the rugged but beautiful Southwest, for example, not to mention a hankering for the broad expanses of Texas and the big shoulders of Chicago, but none of these memories or hankerings have anything to do with forensics.) So I haven’t been in the same room with a debater—aside from looking askance at the Panivore discussing some theory case or other before she shipped off to the aforementioned albeit parenthetical godforsaken wilderness of NatNats—since the first robins of spring were appearing on my doorstep. And I’m ready for it now. As soon as I clean up all the robin poop from my doorstep, that is.
So we’ll meet next week, a couple of lone, lorn Sailors who are available, to discuss the new topic. I love seeing people again at the end of summer, seeing what they’ve been up to, finding out what they learned (if anything) at institutes, etc. My two poor captains have a lot on their shoulders this year, needing as we do to replenish our supply of debaters big time, otherwise the team will fit on the head of a pin. I mean, I like running tab rooms and everything, but I also like the marginal coaching that I do. I’d like to be able to continue doing it.
Then, of course, before we get into too full a swing, there’s the Disney Debate Adventure. Although this will have little if any debate, it sure has debate people. I’ve noted this before, but there’s a small group of us who see each other at tournaments all the time, and enjoy one another’s company but don’t get much time to socialize, and this will give us a chance to do nothing but socialize. Provided we don’t murder one another, it ought to be a real hoot. When it comes to Disney, I may be a bigger nerd than O’C, who holds serious credentials in pretty much every other nerdity in which I partake. I mean, I like Star Wars a lot, but I haven’t proposed marriage to it. And I have found it surprisingly easy to continue to resist watching Howard the Duck. But when it comes to the Carousel of Progress, I think we’re in serious cahoots.
After that, we ease into the life with something small and manageable, the Pup. There is the Babycakes RR, which I’d like to drop in on, but it’s starting on what is for me a DJ workday, followed the next day by my aged mother’s birthday. (Yes, I am not so old that my mother being alive is somehow newsworthy. I just look that way.) I went to the Babycakes last year for the first time, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I also enjoyed those actual Babycakes babycakes which, if I remember correctly, were allegedly off-limits to coaches, but since the Panivore took one look at them and pronounced them “too interesting” and thus not part of her diet plan, I did not feel the least bit guilty grabbing one of them for her.
So, over the next few weeks, a little preplanning with the team, a little WDW, then it’s orientation of new plebes and immediately thereafter the Pup.
Life is good.
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