One begins to hear the Pups howling at the moon

Normally, I wouldn’t mind if things weren’t all peaches and cream over at firmguns.com tabroom.com. But CP has upgraded it, and now every time anybody gets an error, he gets a message directly explaining the error. That is good. But because at some point over the summer he made me a junior executive on the site, I also get the messages. That is not good. My inbox these days is an endless combination of another-one-bites-the-dust error messages from tabroom, notes from O’C promising to do something real soon now, people wondering why I screwed up their Yale entry, spam that encourages me to spend only a little to gain a lot in more ways than one, and deals on all sorts of crap from Amazon. Mostly, I just read the latter two and let the rest take care of themselves.

Seriously, this is the moment when things start heating up for a tournament. Yale is pretty big, so things get pretty hot. There’s a lot of judges to sort out, and I spent some time over the weekend marking blocks and the like, plus trying to get some good judges into the JV pool where they’d get a real workout, and out of the VLD pool where they’d get low ranks and spend the weekend wishing that the Pups had a better way of heating up the lunch burritos. Everybody likes a round off; nobody likes all their rounds off. In a situation other than MJP I could manipulate people into rounds at my own discretion, but it’s really out of my hands with this system. My job is to deliver what people expect, not to keep people from getting bored and storming the barricades. I did manage a couple of nutty things in my sorting, including taking one competitor and making him a judge, but look on the bright side: he could rank himself a 1 and judge himself in a bubble round. The problem is, I think he’s a sincere, honest guy, which means he’d probably have to drop himself, and that just would not be a pretty sight. Other than that, I think I didn’t make a mess of things. I’ll know better next Monday.

Meanwhile, RJT is learning the tabroom.com ropes up at Monticello, and couldn’t figure out why judges were being ranked as useless. It’s not as if they weren’t useless, for the most part, but this seemed a bit cheeky of the software, to put it mildly. So I turned off the request for judge rankings for her and everything came out fine thenceforth. I love solving problems rather than creating problems, but on balance, both are pretty entertaining, provided nothing serious gets screwed up. Rule Number One: Don’t talk about Tabbing. No, wait a minute, that’s not Rule Number One. Rule Number One is Smile and the World Smiles With You. Seriously. Be a pain in the butt, and you’ll be fighting with everyone forever. Try to be nice, and you’ll only have to fight with them until the end of time. It’s an improvement, let me tell you.

I managed to get everything ready for the season bags-o’-crap-wise. Sorted out pens, tape, cords, plugs, lists, paper, forms, checks, etc. Took longer than I thought and even required a quick trip to Staples. But I’m ready now. All I have to do is throw it all into the trunk (from which I removed the golf clubs) and point myself toward New Haven. Since I just agreed to tab NDCA, I guess it will have to keep me going through April. All that’s missing is a hardware engineer. My present and (she hopes and prays) soon to be emeritus H.E. has acquitted herself quite well. I mean, her hardware engineering wasn’t anything special, but she took the prize for the most complaining about it, thus entering the Hen Hud Hardware Hall of Fame. (Too bad there's no way to spell fame with an H.) Maybe if she ate more vegetables it wouldn’t have weighed so heavily on her…