Tuesday, November 18, 2014

In which we ponder what happens after meatballs

Things seemed better in hand for Bump 2014 than in some previous years. Everything ran smoothly and on schedule round-wise, as far as I could tell. The fact that we ended earlier than usual on Saturday night would seem to confirm that.

I always pass housing along to a parent. Now that we only handle out-of-staters, the number is much more manageable, although we certainly can’t handle the load just relying on the team. So the housing person does a lot of calling around, and brings in legacies, and the job gets done. The main confusion this year was one school that a) decided to forego its housing and b) didn’t bother to tell us. There were a few panicked moments when we thought they were being housed in an undisclosed location somewhere in the backwoods of Sailorville, and there was a bit of running through the halls plaintively calling their names. I finally got the coach on the horn who gave me the oops alert, and that was that. Oops this, if you know what I mean.

Food seemed to go well. There was enough of it for everyone, that is, and it was there when it was supposed to be there. The candy Speecho-Americans kept asking me questions like, could I give them change or would they get special service credits or somesuch, and I kept looking at them as if they just escaped from a lunatic asylum, but we’re used to those sorts of exchanges. Because there had been some thefts from the high school and lockdowns and whatnot a couple of weeks ago, all the doors were closed and there was only one point of access, but that proved to be no problem. As far as I know, the lost and found business operated once again with fully one hundred percent of the items lost completely unconnected to the items found. That is always one of the great Bump mysteries. If we ever found something someone actually lost, it would be a miracle.

We gave the varsity trophies out in the rounds, but I did do short ceremonies for the speaker awards for the two divisions, about 5 minutes each. I like talking about crappy prizes, and students like hearing about them and getting them. The Traveling Tray of PF returned this year—it’s the 2nd Place Bump Speech Award from 1981—as did the Traveling (Fruit) Cup for LD. The TT of PF now has a beautifully embossed nameplate, sort of, if pasting an index card on the back and attaching it with green tape and me scratching the name of the previous winners counts as beautiful embossing. There may be some dispute over that. The (Fruit) Cup winner, whose school doesn’t usually come to Bump, had the temerity (or foresight) to leave it behind after beautifully embossing his own name on it. Which means it will find its way into my basement where TK (pronounced teek) can use it as a scratching post when he’s down there chasing mice. By the way, O’C was saying how the retired can of soup that substituted for the fruit can during the wilderness years is looking pretty dicey on its perch at Bronx Science. He says when you shake it you can hear the meatballs still bouncing around in it. I had to break it to him that it was a can of chicken stock, sans meatballs, which made him start to worry about exactly what is bouncing around in there. We agreed that not shaking it again in the future would be the better part of valor.

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