In which we sign off for the holidays

The concentration now is on the Tiggers.

The waitlists have whittled down about as much as they’re going to. The rough area is PF. We’ve let in 4 teams per school, and gotten to 200 entrants. You can do the math on that yourself. I would imagine that if we had the space we could easily have gone up to 5 or 6 teams for most schools. Of course, there is a down side to that. Someone has to handle all those ballots. And PF is the hardest, what with all the lay judges. I mean, it’s hard enough for whoever invented PF to get the ballot straight, much less some poor parent doing it for the first time. I always used to right down insulting descriptions of which kid was which on my flow, so I’d know who was on which side and who was speaking first or second. Hairy Ape. Knock Knees. Snape Lookalike. Potato Face. Et cetera. Of course, I did not show the flow to Hairy or Knock or Tater. Anyhow, no matter how you slice it (or mash it), 200 is a lot of ballots to process before the next round.

LD mostly won’t have that problem, although between the two divisions we have more ballots. We have such a big break on Saturday between rounds that there’s plenty of time to rabble-rouse and still get all the ballots entered. Plus I’ll put some loose Tigs to work, given that we’ll be getting most of our info via text. I still maintain that e-ballots won’t work without a big infrastructure and no where for the judges to disappear to. I may be wrong, but I’m the one paying the price for it. So it goes.

Speech and Congress, which I know you’re wildly interested in, are also nicely set.

I spent a lot of time on Sunday room whispering. Did Friday and Saturday both for everything but Speech, which is JV’s devoir. I even managed to keep a few spare rooms in the McCosh building, our central launching area, for emergencies. I also hired out an oodle or two of judges to everyone.

So, it’s all mostly set. This time out I’ll open the prefs on Thursday, rather than repeatedly telling people to redo them every time there’s a drop or add. I’ve learned my lesson. Earlier in the week I’ll publish the riot act about judges showing up and the proper use of conflicts. And then I’ll sail off into the sunset that Friday morning, or more to the point, away from the sunrise, to beautiful New Jersey, the alleged Garden State.

Meanwhile, enjoy the upcoming holiday. We've got all kinds of fun things planned. Maybe we'll run into you while we're doing them.