Monday, February 22, 2016

In which debatefolk gather on a debateless weekend

We turned the chez into a B&B this weekend, with CP and Kaz as guests. They were up at her place in Newburgh getting it ready to sell, and spent some time with us as a reward for heavy lifting. (Actually, it was CP and Catholic Charlie and JV who did the heavy lifting. Kaz is still recovering from her unplanned athletics in Turkey.) It was nice to fill up the chez for a while without having to put up a Christmas tree.

We went down into NYC on Saturday and joined up with the second-place winner of the Matt Hoyle look-alike contest. We went to the New York Historical Society, which had a tech exhibit revolving around IBM’s 1964-5 World’s Fair exhibit, branching off into all other aspects of computer tech that sort of looked like the story of my life, if you can tell that story by analyzing all the dinosaur machines filling up our basement. I told stories of my days hanging out with Ada Lovelace, while CP regaled us with tales of bytes from his end. Matt just kept staring as his smartphone and marveling that there really was a West Side, since he’s been living on the East Side in Manhattan a year or so and had never crossed the (semi-) imaginary line of Fifth Avenue. We stamped his passport for him at the end of the visit. It was one of those gorgeous days when you simply have to be walking around in the city, although in Kaz’s case it was limping around, so we eventually found a cab back to the train, and soon joined up with JV for dinner at a Moroccan restaurant. It seems as if we spent half our time pricing out various weeks in foreign climes, including said Morocco, Japan, Venice, etc. Letting CP read the travel section of the Times Sunday morning was putting demon run in the punch at an AA meeting. Of course, it seemed that I spent most of our chez time in the kitchen making either dinners or breakfasts, but since I really like doing that, I was perfectly content.

Part of the time Kaz and I (or, as debaters would put it, Me and Kaz) furrowed our brows over the upcoming Land o’ Lakes tournament. Stefan swears he will be there if they have to roll in his hospital bed to make it so: he’s having back surgery on Tuesday. Kaz and I are worried that we won’t have enough judges/rooms/wifi/coffee/tea/demon_rum/snakebite_kits to get through the weekend in the tab room. OTOH, the Gem has shaped up quite well given its postponement. Still waiting for the confirmation of the speech tabber, but I’m pretty sure we’ve got a good one lined up.


Let the week begin!

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