Other stuff happened too, other than just our sorting out
e-ballots with judges spread out over half of New Jersey.
Kaz and I drove down together, since she had all kinds of
complicated logistics with kids both at the Tiggers and in New York (at the
oldest established permanent floating Scranton-in-Mamaroneck tournament). For a
while we sang along to the oldies, but when we reached the beautiful stretch of
Route 1 that crosses the state like a bar sinister, we switched to a game of
finding franchises in alphabetical order. You know, Avis, Burger King, etc. We
only got to J around when we reached the hotel, not because there are not more
franchises on Route 1 than there are fishes in the sea, but because there
aren’t that many J franchises. After checking in it was off to the races.
Registration was calm and controlled. Breaking it down into
three lines makes people feel like they’re getting somewhere, sort of like
snaking lines around corners in an amusement park. We started our opening
assembly promptly at 4:30, and we were out of the gate.
Tabroom was satisfyingly steady all weekend. The nice thing
about a big field with a big judging pool in tabroom is that the prefs practically do
themselves. We did have to fix a few 1-2s and make them 2-3s, as is our
priority, but mostly we just pressed the auto-pair button and stood back in
awe. Say what you will about tabroom (and as a rather major user, I certainly
will say what I will), it makes prefs
a joy. We can turn around a pairing in no more than five minutes, and even that
exaggerates. It’s just damned easy. Granted, it’s harder with smaller numbers,
but not all that much. I had originally feared that smaller numbers would
result in dramatically unsatisfactory results, but that has never been the
case, which is why I feel we can do the full 6 tiers just about anywhere.
We didn’t have too much of the predictable nonsense, liked
locked rooms or tuba club practice next door to a round. On Saturday, I took a
tour of the buildings we had available. We needed to accommodate a wheelchair
on Sunday, plus we needed speechish room for the speechish events, so I hit the
road to check things out. I went up and down and all around, and in one
building couldn’t believe that anyone could ever find their assigned rooms,
whereas in another building I finally discovered the round tables that the
Paginator had complained about last year as being unsatisfactory for congress,
despite the fact that the idea of a round table hadn’t bothered King Arthur, so
why should it bother Congressians? Then I crawled around our home building and
found a bathroom that was so clean you didn’t have to attach a clothespin to
your nose, and a corridor that was a carbon copy of the launch tube of Space
Mountain. Apparently, the ladie’s room in that same space wasn’t as convenient
as the men’s room, as it locked from the outside, and at one point Kaz went
down to it and when she opened the door she was stampeded by a herd of people who
had been locked in for hours. (Actually, I find this hard to believe, but would
Kaz lie to me?)
As for the tournament, there were a couple of schools whose
prefs were the paradigm of oddity, and were therefore impossible to match.
Every time. You have to wonder about that. It wasn’t a simple preference for or
against circuitry, which we see all the time. It was monkeys throwing darts at
the names and occasionally hitting one. Whatever. If there is never mutuality
for a school, well, who suffers? Unless they have some secret cabalistic system
that we were simply unable to decode. Maybe they were happy at being judged by 3 after 3. What can I say?
And if you were wondering if the Tiggers celebrate Christmas,
then this one is for you:
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