A day of rest

Sunday I got up, ate, bought a Christmas tree and a Thanksgiving turkey, then took a nap. Then I woke up again, ate, watched a movie, and went to bed. The perfect day!

Little Lexington is now history. Scarsdale joined us for the trip—all 487 of their novices—and aside from the fact that a few of them had jackintheboxitis and couldn't stay seated, I was gald to have them. It made for a bigger, tougher field (decidedly so, since they virtually swept their division). But we held our own in Pffft, with Hush and McLean proving once and for all that they're in the wrong activity, and Nicole in Open LD proving once and for all that she is in the right activity.

The high point for me, of course, was meeting the actor Claire hired to portray Phantom. This is the furthest she has gone to perpetrate the fiction that this guy exists. Whoever this actor was, though, I have to admit I liked him, even if he did drink like a fish, dress like a Hell's Angel and claimed to spend all his time watching Kung Fu movies. I also got Claire to attempt to explain what she does as a computist, thus learning that I have absolutely no idea what Claire does as a computist, or will do as a computist when she goes out to face the real world. Hell, I can't get my home wireless network to work. What do I know about SML? Give me an English major any day. How about that Moby Dick, eh?

Once again the "new" TRPC program performed beyond expectation. Unfortunately. Lynne was loaned a PC from the MFL (pronounced Muffle), which had downloaded the data from their registration site into the very utmost latest and greatest. And this was fun. Not once, not twice, but three times, teams from the same school had the same name, not only the one on the schematic that everyone can see, but also the one the program uses for i.d. in the tab room. Holy Hannah! And of course, there was one pair of geniuses that didn't bother asking the tab room which they were, so they went to the wrong round. There were other issues, too, but this was the most grievous, and together they cost us about a half hour of deep confusion. On the other hand the new version will accommodate Pffft with its shifting sides on the fly, so I say, if you must tab Pffft, use the new version and do the rest in the old version. Like the Johnny Appleseed that I am, I left a copy of the Benevolent TRPC behind on the desktop for Muffle, if they wish to come to their senses. How anyone ever uses the new version more than once, by choice, is beyond me. Then again, I am inspired to begin working on that brochure to sell that bridge down there in Brooklyn. Muffle will be my first client.

Tomorrow night, a tutti meeting to go over everything I would have gone over last week if anyone had shown up. Arrrghh! And with any luck, will have room lists (or I'm throwing my Hardware Engineer over to the wrestling team).

There's a few more Bump folk to enter on my list. I would have done it yesterday, but we're not quite at the LD limit yet, and I prefered sleeping. Some yabbo complained that our judges were too "lay." This would come as quite a shock to the assembled troops, if you ask me, considering that as far as I can tell, about the only people on the list who didn't compete at TOCs are the coaches of the people who competed at TOCs. Plus we give 'em 5 strikes (which they can use on the couple of judges who got TOC bids but didn't go). One less yabbo, I guess.