I'm breathing a little today

I seem to have spent the last couple of days in a true Bumpidian fog. Losing the dome was the capper (no pun intended), but I worked out the solution last night pretty satisfactorily. I'll get it organized probably tomorrow night, which is, of course, official registration shut-down. Ha! In fact, I've now created a new mail folder for waitlist requests (after all the waitlist I've already collected). Unless the NY UDL goes out of business between now and tomorrow, I would imagine that we are mostly done. This morning I sent out a few advisories for more info to a few slugabeds; otherwise, we're set. I pushed back the closing date this year to give myself more time to catch a breather. In retrospect, that seems to have been a brilliant idea. I was due for one of those, eh?

There is other stuff going on. I've sorted out the Guertin finals, which will now be our culminating LD tournament, predicated on qualifying a la States (which we will not go to, regardless of when it is). They do allow upperclass judging, it will be hoteled, it should be fun. I'll make some preliminary arrangements after Bump is over. Tomorrow I'll make the Ridge arrangements; so far, only one parent, so one judge + whatever he can fit in the car and cover in the pool. Now we just need them to have splendid weather.

Then there's Princeton. This has been interesting, at least from my perspective. Two debaters marginally signed up on our db, then said they really didn't want to go, then they did, then they didn't. There was more hearsay evidence than the collected works of John Grisham. By the time they finally decided they would go, they were shut out of registration. I think they're still waiting to hear more; God only knows. I wish I had known that they were expecting me to register them. The object lesson here is simple: if it's an optional tournament, don't expect me to sign you up for it unless I've very specifically said I would (and you've very clearly said that you would attend). As a rule, if people go to optional tournaments it's iffy whether I'll be involved, especially when there's flying involved, although obviously nobody's flying down to Princeton. Still, I have no set approach. If you're on the team, make it clear who's doing what and we'll be fine. (To be honest, I don't see not going to Princeton as any great loss, as I have no particular fondness for the event, but that's just personal opinion. I do have personal opinions, if you haven't noticed. But normally I keep them to myself and play well with others. Yeah. Right.)

Speaking of options, I've filled out 2/3 of the forms for Emory (which I *will* register folks for, but the rest is up to them). I still need Emcee's record. I guess he doesn't want it shipped south of the Mason-Dixon line. Some people are still fighting the Civil War, it would appear.

Some day I'll publish a certain pathetic email a certain pathetic ex-HHer sent me to get out of judging a round at Bump so that she could break bread with her long lost father. Apparently he's just back from Iraq, New Orleans, Kashmir and Lexington. It brought a tear to my eye; I didn't know she had a sentimental side. Usually she just tells me what to do and I do it. I was really touched.

Speaking of which, the only two grads I'm unsure of at this point are NoRelation and Jeremy. I'll track them down; I vaguely recall them anecdotally telling me they'd be there. I can't imagine they'd have anything better to do. I mean, what *could* be better?

I did post the (I hope) final Bump job list finally. The first version was a misbegotten pdf, and I don't understand why. I ported the sheet from Excel in Virtual PC to Appleworks and it looked fine, but printing the pdf was half-baked, literally. So I just saved it out as html (I can't create pdfs in my Windows existences) and posted a link. There weren't many changes from the original. The biggest was deciding to change the majors domo to majorettes. A bow to the feminine side, if you will. It's been so long since we even needed a majordomo in LD (Averill used to md himself, so to speak) that it's taken me a while to get into the swing of it.