I spent most of yesterday swimming upstream through a river of self-generated turmoil. I’m not quite sure why, but some days, it is best not to bother. Unfortunately, the days when one can get away without bothering are few and far between. My goals yesterday were simple: post the results of the Saturday MHL, go through the MHL bills and separate out the deadbeats, and go over the Sailors’ ballots and figure out from them where the bodies are buried. Part one of the above proved almost beyond my abilities, especially when mixed in with sending O’C a printout of the Big Jake elims for his certification of the TOC bids. Now, all I had to do in any of these was open up TRPC, print up some sheets and run them through the MHL printer to make scans. Sounds simple. In fact, it is simple. So why I screwed it all up from beginning to end is beyond me. This fifteen minutes of work lasted at least an hour and a half, and at the end of it I realized I was not now in possession of the full Jake outrounds, even though I had been a couple of days ago (this in addition to some slippery MHL divisions). Fortunately I have my backup through all the prelims, so I can recreate the elims easily enough—it’s not as if O’C doesn’t know it all by heart, plus it’s on WTF somewhere—but still, I’d be happier not having to do it. In any case, after finally getting the MHL postings up, a true miracle, I went upstairs and took a nap, and this seemed to help, even though I didn’t fall asleep. The change of venue, plus the copy of The New Yorker in my lap and Leon Redbone on the Victrola, seemed to do the job. I attacked the Sailors’ ballots with renewed vigor, and they even made sense to me, except for those of a certain Scarswegian whose handwriting is smaller than [insert your own humorous metaphor here for some really small thing]. Jeesh! I mean, what I could read made sense, but I’ll bet this guy could flow a three hour Fidel Castro speech on an index card, with room for the Gettysburg Address, Washington’s Farewell to the Troops and thirty-four assorted Conan O’Brien monologues. Meanwhile, the other planned piece of yesterday, the sorting of the deadbeats, I’ll do sometime today.
As for the MHL itself, which was primarily an event for first-timers, it was the usual chaos of such an event. As everyone in the VCA knows, the opening of any tournament is chaotic, with confused registrations and people finding their way around a strange building or campus and enough adrenalin to launch a space shuttle, but factor in that 90% of your participants are not only novices but entirely raw novices, and you’re in for it. Newbies can disappear way faster than veterans, and with veterans, you at least have an idea where they might have gone. Newbies invent new places to disappear to every year. For instance, this vintage of polician newbies all seemed to think that they could watch other people’s rounds and somehow they’d catch up in their B flights; what are they telling these people nowadays back at the ranch, anyhow? I did like the idea of running JV divisions, which were quite successful, but it’s questionable whether we really had enough room. There was a second cafeteria nicknamed the Bobcat (the school mascot), and early on I visited it and it looked like a nice place to run the 5 or 6 PF rounds. Unfortunately, a whole skein of Pffffters tanked when one school pulled out, and since the Bobcat space now became theoretically larger, every time a round didn’t have a venue (each one of these coming as a surprise since we seemingly had enough rooms, but I think Lewis Carroll had been there first) ended up there, which apparently turned the place into Hell For a Day (or, as we like to call it, Regis’s basement at the December event). But everyone seemed to survive, or at least everyone I was aware of. I was happy to see a large contingent of parents in the peanut gallery. They all had printed guides either from me or Scarsdale, and desperate looks on their faces, and I pep-talked to them for about 10 minutes (I mean, they could have come to my non-attended evening class for a full hour and a half) and then shunted them off to JV rounds for observation and judge commentary, telling them that they could judge round 3 of novices if they wanted. One did volunteer, and his ballots came back to us looking like Chetan’s, only neater. I mean, how many first-time parents give 28.5/26.5 in a round? Obviously, the guy was a ringer. The good news is, he’s one of mine! Go Sailors, eh?
When I got home Saturday night it was about ten o’clock. I settled down with some macaroni and cheese and watched the “Michael Ellis” Monty Python episode. If you know that one, and you know the concept of evanescent registrations, you’ll know that it was the perfect end to an imperfect day. And so to bed, as Pepys would say.
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