The thing that is Bump in the night

Last night I started Bump 2009.

Oy.

First thing, there was the requisite digging in the chez catacombs for any leftover trophies from last year. I seem to have a wandering herd of octos trophies, probably from PF. (I don’t label my trophies, allowing me to give them to any division at any time. I also don’t date them, for the same reason. O’C, on the other hand, does date his trophies. I don’t mean that he puts a date on them, I mean that he takes them out for dinner and a movie. That’s another difference between the old guard and the new guard, but I’m not sure which one of us is which.) I blew the cobwebs off them and decided at least I had a little leg up on this year’s purchase. There’s also a ton of mugs; I’ll probably migrate over to medals next year for the double-octos folks, but for now, have a cappuccino on us. Or at least, have a place to put your cappuccino on us. Close enough. As for crappy prizes, I have enough of them in the crappy prize closet to last until President Palin’s impeachment trial.

Then, on to putting together the order for the trophy company. Simple enough, just update last year’s order. Except, where the hell was last year’s order? In the transition from Little Elvis to Bigger Elvis (which has become the new computer’s default name; btw, I just learned that O’C calls his MacBook PortaPotty, for reasons that elude me), I managed to overlook a hard drive that had been hooked up through USB, so there was a lot of sturm und drang over that for a while, but I finally found 2008 and transmogrified it into 2009 for the trophy order. And, of course, I found a bunch of other stuff that I’m sure will come in handy and that I’ll port over to somewhere useful in a day or two. In any case, I’ll be stopping at the trophy place Friday afternoon to put in the order.

Meanwhile I’ve got about a hundred to-do calendar postings telling me to start working on Bump. It won’t be terribly different this year, except I’ll probably eliminate late-change fines as just too much of a pain in the patoot to bother with. However, I will be charging people for rounds they aren’t covering with judging, which the VCA knows always bothers me. If you are required to bring a judge, bringing a judge who will only cover some of the rounds doesn’t do the job unless, as I always say, your debaters are willing to only debate the rounds that they have judge coverage for. If you don’t cover all your rounds, then I have to. And if I do it, it costs me extra money. That money will be from your wallet, you yabbo!

Other than that, the invite and the tabroom data will be mostly the same, but I do need to get on it. It does take time, and this is the last full week of August. The last full week of August? Egads! Another summer shot to hell.