I'm sending my precious offspring away for the weekend with—you?

Parent’s night is always fun. There’s so much to cover, and you don’t want to daunt them, but by the same token, you want them to understand that, if their kids fall in love with debate, they won’t be seeing them again until the second grandchild is born. Tough business.

One problem of meeting parents and planning for Bump simultaneously is the possibility that a parent who has volunteered for something will have a kid who drops out in a week or two. I don’t think we set ourselves up for that possibility this year, though. My handful of novices this year look pretty likely to me for at least the short term, although only one of them has signed up for the team listserver, the official act of enlistment. I fault my new novice coordinators for this. The People’s Champion and the Panivore? Feh. One of them needs a haircut and the other needs a square meal. What was I thinking?

(Seriously, one of the CatNats ballots from May, when Zack’s hair was about 5 months shorter, complained that he needed a haircut and hence lost the round. Gotta love CatNats. I usually set the bar at no white shoes before Memorial Day, but then again, I’m a more experienced judge.)

Anyhow, I managed to confuse the new parents no end and got enough traction on the more experienced ones to get the parental side of Bump sewn up. And the thing is, September is, somehow, almost over, and the season still doesn’t feel as if it’s started, the VassaRR not withstanding. I need to sit in front of a computer seeing which C judge is on a bubble. Until then, I’m just not doing my job.

Tonight Bietz and O’C and I will play around with Skype and GarageBand and see what we come up with. Probably nothing for publication, but a sense that either we can or we can’t. I’ll keep you posted.