TVFT for the literate; Old Grizzly is the last man standing; they also do a lot of nose rubbing; cool ranch flavor, of course

There is a blog for The View from Tab, which you might want to look at if you’re just subscribing to the podcast on iTunes without recourse to the written word. There are some comments there, and entries responding to the comments, plus a very important poll that I put up because, well, the world needs more polls like this one.

I’m rather depressed that this year my novices have almost entirely drifted off. I always expect to lose some of them, sure, but all of them? This quickly? The statute of limitations hasn’t even expired yet on ModNov. I mean, we probably will keep Old Grizzly, a nickname that he simply doesn’t realize is a term of affection, but Muffins has gone AWOL big time without even a single round under his belt, and The Phantom did debate once and continues to come to meetings, but he hasn’t signed up for anything else because it’s moose hunting season and, well, one does have one’s priorities, and you can’t bring a Sharps rifle to debate rounds (except in Texas, which explains a lot). The others have simply fallen off the face of the earth. Go figure. Was it something I said? I mean, other than that there was work involved (e.g., writing cases) and, oh yeah, public speaking (which I know scared the bejesus out of one of them, but which I would have thought wouldn’t have been that much of a surprise, all things considered). Oh, well. We limp along. But at this rate it’s something of a death spiral… Maybe O’C will hire me as an assistant coach! Or better yet, I could be his hardware engineer! Or maybe I could just become a traveling tab peddler. I could get myself a cart and a mule. I’d like a mule, I think. There’s got to be some bright spot in all of this.

Tomorrow is the Monti MHL, with a pretty decent registration. The good news is that the forecast is for less than three feet of snow, which is unusually balmy for Monticello at this time of year. Last year I think they showed up at maybe two tournaments, thanks to weather cancellations. You know that their location may be a problem when at their tournament all your kids are housed in igloos.

And tonight, at 9:00, registration for Bump officially closes. No new entries, not that there’s been a new entry for weeks, except for a couple of poor souls who didn’t get the message that, in this day and age, tournaments sell out fast. Over the weekend we’ll cut out the ribbon clerks as we head toward Monday’s final setting of the fees. My goal is to get one last school off the housing waitlist, and get everybody off the VLD waitlist. Can it be done? I don’t know. All I can say is, I’m settling in for the next level of Tournament Tycoon over the next few days, with a couple of cases of Diet Coke and a bag or two of Doritos. Makes me wonder why I ever bothered buying the Wii.