This is all I remember, to tell you the truth

All right. Just some random notes from the Tiggers.

So this guy comes in to the tabroom Friday afternoon, a Tig, and asks if we want anything. We look around and say, well, we could use some water. He salutes and says he’s on it, and runs off. We didn’t see him again for another twenty-four hours. And, needless to say, no water was forthcoming. So I ask you, what former English major wouldn’t refer to him as Gunga Din the next time he appeared, asking if we wanted anything? I assure you, my reference was entirely to Kipling. The fact that the so-nicknamed Gunga was, well, a little Indian guy was mere coincidence. If it had been Sarah Palin I would have used the same reference. Please. Give me a break.

O’C and I were doing the LD chores, while JV was over in Speechland, which meant that we only intersected with him socially on Friday for a quick dinner. La Coin was dispersed to PFdom, which meant that we only collided with her for breakfast. That’s the problem with big events: your friends are scattered to the winds. So it goes.

On the entertainment front, O’C made me turn off my Disney Princess Christmas album before the first song was even finished. (Thank God!)

And I learned that O’C is, uh, a little obsessive about certain things. To wit, he’s gone way around the bend on his Star Trek Second Life recreation. The jaw-dropping detail was literally jaw-dropping. I was speechless. Still am. You would be too.

Another thing I learned is that everybody has an iPhone and everyone gets messages with the same notification sound, which means all of us in any given room are dipping our hands into our pockets whenever one of us gets a message. I fixed this. My new sound, much more annoying, has everyone in any given room dipping their hands into their pockets to pull out their pistols so they can kill me and my phone both. Anyhow, one week into SmartPhone ownership and I can’t imagine how I survived without it. Looking up the names of the errant PF novices in the breakout on the stage of the award ceremony, for example, and finding them in seconds flat, just can’t be done any other way.

We shared a bus with the Scarwegians. So, you ask, is JV the tyrant he appears to be with his team? And the answer is, are you kidding? That stuff doesn’t wash off at night. Jeesh. Anyhow, it was nice to have a comfy bus. On the way down I entered the rooms for LD and got all but three of them right. That’s pretty good by any standard. Try that on a school bus.

The whole room thing is as complicated as I thought it was. It’s not so much divvying up spaces as those spaces being appropriate to their activity. You can’t do extemp prep in a broom closet, for instance, and the definitions of small and big employed by some Tigs are not the same as those employed by some tabroom directors. ‘Nuff said. It got fixed, and I’ll have a better idea next time out.

I still haven’t debriefed the Tigs on the whole thing, but mostly I felt it went fine. Our real issues were in the lead-up to the event, and knowing what those issues are is 99% of solving them. In other words, mark your calendar now for next year. It will happen again, same time, same channel. Although next year I’ll try to find time to read the Sunday paper.