Me, I labored

Things seem to have kicked into high gear all of a sudden. I spent the first half of the weekend enjoying this and that, and the second half mostly working. It was nice to have the extra day to do it.

Chief concern was Bump. The invitation has been updated and posted. Of course, a lot of this is the same year after year, but there’s always something new. First of all, we had to go back to Friday-Saturday. Second, thanks to shenanigans in the grammar school last year, some changes had to be made there. The dumbest thing in the world, if you ask me, is an upperclassman newly judging novices. These judges think that, first of all, they are suddenly way smarter than they were the day before, and second, that the world is at their feet. They do not necessarily believe that the normal rules of debate behavior apply to them, even if that means that my use of a building might be jeopardized by their scrambling teachers’ desks and kids’ projects. So, that had to be addressed, among other things.

I also got the tabroom.com material ready. I noticed that there was a button to click to ask for previous judge experience. Interesting. I really like the idea of being able to weed out the stinkers in advance. I mean, I know that if certain schools send me a new judge, I can trust that the judge has been trained. And I know that if other schools send me a new judge, the likelihood of that judge being able to find a cow pie in a dairy barn is pretty slim. I can make my challenges up front, if this works as expected.

Needless to say, O’C was way more involved in this than I was. The minute the invite was up he was culling it for…something, and reporting on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp and the Daily News. He’ll be tabbing down at the grammar school again, until the pressure proves too much for him, or the G Man gets married, whichever comes first. The G Man is also known to us as Cousin Joe, as one of my seniors’ father is, indeed, his cousin, so they’ll be shipping out early for the nuptials as well. Come on, Gazzola! Couldn’t you get married during Big Bronx and leave me out of it?

Somewhere by the end of the weekend it occurred to me that I had to procure trophies for the event, which I had honestly forgotten. The good news is I’ve got enough medals left over from last year to last until the end of the Chelsea Clinton administration, but as always there is need for new plastics. For some reason it takes me hours to figure out that there are 8 of these and 4 of those and 2 of the other in a very logical progression. My mind stops at this math, for some reason. Who knows?

Then there was prepping up for the new season. I’ve got to figure out some research training for Pfffters. In my mind one creates a library of research indexed by a straightforward pointer doc, but I think in their mind one reads a couple of articles on the internet and hopes for the best. Ah, youth.

Then there’s some fiction writing I’m doing, which I’ll preview here eventually, although it is not debate-related. And a bunch of other stuff, including prepping the sked for the upcoming NYCFL meeting this weekend. Then there was the fleshing out of the MHL Workshop agenda, and at some point I read the October resolution and wondered why they couldn’t come up with one that had both a pro and a con side, but that was foolish of me.

Anyhow, tonight we chez it up, and tomorrow I’ll pop in on the Speecho-Americans to see what they’re up to and to coordinate a bit with my speech coach.

September is the busiest month!