Pups 2012

By the time I got home last night I was at death's door. A cold began sometime Saturday morning and hit escape velocity Sunday afternoon. No doubt the business of the weekend didn't help any.

We got off to a fine start. Some Pups yabbo lent us a PC that was, in a word, the sort of computer that you wouldn't mind lending to someone at a debate tournament because it would mean not having to look at it yourself. Every time I touched it I felt one step closer to leprosy. I let Ari use it for JV. This was, of course, Ari's first time in one of our tab rooms, and he kept repeating that he enjoyed the experience, and for all I know he was telling the truth. Then again, I was getting progressively sicker as time went by, so I could have missed the irony.

We started at the school where we spent most of last year. Having a sense of the place this time meant that we didn't have the startup problems of figuring out where to put what. Unfortunately, there was no wifi and marginal cell service, so a lot of the best laid plans aglayed on us, like tweeting and posting on tabroom. Throughout the weekend CP was clicking away on the new Starship Enterprise version of the program, and he showed us all sorts of nice features, but unless you are actually plugged in, so to speak, you might as well do your flowing on a shovel with a piece of chalk. It was entertaining to watch him code, though. First of all, he's fast as hell. Second, he has this keyboard from the Land of Lost Prosthetics, where he sort of sticks his hands up the rear end of the computer— But you don't want to know about that.

MJP went like a charm. We got mutual pairings up through about round five, at which point we had a couple of 1-2 pairings, but all things considered, if you debated, you debated in front of a judge your opponent had ranked as you had. 4 rather than 5 categories helps with that. Next time, though, we'll get clearer on what it means to be "circuit."

The second day we were at our old Hillhouse venue, which I've come to know and love because it's familiar and there's refrigerators, sinks and microwaves in the tab room. Again, no wifi, though. We ran maybe a half hour late when everything was said and done, but this is entirely ascribable to judges who take their own sweet time picking up their ballots. A couple of people were repeat offenders. The official name for this people is unprintable in a family blog, but feces above the neck should help pin it down. These are the people who make everyone late. We can turn a round over in about 15 minutes, with MJP, from last ballot to new ballots on the table. Sitting around waiting for the last ballots to come in? Ain't no way of speeding that sucker up. A couple of people are notorious in tab as slowpokes, and we hesitate to give them ballots at all if we can help it. We like to be in bed at a reasonable hour, and considering that we're the first ones in and the last ones out, well, you get the picture. I'll provide you with a list on request, if you're thinking of creating a blacklist for your own tournament.

My favorite no-show was a Pup, of all things, on Sunday, where I really wanted to rip him a new one, but instead our wonderful judgemeister simply made him feel like total crap and we gave him a JV round as a reward for sleeping in. There is no sleeping in at tournaments, especially your tournament. Especially when I was up until two—

Oh, yeah. So after Saturday was in the can, JV and Ari and I went out to dinner, and I got back at 12:30 to my hotel to find that we missed the inevitable lpw back in round 6. The best news was that it was among top seeds, meaning neither of them debated in the run off, and when we switched them, the runoff break point held, so no problem there. But simply correcting the error didn't help. I had to reenter the entire runoff, and then re-pair the entire doubles round. Oy. I guess we should be happy that it was a reparable error, but still, I could have been sleeping. Missing lpws is the one most consistent error in tabbing. Come to think of it, it's pretty much the only error. From now on I'm writing on the ballots that judges need to write LPW at about the size of the Ritz, to insure that we see it. The tiny checkmark just doesn't hack it.

Anyhow, Sunday went okay, and since CP's kid was in finals, I was able to hit the road, confident that he could handle any emergency. If he were willing to pull his hands from out of the wazoo of his computer for any length of time, that is. On my trip home I got about a million texts about the Panivore's lost wallet and Panivore Junior winning DI. In an organized world, instead of Noah getting a trophy he would have gotten Sophie's wallet, but I gather that they worked all that out. And as I said, I arrived home ready for the undertaker. Today I did indeed not go to work, and sat around blowing my nose, napping and writing this. And calling in to a 2-hour DJ meeting. Sigh...