Debate: Ridge-a-Roni

I find it interesting that Ridge has moved about a half hour closer to my school than it used to be. Much closer than I remembered. That’s a good thing. I’d much rather have a short drive to Ridge than a long one.

It was nice to do a high school again. 5 prelims, endless elims. At first we were in a room with good comfy chairs, but it was way too many of us and we quickly drifted over to our normal venue in the Media Center. (You would call this the library, but that’s not a tony enough name for the folks in Basking Ridge.) You can fit kazoodles of tabbers in this place and not even notice them very often, except when the policy folk get overexcited, which does happen occasionally. LD and PF tab never get overexcited. We don’t know the meaning of the word.

Things went fine for the most part, except for confusion over who owned which judges. PF liked to think that they were theirs, while we liked to think that they were ours. PF was being run by people who had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. LD was being run by me and O’C. It was a bloodbath.

On the plus side, we had a “Jack.” Every tab room needs one, a major domo who is always there and who can solve every problem. Jack is a good name for such a person, and in this case, happened to actually be his name. We would just shout out “Jack!” when something was askew, and there was Jack, skewing it back up. Ridge happens to be slightly larger than the Pentagon, without the internal order of roomage, so it’s a major miracle to get from one area to another. I’ve been there enough now to have only gotten lost once, but it was for eleven hours, it being that kind of place. As I say, big and confusing.

I tried to keep CP around for various purposes, since I was using the notification system again (despite Ridge’s crappy wireless; I ended up plugging in my MiFi and paying the $5 for a day, which meant that when it ran out on the second day, it was either pay another $5 or let it go: I let it go). Unfortunately, he was the quality in the pool, probably ranked by everyone there as a 1, including the people who didn’t rank. So we didn’t see him much except at the short gathering Friday night at the motel, attended by everyone in the universe. I had brought nuts and cheese, which were quickly devoured. The other people were just nuts and cheesy. What can I say?

O’C didn’t wander off too often, although at those times when he insisted on blasting out “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” we were all wishing that he would wander off. JV was on burger patrol. There was one team that refused to use the other team’s coin for the PF flip because they had cursed it with negative energy. (Shouldn’t that be con energy?) The guys who had looked all professional last week running the Tiggers looked like normal human beings again judging PF this week.

And so it goes. This weekend I’m off. Yes, off. There had originally been no tournament on the schedule, so I made other plans. When a tournament came back on to the schedule, it was (thankfully) too late to change those plans. Whoopty damn do, as Clarence Thomas might put it.