I think I have recovered from my excitement over the birth of the young royal, who will presumably be refered to henceforth as Prince G.A.L.

Moving offices at the DJ has resulted in lots of flying debris and general dysfunction, which some might say is no different from normal but I would suggest otherwise. The amount of flying debris most of the time is quite manageable, whereas at the moment, I fear slightly for my life. The literal move is the first weekend of August. Between now and then we’re all packing away, and every now and then someone rushes into my office after an explosion to see if I’m still alive, and so far I have managed to answer in the affirmative. If things change and I answer in the negative, I’ll let you know.

I’ve finished up the author page for Amazon, and in so doing realized that I haven’t updated my jimmenick.com website yet to launch Summer Street. Last week I started updating everything just because the new debate season was slowly approaching, but I got distracted when the NYSDCA link was amiss. (It’s since been fixed.) I’ll get back to all of that forthwith.

And I’ve collected as much as I could find about Academy Debate, which will be good to go at Monticello, but which isn’t really explained anywhere particularly accessible. It turned out that this was actually my idea in the first place, which means that I’ve got to get on the stick to keep its momentum. We’ve only done it once, in January at Byram Hills, and realistically we won’t do it that often, although there is a nudge in the back of my mind thinking that we could incorporate training sessions into MHLs if we really get into the swing of this. I’ll keep that on the backburner, but it is there. I’ve talked to people about tournaments that do things like force all the debaters to do extemp and the like, and I really love that sort of thing. But you can only do so much at once. We need to get Academy locked into the system as originally presented before moving on, and that means putting together a document of explanation, and given where we are on the calendar, doing it pretty soon. With luck, I’ll have it done by the end of the weekend or the beginning of next week. It's mostly just editing the bits and pieces already created.

I will admit, it’s nice to be busy again. My summer hiatus started back in April, and then there was traveling in June, so at this point I’m all charged up and rarin’ to go. Those who had institute chores never stopped going. And then there were those like O’C, who has spent the summer so far at a month-long salt-and-pepper shaker convention in Las Vegas. During the lulls in the festivities, he’s found time to go off on the search for lost Liberace artifacts in a city known to overflow with them. Presumably this includes Liberace salt-and-pepper shakers. Whatever. I’m sure he’s full of pent up debate energy. And also pent up salt-and-pepper.