So what happened at Wee Sma Lex?
Well, first of all, on arrival we hit the Chinese restaurant with the buffet. These are the easiest way to ease the plebes into the idea that they have to pay for their food, because there’s no need to figure out who had what. All you do is divide by 11 and collect the dough. Before we reached that point, however, I was struck by how many of this year’s edition are barely out of the state of nature. The holding of a fork roughly the way a Neanderthal would wield a big stick while killing a mastodon, for instance. Unanchored pieces of crab flying through the air with abandon. Piles upon piles of food grabbed quickly just in case the restaurant suddenly closed and left them in the lurch.
My work is cut out for me.
Getting them housed went quickly. After the fact the girls complained that the woman at their house just dumped them in the living room and left them alone. They wanted her to be their new BFF? Then Mary Poppins told me how at Bump she had four boys who practically burned the house down while microwaving popcorn, setting the oven to cook for an hour, a culinary experiment shut down when the smoke practically sent the whole family out into the night. Obviously the lack of civilization spreads far and wide beyond Hudville, or maybe they just acquire it at our border crossing.
In any case, after everyone was settled, CP and I got together for a little socializing, and then I went back to the hotel and tucked myself in and, way too few hours later, I was helping tab WSL. By now I’m getting familiar enough with the general process, but here we had the added wrinkle of electronic ballots, which I haven’t done since the Bronx RR. Here you had some people getting ballots, some getting nothing but emails. It took me a while to get the hang of this, but I think I’m good now for Ridge in a couple of weeks. I don’t think the world at large is ready enough for us to try it at Princeton. I don’t think I am either.
The Sailors did well, with everyone winning a bit, including the rawest PFers. Not-Zach and George were in the top 5, and Not-Zach was 2nd speaker, so that was very good for them.
As always, on the ride back we stopped at Reins Deli, where the lack of civilization was even more pronounced. It took the waitress three trips to bring us all our food. By the time the last plate was set down, the first plate was empty. Simply put, they’re all a bunch of heathens. Which, probably, is an insult to heathens everywhere. Not to mention the fact that, when the bill went around the table and came back to me, they shorted me about twenty bucks.
And of course, on a trip that’s a straight line down one road, the bus driver managed to make a wrong turn. Fortunately it was a wrong turn that once upon a time was my shortcut around Hartford, but still. She pretty much almost missed every other real turn after that. Sigh. This is shaping up to be the year of the bus fiasco, and it’s still only November. Who knows where we’ll end up by February? I hope they have tournaments in Omaha then, because we’ll probably be driving to them by mistake if I even doze off for a minute. Wasn’t it Jefferson who said that the cost of getting home on a Hen Hud bus is constant vigilance?
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