In which we put another pre-season to bed

The last invitational of the season is over. Lakeland is now history.

Kaz and I ran 6 divisions plus 1, although I have to admit that the MS Parli activity wasn’t exactly demanding. Occasionally hearing a passel of high-pitched voices in a room off the library was about the extent of my involvement. The door would open and the room would spit out an adult who would talk to Sheryl, and then the adult would disappear back into that particular universe, and that was that. MS PF was a little more noticeable, but petite and more of a round robin than anything else. We kept throwing lots of Lakeland kids at the judging slots. The HS PF and LD were pretty normal, although small enough that judging was an issue. We kept borrowing the traditional anyone-who-can-breathe warm bodies from the policy pool to solve our emergencies when they arose. I mean, we had to double-flight a Quarters round! Yikes.

The plus 1 was the most fun. At roughly the crack of dawn a help request came over on tabroom. Virginia was mired in its inability to enter results (an easy one, as they didn’t understand the process for tenths), and couldn’t pair the manifestly unpairable rounds for a CFL qualifier, a not-so-easy one. Usually I let Sheryl pair the unpairable but I had my shot at it this time, with quite pleasing results. A few rounds required brute force hand-pairing, but the 6th or 7th round, I forget which (these people were nothing if not intense) was paired by tabroom in a trice. I have a feeling that if they had had tabroom doing it the right way from the start (they already had a couple of rounds done when I got involved), all would have been fine. The take-away, though, is that when there’s trouble afoot, it can be solved long distance. That’s probably the best thing about tabroom. You are not alone. But honestly, hand-pairing is not its forte. Since you hardly ever have to hand-pair, that’s not the worst thing in the world.

In other Lakeland news, I got to introduce Sheryl and Sara S to the good restaurant not quite across the street (they were shocked and awed that such a place existed), we got to look at the menus for the DisAd to plan our appetizer attack six months from now, I made the last pending DisAd dinner reservation at Universal, we were not at Districts, and I was a mere 15 minutes’ drive from the chez. And next weekend I have off. Off? Could that be? Really? It’s hard to imagine. How will I pass the time? (I’ll come up with something…)