Week 107: Catching up on everything else
Six small bits this week because I have spent all my free time from Thursday through Tuesday writing various press releases for the ICT and IPNCT. I'm going to be spending Sunday night doing the same thing in the airport, so next week might be more of the same. Nothing on the book has advanced this week, but everything else in my world has.
My Saturday
Last Saturday, I got to help out at a tournament at Pitt. They've run a high school tournaments for 23 years, though the last two years have been ruinous to their spring tournaments. When I was sick, the spring Battle of the Burgh was the tournament I came back to read. So getting it back to in person, and just getting it back was important to me.
The surprising thing was that it was small. It was only five teams when I signed in on Monday, and the squall of snow that coated the area for sunrise Saturday knocked another team out of the event. Still the four teams that came were game to play, and we did a triple-round robin. If you're familiar with Charlie Steinhice's rules, the operative clause here is the third "Getting stomped beats not playing." Small local tournaments are the thing where readers are most needed these days, and I was happy to do it.
I'm missing out on this weekend's tournament at Allderdice, which got rescheduled from January when omicron shuffled the schedule. I'm thinking that Pittsburgh is not yet as robust a market to support two tournaments on consecutive weekends. We may have been a few years ago, and we may be again but it will require effort to remobilize may teams which are missing this year.
The second part of my Saturday was to go down and watch Catie dance at her dance team's competition. I got to watch her solo and then watch her manage to the get the high score not only her group (of four performances), but win her first first place overall (of 20+ performances).
She's been putting in the effort dancing for seven years now, and while she's improved tremendously, she's always believed herself the second or third fiddle for her age group on the team, even as she was promoted up to dance with the older girls in groups.
So why am I including this here? Because I think she might have finally gotten a lesson I'm trying to capture for the book: that improvement isn't visible in the scores, but you can sense it in yourself, and then suddenly it shifts and becomes something. In quiz bowl: you get smoked on a question and you can't imagine how your opponent did it. Then you miss out on the question, but just barely because you knew that clue before. Then you get the question just ahead of the other team, and then you get the question and your opponents can't imagine how you did it. Catie just shifted from barely behind to barely ahead. And now she has a bunch of younger teammates who can't imagine how she did it, but I hope she can inspire them to do the same.
My trip to Chicago
This weekend I'll be going to Chicago for the ICT and IPNCT, which has been surprisingly a source of much agita for me. What worries me is that this is the first time for a lot of people where we're interacting with a bunch of people whose pandemic experience is completely different. We're not even close to normal being distributed evenly across the country. In many cases it will be the first time people will encounter people who lived under more strict and less strict at the same time, and that's going to be new, as you are challenged in both directions at the same time.
The second source of agita is I'm not sure these are the same people I interacted with before. I'm worried that, deprived of normal interaction, how much people's internet personas have become their default interaction. Given the level of stressfulness that quiz bowl interactions can achieve online, I have no wish to see those moods become standard in real life.
What I'll be reading on the plane
I was listening to a podcast when they mentioned a quote by Billy Beane about choice roughly "When you're forced to decide, you're at a disadvantage." I was about to search for the exact phrasing, when I remembered I had a copy in storage from when I had my own apartment, and thought well I could search for it at some point.
Later in the week, I realized that I probably could pull books out of storage to give as prizes for the tournament, and since I had books I could give for free from storage, and I wouldn't have to run out to a bookstore for such a small tournament, I ran down to the garage and pulled open one tub of books. I got through the first stack and pulled ten books out that would work. I then saw the second stack in the box was the Traveller's History series, which I had bought all the ones available after using the Spain volume for questions many years ago. After pulling that stack out, I found a History of Paraguay I had bought but never read, and realizing we were in the section of books that were in my bedroom to read, I searched to the bottom of the stack, and found Moneyball.
And now a little secret: Despite it being the book people think most closely resembles what I write about for quiz bowl, I don't think I ever finished reading Moneyball, and I never saw the whole movie. My knowledge of what happened with the Oakland A's in that era was from watching columnists and bloggers interpret what was going on, so while I did read about it and followed the points as it was happening, I don't think I ever saw it depicted from A-Z. I'm hoping to finish it on the plane, so I can see if I can find another throughline to tie together everything I've written in this draft.
My office
April 1 is also the turn of the quarter, so my office is now checking who's willing to go in and who's willing to work from home all through. The past three months I've been officially flex (1-2 days/week in office) but in practice I've only gone in once due to a power failure on my road. The office is apparently sort of back to open, but they never bothered to make a formal announcement for the building I work in, and the official form I need to submit to go in never was updated to allow 2022 dates to be entered. I'm now thinking if I want to support having an office to go to in future, I need to formally make it flex in practice.
My planting
The one thing I've been looking forward to this winter has been when my parents' anniversary gift of a seed catalog was converted into seeds for the garden. I was expecting my seeds to arrive next weekend while I was in Chicago, but they came on Monday. So I've now begun planning out all the seedling growth I've got to work on next week.
When I started planning out the seed purchase in December, I figured I could very easily keep a garden up during my lunch hour while working at home. The recent office drama has me slightly worried about whether I could maintain the garden between flex time and championship weekends. But I have to at least try.
Getting freshmen this year
One of the things I've promised myself is to actively go out and use this time before the nationals to promote seniors submitting information on where they are going to college. While we do this annually during the weeks of the HSNCT and SSNCT, that really covers only the teams that are attending nationals. That misses all the other teams who are done for the year, or will not be going to nationals. This weekend is really as early as feels safe to ask students where they are going to college, as the last schools to offer slots in their freshman class traditionally release their offers around the beginning of April. I plan to send an email to all coaches in the next week to alert all of them to tell their students to submit their information about next year to the webform. When we use normal methods we usually get around 1500 students, but last year we only got around 800. I'd like to have this year's list be over 2000. The more names we get, the more likely it is that new schools will have 2-3 names that can be brought together, and that means it's more likely to form teams for next year.