This will be short because it's fair week, and other things are moving forward.
My portion of the freshman contact list is complete, but it's got to go downstream before it's actually complete. I was right in what I suspected to be true. Google digest emails are very different from what news.google.com produces currently. Seeing that made me resurvey the list after I'd gone through the digests, and that pass of the data netted 30% additional hits, with a major vein of information around graduations. I've got to figure out a way to incorporate this knowledge into next year's procedures.
The letters have begun to flow, I’m still over 200 to go if the numbers from last week are any indication, but we’re moving forward. I have a few additional twists I want to add to a couple of the letters going out, so they moved to the end of the month. But it’s all queued up for tomorrow morning, and the morning after that sees another set of letters, and so on and so on. When I’m really flying at work, I can feel the obstacles fall in sequence, and I can feel my momentum. It’s starting to feel like that with these letters.
That momentum is good, as I'm in a weird place this week, summer has disappeared too quickly, I've got another funeral to attend, and my regular schedule has been slammed as people need to be places and their normal delivery driver is working at the fair. Or the situation is reversed and instead of me covering a couple hours at the fair, I was left to man the booth solo all day as other crises demand peoples' time. It's the kind of situation where there’s open time while driving which gives your mind time to dump feelings of regret on you, where you should be somewhere else doing something else.
The last week of summer is rough for me in that it’s when you realize the things you should have done got pushed out by what absolutely had to be done. I had a lot of that this year, and it’s understandable to have some regrets about my choices. Psychologically I don’t give myself enough credit for the good things that got done, because I never make the choice between the actual accomplishments and the things I wanted to do that were replaced. I always judge the choice between the things I wanted to do and the extra hour of sleep on a Sunday, or the time spent relaxing as the batch job runs. I always think I could have done it all, or at least more. The drive between things in an otherwise empty car doesn’t help, and you start itemizing the things you need to do immediately upon getting out of the car, only to need to do more things that keep you from your goal. And in the last week of summer before the demands of school come, you start collecting regrets in retrospection.
My regrets for the 2023-24 school year:
I didn't get the book done this summer. This is given. I had planned to do this for my 50th birthday, and then it became for my 51st. Well, there’s enough stuff to do between now and next Tuesday to make that a non-starter. But I think part two is organized successfully so I know what pieces need to be fit in there, and part three is laid out as a set of pieces. There was progress, but not enough, and it grinds on me.
I didn't go to SporcleCon. That is this weekend, and while I had high hopes traveling to Detroit last summer, as soon as I realized it was the final weekend of the fair, I knew I couldn't do it. Dana needs an extra set of hands to close this fair off; without Judie, she's not going to be able to it in a reasonable time. I need to get back in practice, having missed WQC because of similar scheduling conflicts, and having missed the normal summer cycle of playing trivia nights and eating out. But there simply hasn't been time. Not even the temptation of the same competition that I played at the downtown casino coming to the bar at the closer racetrack has gotten me out of the house. But more than that, I need to establish that connection again with that section of the quizzing community to generate new potential coaches for schools, and new contacts for quiz bowl. The pipeline of people who got into quizzing and then started helping out at quiz bowl used to be strong, we had a long line of interested people, and COVID kind of narrowed that channel, and made it seemingly flow in one direction. I’d like to believe there’s a connection there that could be resparked, if only by reminding a lot of former players who do bar trivia that they could help out and would be welcome again after years of the cold shoulder. But as with anything, the first step is being present, and seeing it approach without acting on being present brings pangs of regret.
I didn't do enough to supply the Seton team with new material. I haven't gone through the other taped episodes yet. I need a rainy day to do that (hopefully Sunday will be rainy enough for that. I haven't gone through lesson plans for the students who have gone through two years of practice. I can rerun the lessons I had done earlier for new players, but I'm not guaranteed to have new recruits for this year. I haven't compiled the list of quizlet cards that I wanted to. I haven’t turned study sheets into notecards, and notecards into slideshows for the team’s google drive.
Finally, I feel like I didn’t do enough this year to make real progress on making quiz bowl and NAQT a success. You can parse this statement exactly in the way this implies. I consider a success to mean that it is functioning well enough and perpetuating itself well enough, that if I walked away, I would have no worries. There’s an ocean between these successes and actual failure, and there have been many years when I’ve felt like we were treading water. When we started out I had a bunch of big spectacular goals, goals that seemed ridiculous, but were markers to judge progress. You’ve seen some of them: Teams from all 50 states at nationals, 500 colleges playing in Sectionals, 3000 freshmen connected with colleges, 25% of high schools playing quiz bowl. They’re ridiculously oversized, and are probably never going to happen. But I keep them as goals because they are things that nobody else is going to be able to do, the quiz bowl groups that aren’t NAQT may be successful in reaching their goal, but I see that in doing that, they put limitations on themselves that I could never accept. So while I regret not reaching the goals this year, it’s that regret that pushes me to keep trying.