Current mood:	me
Current music:	Afternoon Delight!
Entry tags:	logorrhea, puzzles, trivia

Can't Fight Fate
It's easy to get the impression that this here blog doesn't exactly suffer from too much variety.  Since the weather got bad enough around here for me to not want to go outside and do anything physical (which has led to me feeling winded after walking up three flights of stairs), all I ever seem to write about is puzzles, trivia, or my internal wiring.  What follows is a listing of upcoming events in the next two months of my life, which will likely provide as much introspection as even my most self-referential blatherings.

Tomorrow afternoon I leave with the UNM College Bowl team for the Region 13 ACUI tournament (aka "Regionals") in Colorado Springs.  We are the defending champs and have a strong team again this year, but (for reasons I'd rather not explicitly state), ahem, "it's anybody's ballgame".  One tangential goal is to actually play in more preliminary rounds than I moderate (last year: 6 rounds played and 7 rounds moderated out of the 14 rounds held over 9 very long hours), and I suppose it would be good if I didn't nitpick the gang to death.  I get back on Saturday, but may blog about it anyhow, should the UC-CS fitness center not be sufficiently worthy of my nervous energy.

At 3am MST on February 29th, I'll have my first real go at one of the Nikoli Puzzle Championships.  This time it's a Kakuro, and as I was in the midst of explaining during another rambly (and temporarily postponed) puzzle-themed message, I'm actually pretty good at these.  I'm going the full monty on this one too -- I plan to spend a few hours over the upcoming days getting my speed back up to where it will need to be to compete, and I'll probably set my alarm for 2:30am and shower up before the big event.  If my time comes anywhere near the performance on the most recent Kakuro championship puzzle (Vol. 20 on that page), I'll be in good shape.  If it's more like the previous Kakuro championship puzzle, I may as well sleep in.

March 7th and 8th I'm attempting to host Albuquerque Dorkfest 2008 (tagline: "The most fun I've ever had").  The idea is to run a music round (guaranteed to crown a new champ, as the previous (and only two-time) winner is out of town), followed by quizbowl theme packets.  The next night is a low-stakes, friendly poker tournament (or two) followed by some bughouse -- a team chess game that I'm not nearly as good at as I should be.  The grouping of the events in this particular fashion is no coincidence; I don't expect a helluvalot of overlap between the participants on the two separate nights, but figure intra-evening events to see lots of repeats.  All are welcome!  Yes, that means even you, dear reader(s), skimming this wherever you are.  All events will be hosted at the Luxurious Zuffranieri Villa (which inspired the name of this here blog, as you've probably figured out by now).

Incidentally, the afternoon of the 8th is the 4th Annual New Mexico High School Quizbowl Championship -- which is in the running for the longest-running longest-titled event in all of the ABQ Northeast Heights.  I plan to moderate, tally scores, and probably boss people around, per usual.

The following Saturday (or Sunday, or whatever day it is after the time-change) I'll be taking the Indian Sudoku Qualifying test, as part of the US team's preparation for the upcoming World Championship.  This should give us a good idea of where the four of us stand, as well as perhaps a peek into which puzzle styles we'll be seeing a month later in Goa.  As an aside -- this is actually a really fun time of the year, as the puzzle championships from around the world (hopefully) trickle into our clutches.

In early April, me and 66.7% of the regular boys head to Chattanooga to team up with another solid contributor at TRASHionals 11.  We're looking to improve upon our 3rd/8th/7th/5th/3rd-place finishes from 2002-2006; we're also looking to forget our performance last year, where we finished...nobody really knows, but not in the top 6, and probably closer to 9th or 10th.  I don't even know that the TRASH people have a proper ordering.  It's not going to be easy without our most consistent second-day player (with more unique knowledge than any of the other three of us), but with enthusiasm appropriately tempered, it almost certainly will be another fun time, and a good way to catch up with old friends.

After TRASHionals but before the WSC, I'm going to head to the Big Apple for about a week of big, expensive fun.  My sister has been kind enough to let me come and stay with her, and if things go right, I will be heading to both Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, and maybe not even by myself!  Either way -- my first trip to NYC is sure to be a blast, so long as I don't, you know, get mugged.  And if you're scoring at home, should everything go according to plan, the tallies will read: Visits to Chattanooga 4, Visits to NYC 1.  Ugh.

Then on April 11th or 12th or whenever, I take the 30(ish)-hour plunge and head to India with a single purpose: sightseeing.  Err...I mean watching the US team win the gold (one way or another -- more on this as it becomes available) at the 3rd Annual World Sudoku Championship.

Not too shabby, eh?  All the above, in addition to four daily top-notch Nikoli puzzles, timed runs at the daily Journal sudoku, untimed miserable runs at month-old NY Times crosswords (also in the Journal), twice-weekly pub quizzing (4-quiz winning streak!), daily Jumble runs, and at least one thing left out of the above for superstitious reasons -- what does it all mean?

As Marie says, "Fighters fight"; it's even there in the very descriptive title of the clip!.  So what do dorks do?  Much of the stuff expounded upon in the previous paragraphs, I would say.  I do believe there is such a thing as one's "calling", and while I would have a hard time claiming mine is "Cosmopolitan Cerebral Competitor" (for one thing, the money's just not there (Ten-large ain't good enough for you? -- ed.  Not if I perform as badly as I did this past year.  Were you actually there?  I didn't see you mentioned in any of the writeups. -- ed.  Thanks, thanks a lot.)), I do think there's no good reason (and very little likelihood) I would ever give up these pursuits.

The future may hold actually doing something with my (very game-y, of course) reality program idea.  It may also, or instead, see me trying to open my (still 100% free of any plausible break-even business model!) "school of gaming and puzzles".  Or it may hold neither, and watch me keep underachieving in my current job, or burning out, or getting a new job and possibly doing both of those.

The chances of me getting off my butt and turning my mental (in a good way...err, right?) lifestyle into a career aren't very good, I'll admit.  But then again, the chances of me getting a (for me) radically different haircut were slim, and that happened today.  So who knows?