Judging

• Apparently, the newspaper got it wrong that Mr. Singer would attempt to appoint a successor for Town Moderator if he were elected to the Board of Selectmen. It’s still not clear to me who would. The Board of Selectmen would be a possibility, although I would think that it could be Town Meeting. However, it’s possible that the Town Meeting has delegated that authority to the Board of Selectmen via their annual vote to let them fill appointments. But Mr. Singer would need to get elected, first, anyway.
• Making the Selectmen’s race more interesting is that there’s a Bay Path senior who plans on running.
• I’ve basically gotten the custodian of Jessi’s former 457 plan to admit that they gave us an incorrect 1099-R, but that they won’t send a corrected one. I may call the IRS and try to get them involved in correcting the situation.
• I made enough money judging last year that I’m claiming it on my taxes. I hope they accept my assertion that it’s “hobby income” and not “self-employment income” and thus not subject to self-employment tax. Especially as I consider it a hobby and not employment.
• I’ll be judging this weekend at the Conflux prerelease, on Saturday at TJ Collectibles and on Sunday at Rising Phoenix Games.

• As mortgage rates have dropped significantly, I’m working on refinancing my mortgage. I find it bizarre that when staying with the same bank, they need to do an appraisal to ensure that we have a low enough loan-to-value ratio, when they’re already taking the risk of having loaned us the amount of money that we have out. In fact, by lowering the payment all the refinancing is doing is lowering their risk. And yet they have to follow their procedures. Truly bizarre. On the plus side, if the appraisal comes in at less than the tax valuation, I can bring it to the Assessor’s office and potentially lower my property taxes.
• This weekend, I’m head judging the North East Open, with the complicated logistics of having many draft pods running at once within one event. Hopefully, it will be a fun and interesting event.

I’ve hardly judged at all since Hannah was born, but I do enjoy it and plan to continue to do it as much as I can. I’ll be judging at a PTQ in Hartford this Saturday.

But I won’t, for instance, be judging at NY Comic Con because I don’t want to be away for home for that long.

• Last Saturday’s PTQ was busy and a long day, with 154 players. But, it was fun and a good event.
• Yesterday evening, Jessi found a black longhair cat by our house that seemed hungry and cold, but obviously belongs to somebody due to his collar and friendliness. Jessi let him inside and fed him. Animal Control gave us a collar with a message attached (presumably to call them if found) and told us to put him back out to see if he would go home. He was still on our porch this morning, though.

• I’ll be head judging a PTQ this Saturday at TJ Collectibles.
• There’s a group of people trying to stop the Access Road from Rte. 169 to the Southbridge Industrial Park, in the hopes of having the road go from Rte. 20 in Charlton (and through my land) instead. It seems that perhaps the effort to change the route is a bit late, since they’re trying to stop the Conservation Commission’s approval of the route, and they really should have tried to change the proposed route many years ago. So, I place the odds of the road eventually going through my land as rather slim, but there’s still hope.
• Yesterday Hannah turned 5 months old. She’s still doing wonderful. She’s very much more seeing and interacting with people and objects, which is really nifty to see.

• Last weekend’s prerelease was rather disappointing with the new prereleases-everywhere format. Attendance was extremely below our expectations, and a lot of the players seemed rather unhappy with the changes as well. Hopefully, Wizards will wise up and figure out a better approach.
• I bought a Super Nintendo at a yard sale over the summer, and I finally bothered to hook it up and it works great. I thought that we still had a bunch of games for it at my parents’ house, but apparently they got rid of them at a Historical Society Yard Sale at some point. So, I’m slowly working on buying controllers and games on eBay. But if anybody has any old SNES stuff they’d like to get rid of, let me know.
• Speaking of getting rid of stuff, we may be selling off portions of our Magic card collection that are worth anything soon. To a large extent, the cards are just sitting around our bedroom taking up space. If anyone’s looking for anything in particular (like Judge foils?) before we sell it to a store, let me know.
• Hannah ate her first “solid” food yesterday evening. (That is, baby-rice-cereal-mixed-with-breast-milk.) She did a wonderful job with it.
• I’ll be head judging a PTQ at TJ Collectibles on October 18.

This weekend for the Shards of Alara Prerelease, I’ll be the head judge at:

• Saturday: The Game Castle in Londonderry, NH.
• Sunday: Rising Phoenix Games in Cherry Valley, MA. (With a special appearance by Rob Alexander in the morning.)

This prerelease is working rather different from previous ones, in that there are a lot more locations. TJ Collectibles has 8 event locations this weekend. So, things should be interesting. I’m looking forward to a fun weekend.

• Last weekend, I head judged a Magic PTQ with 161 players, which is rather large for this type of event, and the second-largest event I’ve ever head judged. There was a lot to do (including dealing with a table collapse), but our staff dealt with it rather well.
• A few weeks ago, we signed up with Netflix, primarily to continue watching Star Trek past the Next Generation series. I’m quite impressed with the service so far.
• We’re continuing to go monthly to Scrabble night at the Charlton Library. We may look at going to a more competitive event at some point (primarily for Jessi’s benefit).
• For the Shards of Alara prerelease, I’ll be head judging at some store in New Hampshire (I don’t know the name or specific location offhand) on Saturday the 27th, and at Rising Phoenix Games on Sunday the 28th, as part of the TJ Collectibles network of prereleases.
• I have Jury Duty in 4 weeks.
• Hannah is growing quickly. She can stand with support, and smiles when she sees me, and I’m sure that before long she’ll have the run of the house. She started sleeping in her own room last week.

Due to a last-minute cancellation by the person who was going to be there, I’ve just been contracted as the Head Judge of the PTQ this Saturday run by TJ Collectibles in Hartford.

Saturday, I went to the Eventide prerelease. My lack of preparation wasn’t really an issue, as I was primarily a money-taker again. However, for Shards of Alara, I’ll be up in New Hampshire in charge of a new prerelease location.

Sunday, my brother (who deals with video processing for a living) and I fixed my home digital recording setup that I was having issues with. One of the other things I’d added to my cable system was a distribution amplifier. The amplifier improved the signal for my other digital devices (cable modem, and direct to the HDTV), as well as the devices reading the analog channels, but apparently it was too much signal for the digital tuner on the HVR-1600. We stuck another splitter on just the input to the digital tuner on the card, to reduce the signal by another 7dB, and that apparently attenuated the signal enough for it to work correctly. Rather odd, since the signal level it was getting before should have been pretty close to the level that enters the house, but everything seems to be working for now.