Quite a blustery day.

The Princeton area has over a foot (home has more like 15-18 inches). EWR just reopened a bit earlier. JFK and LaGuardia are still closed. New record snow fall in central park (26.9 inches).

Turns out today is Dad's birthday (using the Chinese lunar calendar). Not one person in our family knew that he was born on the Chinese lantern festival. Now we do.

Summary of the past two days: NAQT-SCT sucked more than usual. There's an obscene amount of trash in the tournament, which is, of course, not good for our team. And I am still slow: recovered some speed after last week's ACF regionals, but still nowhere near how I played last year at ACF regionals. And I let Dan and Jordan steal quite a few buzzes from underneath me. Some memorable powers: Paul Erdos after the lead-in clue on amphetamine; muon after "half-life in rest frame is very short, produced in upper atmosphere"; Schroedinger's equation after the lead-in on its derivation. Sadly, I don't seem to be able to power math toss-ups in NAQT... it is a phenomenon known as "burden of knowledge". When too many possible things fits the description of the things described, it is impossible to pick which is the correct answer. Also, NAQT often entertains questions that deliberately misleads novice players to an obvious answer with an ambiguous clue (for example: British nurse that turns out not to be Florence Nightingale). So I always get extra-cautious, to my own disadvantage, when the lead-in clue is too obvious (like, for example, a clue that would be a give-away in an ACF tournament). [Also, I think the questions, especially science-wise, are of inferior quality compared to yesteryears.]

The A team (Lenny, Dan, Jordan, I) [originally it would've been Lenny, Joran, me (three grad stooges), and Tara; but Chris dropped out last minute citing snow as a reason, so instead of two "slightly weaker" Div I teams, we recombined to form only one rather strong Div I team, and put in two Div II teams (since Tara is still Div II eligible)] took second place, losing to UVA's A team. (We had an embarrassing loss to their B team, partially due to arrogance, partially due to a really really bad packet. If we hadn't lost that one, we would've tied for first and forced a tie-breaker.)

The B and C teams in Div II, however, were screwed over a technicality. The B team was sure they finished first: they were undefeated in playoffs. However, it turns out that in the playoff bracket, because there were a non-even number of teams, UMCP put in a house team, which as it turns out, didn't exist. Rather than counting that as a default win, they just dropped that game from the schedule altogether, which resulted in several teams with fewer games played than others. So while the B team lost fewer games than any other team, and have the best head-to-head record of all in the division, because they only won the same number of games as 3 other teams (including the C team), they were required to play a tie-breaker, which, of course, they lost, due to the already-lowered adrenaline levels.

As a consequence, the A team was also screwed: originally we were ready to leave at 6pm. Because of the tie-breaker, we were delayed to roughly 7. And the snow started to pile on. So we were forced to stay at a Ramada Inn in College Park.

This morning, we dug the car out under 7 inches of snow. We improvised by ways of hotel towels.