[So, what is the proper order for eating a bag of Hershey’s Minatures? If you ask me, you polish off the Mr. Goodbars to begin with. Then you move into the poorly spelled Krackels. They’re not as good as a Goodbar, but at least they have some texture to them.

By then you are ready to appreciate the raw melty milk chocolate experience of a regular Hershey’s. “Wow,” you say, “that’s nuts. Straight chocolate. Who thought that up?”

The last thing you take on is the Dark Chocolate Hershey’s, not because they are the worst, but because you are ready for a more nuanced experience by then. Your chocolate hunger has settled to the point where you can eat them slowly – which is the only way to eat dark chocolate in my experience – and stretch out your last few remaining bars.

Of course, I would be the last to contend that you should maintain clear boundaries between sections. It’s always nice to interleave a Krackel or even a regular Hershey’s into the Goodbar phase. And if you didn’t mix something else into the Krackel phase, you would surely go nuts – no one needs that much puffed rice.

I think it would be an excellent programming exercise for someone working on their client-side skills to build a little app that lets me input the quantity of Goodbars/Krackels/Hershey’s/Dark Chocolate Hershey’s and spit out the optimum eating plan.]

Last Friday was a great day. It was the classic good-news/bad-news day. (I still have a job, lest overanticipation ruin the moment.)

By way of background, we had poker Thursday night at my house with the CC folks, and it was a lot of fun, but it went till after midnight, and I drank and overate a ton.

Truly, trucks were backing the M&Ms and chips and cashews up to my face and dumping them in. New York was bidding on the rights to mix garbage with the nuts to solve their disposal problem, confident that I would never notice a few million tons of trash mixed in with all the other junk I was throwing down my gullet.

So the next day when I went to work, I was feeling exhausted and disgusting and bloated all day long. Getting up early to get to work early didn't help, either. Didn’t help me feel less exhausted, and I didn’t get that much extra work done despite showing up early.

In short, I was a wreck. However, several weeks ago, I had signed up for a fencing tournament that night. Even though I felt about as quick and agile as a garden slug who had stayed up too late playing poker last night, I was going to force myself to go. It was a D & under tournament, which means I would be fencing fencers two classes better than me along with hopefully a person or two in my range. I was not looking forward to my work day finishing and having to go take a pummeling at fencing

My work day turned out great, despite the falling asleep in my cereal and feeling like I was going to explode from a surfeit of calories. I got lots of work done, and even logged a few extra hours on both ends of my workday. Plus, it was a payday. Even though my paycheck is always spent within a half hour of its hitting my account, paydays always feel extra-special.

The end of my day rolls around, and it once again hits me how tired I am. Any last shreds of energy I may have had, I had exhausted trying to get through my work day without getting fired. Notwithstanding, I hauled myself over to fencing at 7pm. Even the walk to the salle was more than I could handle. The plan was that I would go to the tournament, get knocked out in five or ten seconds, catch a bus home and be in bed and asleep by nine, but at least I would have been at the tournament that I had promised myself I would go to. It would be a good experience. So I paid my five bucks, I suited up, and then I waited till almost 8 for us to get started.

Once we started fencing, suddenly everything started happening like some kind of crazy magic was at play. I was only dreaming of maybe winning 3 of my 5 pool rounds (everyone fences everyone in your group of 5 or 6). I would have felt really good about my performance for the evening if I could be winning 60%. But I won all 5 bouts! And won most of them handily, too! You could have knocked me over with a feather.

At the end of the pools, I was ranked an amazing 5th in the overall group of 31! It was too stunning for words. I was giddy with joy.

After pools, you go into direct elimination rounds, where if you lose, you're done fencing for the night. In another crazy fluke of fate, I won my first two eliminations, putting me in the quarter finals! Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I could make it that far. I was kind of embarrassed at doing so much better than I had expected, and was joking that someone was fixing the night, paying off my competitors so that they would have me for an easy kill in the later rounds when they needed a break and an easy advancement.

And an easy kill was exactly what I was when I promptly lost my quarter final match to the guy who went on to win first place for the night. But at least I lost to the strongest fencer there. It was amazing and educational to be fencing him.

The crazy great news is that my overall placement of 7th in the total group was enough to win me my first rating! No longer am I a lowly U (unrated). I have left the unwashed masses and am now an E03 (ratings from A (best) to E (5th best), with 99, 02, 03, etc indicating the year you earned the rating in).

I never ever thought I would get a rating so soon. The group playing was too talented, I was feeling too icky, and it was only my second tournament ever – I still do not even know all the rules. I got a yellow card called on me for touching my weapon during play and I got gently warned not to leave the strip during breaks – there are just all these tournament rules and conventions that I know nothing about.

Wow. I was so very happy, you cannot imagine.

That was the good news. The bad news was that when I finally got back to my car (the tournament didn't finish till midnight – so much for being in bed by nine), someone had stolen my bike off the back of it.

That was a major bummer at the end of a perfect day. You go around trusting people, and then something like that happens to remind you that you can't always trust everyone as completely as you would like to. My father, whose bike it was before he had given it up to my disposable bike lifestyle, was a really good sport about it, thus taking the jinx off of a superb day.