In these trying times, anything that changes up the same old boring routine is a welcome diversion.

“Hey kids, wanna go for a hike? (again)”

“Nah.”

“How about throwing a frisbee around in the park?”

“Not interested?”

“Maybe you can invite a friend over, both wear masks, face shields, body armor, and chain mail helmets?”

“Sounds boring.”

We get it, there just isn’t much left these days. Lucky for you, at least for this weekend, we’ve got fun for the whole family!

CMEpalooza Pursuit

Your kids will love learning about the many fine sponsors of CMEpalooza Fall (“Boy mom, I didn’t know that your work was so interesting. I want to learn more!”). You can perhaps even bribe them by saying, “Look, fill out the entry form, and we split the prize 50/50 if we win.” Then you tell them the prize is $50 (it’s really $100), and pocket the majority of the money. Everybody wins!

If you have forgotten how to play CMEpalooza Pursuit, all of the details are in this post. Entries are due by the end of day on Monday, so that gives you the entire weekend to cuddle up with your loved ones and dig in. You’re welcome.

I come from a big board game family. Growing up, we had pretty much all of them. Yes, there were the usual standards such as Monopoly, Clue, and Sorry! but we also had some more obscure gems such as Careers, Parcheesi, and Rummy Cube. I spent a lot of time lying on the rug in the den beating up my sister at all of these games. Good times.

That’s why it’s always fun when it comes time for our CMEpalooza Sponsor event. While I haven’t quite figured out how to replicate some of these board games for our format (yet), it does allow me to harken back to those days of yore.

With a record 28 sponsors for CMEpalooza Fall — not too late for your company to join in! — developing this fall’s event was quite a lot of work. Some of our previous game designs such as CMEpalooza Bingo!! would not work (only 25 spaces). But fortunately, others were just fine. And so, thanks to some help from our intrepid Fall intern TJ, we’re bringing back CMEpalooza Pursuit this fall for another go round. There are some brand new categories such as The 80s (natch) and Food and Drink to join the more traditional ones.

Here is how CMEpalooza Pursuit works:

1. Click here to download the list of forms you will need, both the questions and the answer form
2. Use the Sponsor tab of the CMEpalooza website to get links to all of the companies involved in this event. You’ll need to visit the Sponsor sites to get the answers to all of our questions. We promise there is nothing that can’t be found within a click or two.
3. Complete the entry form by coming up with a correct response to one question in each category. That’s nine questions/answers in all.
4. Added bonus this year — you can enter up to three times, as long as you select different sponsors in each category for each entry.
5. Send your completed entry form to me via email at scott@medcasewriter.com by 5 p.m. ET on Monday, September 28.
6. Take that 4-leaf clover and clutch it tightly to your chest

We’ll be giving away $500 in Amazon gift cards to our winners – there will be 5 winners of $100 each randomly selected from all of our correct entries. We’ve been doing these events for so long now that many of our most loyal players have won thousands of dollars thanks to our generosity. They hope you will be too overwhelmed by work and family that you won’t have time to play CMEpalooza Pursuit. Don’t let them quiet your voice! Find 15 minutes, complete your gameboard, and give yourself a shot at the big prizes.

And… go.

On March 12, the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in Philadelphia, I posted the following on Facebook:

Three weeks later:

Six months later (note from Scott: technically, five and a half, but whatever) and these same people are still in our houses, which is why I am hear to talk to you about setting appropriate expectations for the day of CMEpalooza, now less than a month away (Wednesday, October 14, if you forgot).

Let’s all be honest and admit that there is a nonzero chance that one of the following things will happen during any virtual conference:

• A panelist’s video or audio feed glitches because they have multiple kids at home sucking up all the bandwidth with virtual school or watching episodes of Cobra Kai or both at the same time (both of my kids will be home for virtual school during CMEpalooza. Say a little prayer for me and Verizon FIOS on October 14.)
• A viewer watching the livestream at home has their video start buffering or pausing. We sometimes get complaints about this in the eval comments, so it’s time for a little come-to-Jesus moment: It’s not us, it’s you. If the video you are watching starts buffering, it’s because of an issue with your internet…probably because you have multiple kids at home sucking up all the bandwidth with virtual school or watching episodes of Cobra Kai or both at the same time.
• Someone’s kid/spouse/pet appears on screen because they didn’t realize or didn’t care that there was a video call going on. Frankly, at this point I’m disappointed when it doesn’t happen. Seriously, when was the last time someone’s cute kid or pet showed up on screen and it didn’t make you smile? We should start making it a requirement.
• Power outage. It happens. Fortunately we can usually just have people use their phone and everything is fine. It’s not yet happened to Scott or me, but we have had some close calls (my power went out for 15 minutes one year.) My neighbors are currently having an addition put on to the back of their house and the idiots gentlemen working there have already cut our power once.

One of the unexpected pleasantries that has evolved from the bloom of pandemic-initiated virtual programming is that it has made me feel much better about the production value of CMEpalooza. Watching media monoliths like ESPN and CNN experience the exact same technical issues that we sometimes have during CMEpalooza has definitely been a boost to my self-esteem.

There will be glitches. There will be interruptions. There will be mistakes. The show will go on and it will be fine.

Because I know it will annoy Scott, I wrote a haiku to summarize the moral of this post. I call it Pandemic Haiku.

it’s fine it’s fine it’s
fine it’s fine it’s fine it’s fine
everything’s fine

(note from Scott: Don’t tell Derek, but once again he failed to count syllables properly — check line 3, doofus — so this is not technically a haiku and I am OK with it)

(note from Derek: You come at the king, you best not miss https://www.howmanysyllables.com/words/everything’s)