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lenora_roseSo, Sunday Afternoon: the heavy fighters were finally going off to do with thing which gave this Event its name: that is to say, the Bridge Battle. I hear it was mucho fun to do and to watch. They were also planning on doing a boar hunt (Baron Hreodbeorht, whose device has a boar on it, invariably plays the beastie), but I don't know if they actually did, as I was splashing about in the Lake.
I can't mention this without mentioning that Lake Winnipeg, a dark and silty lake even when it's clean of pollutants, has been getting murkier each year, and the latest report is that it's as bad as Lake Erie was when they started the clean-up effort there. Of course, the "reassuring" reports all say it's safe to swim, as long as you keep it out of your eyes and your mouth, and don't try to drink. I knew this. I feel very strongly about the many things done to make it this way, from clearing the natural wetlands that used to filter it, to places dumping more sewage than they ought, or insufficiently treating it. And yet - I didn't swim long, but I did say "to hell with it" and dunk my head a few times.
Anyhow, I went out once, went back to chat with Branwen a while - and on my way back, tripped over a great huge rock I hadn't known was there. I Stood on it a moment to show Branwen how tall it was, then slipped backwards off it. Then I climbed over it and groped for the bottom, to find more great huge rocks. The water was too murky to see them at all.
I was less than five feet to the side from where I'd walked out. As far as I know, there were no invisible rocks udner the low tide line on prior years. (I was already utterly sure that one boulder line marking the end of the public and campground beaches had been partly moved aorund by some agency). It may be that wave action or human action moved them. It may be that, since the lake is higher this year than before, that they were visible and avoidable before. Anyhow, I scraped my leg nicely.
Branwen and I wandered the rest of the shore a bit, including visiting the icy ICY stream towards the end of the beach, then I went out a second time, more carefully, then sat on my towel to drip-dry. I found oput later that two of my friends had been tanning further down the beach, but I hadn't seen them (SCA folk look a lot like cabin folk when they're in nothing but a bathing suit, and I hadn't looked at any of the cabin folk closely, aside from one cute little kid who said some funny child-things on his way by me.)
I then changed, and talked with Her Majesty, and one of her Majesty's attendants, a woman who had given Branwen a pearl to replace the missing one in her brooch (A real pearl, it turns out, too. I *really* wish I remembered that Lady's name. She seemed very nice on several counts.) That same Lady had been doing a class on mixing pigments into paints during the Water Duel that I'd missed, and she gave me a very very fast summary of the basics. Not that I'm painting enough at this moment for it to be worth my while to do, but I like absorbing bits of info like that. (Same as I don't mean to make perfumes, ever, but it was fascinating sitting by the Lady who did at another event, and hearing ehr talk about the process).
I then spent the rest of the afternoon alternately lazing and helping to pack up the archery equipment. The first part of which involved dumping out thew ater form the unused milk cartons, squashing them, and hauling them to the fire pit. Tomaas and I did most of this - I was apparantly entertaining a couple of the ladies when i decided that dumping all the water in one place would be bad for the grass, and started emptying them by throwing the water in arcs as big as I could manage, and then hopping to squash the cartons. What can I say? Otherwise boring jobs get less boring if you get a bit silly. So long as you have the energy to do so, and I was wearing out rapidly.
Anyhow, more relaxing, then supper, much smaller than feast and all but the chili made of leftovers. Still, many thanks to the cooks; that's four solid meals they made us, leftovers or not.
Then, a dead tree having been chopped down for firewood (witht he campground owner's explicit permission), and all the milk cartons, and a ton of cardboard from the archery backstops, there was some playing with fire at fire pit # 1.
I did say I'd explain this in more detail.
We'll start by travelling back in time. (Cue wavy lines)
The first year Master Tarik came out to the event (At least, that I was present), he proceeded to demonstrate glass bead making during the afternoon, with a propane torch and all the specialized equipment. He was clearly an expert, and the class made one of the most popular ones for some years to go (Presonally, I liked bone & antler carving better, but I have a chance of trying the latter some day, and little chance of making beads seriously.)
Also during that same year, the feast-makers had decided to roast a boar over the open fire pit. Two problems with this:
- it was drizzling a bit, not enough to put out the fire, but enough to make the fire irritable and harder to keep going steadily. It was spitting.
- The boar was dripping more fat than expected. This meant that fat was spitting into the fire. This meant outright flare-ups.
The combination meant the pig occasionally caught fire, and had to be beaten out with a shovel (One of the few food-safe ways on hand that wouldn't also put out the fire). Lord Bearaich got very good at this. One of the other cooks (Thorolf, I think), lost his eyebrows in one of the flare-ups.
So, that night, Tarrach (Now His Majesty - well, actually, as of Saturday, "only" Count.) had tossed a glass bottle into the fire once he'd emptied it. The bottle, I should note, was nothing as innocuous as beer.
A couple of hours later, he and Tarik observed that the bottle was wilting and changing shape. This led to the two of them using the cardboard pieces waiting to be tossed in too make makeshift walls, and using other cardboard bits to fan the flames until the base got white hot (And all too many flying embers). Tarrach made rudimentary molds out of the available soil, and they tried to melt it enough to form it into the molds, or into shapes on its own, with whatever improvised tools they could find.Bearaich was giving lessons on how to use the shovel to put out the flames should Tarrach or Tarik actually light themselves. ("Use the back side. If you use the concave side, it only fans the flames more")
What's scary is they did get hot enough to manipulate the glass into the molds and shapes. Not quite hot enough to retain the new shapes on cooling, nor were the embers enough to prevent cracking.
Anyhow, the next year they tried it, with more properly made molds and a failed attempt to build a mini-kiln. The next year, they tried again, and last year, Tarrach made a much better kiln, with a proper blower, and tried to melt and cast bronze. It still broke apart too much to work entirely, but the proper process was clear.
This year, they brought a real kiln instead of trying to make one up on site, and the blower, and they not only attempted to do bronze and glass work, but, from what I saw, succeeded.
However, this year, once they had the wood and cardboard and all, they did what they'd meant to do the year before and succeeded only half-heartedly in doping, which is to ahve both fire pits going. And the s'mores and the Bardic circle were at the other fire.
I ate my oen token marshmallow, then sat and listened as Her Majesty Fina, one of her Majesty's attendants, our own Lord Alrekr, and our Baroness Faerisa all did some excellent music, starting with one of the truly happy ballads, about a woman burying her husband and baby (Which sounds to me like the opening section of the Famous Flower of Servingmen to a slightly different tune), and Alrekr's deep deep bass doing a most excellent rendering of Carrighfergus. At which point I talked Colin into getting my own music book - then went off myself to fetch water, and test out how my voice would do once my throat was properly wetted.
The answer seemed to be, pretty well. I joined in soon after, when Baroness Faerisa did "My Mother's Savage Daughter", a cool tune that could be snarkily dismissed as "new-agey Women power" except that it just sounds so damn good, and I like a lot of what it says.
It's also the single most Parodied song in the SCA. Alrekr followed with "Your Mother's Darkest Nightmare" (about her boyfriend), and "Savage Father" (There's also one about her sister "My Mother's Other Daughter"), to the same tune, then I introduced one more; "The Savage Daughter's Daughter". My comment was "I don't write filks, except, apparantly, when I do."
It got laughs at the right points, and the kind of humour contained therein didn't require me to be singing in top form. By the end of it, my voice was starting to feel like it had warmed up enough to acutally *sing*, so the next few songs I did, through the night, I didn't creak quite so much or sound so raw.
Anyhow, Lord Alexandre joined in, another fine singer, who does both parodies and fine serious songs.
The music got interspersed with Baron Wulfgang, and Her Majesty's attendant whose name (grr!) I still can't remember, telling stories about SCA history, or about how they got into the SCA (The woman in question went to Pennsic as her first ever event. Eerp! I've been around 10 years and still haven't and won't for the foreseeable future). Lord Douglas made a little paean to the SCA life. Her Majesty told us the punchline of the tormenting of Master Tarik. As I mentioned, he wanted to be an outlaw, but was forced to choose between that and a pyxis, a much worthy award. So the next week (That is, last Saturday), their Majesties had decided they would outlaw *someone else*, that someone else being a pyxis already. The new outlaw was then to call Master Tarik, and tease him horribly for only getting to be one of the two things.
In the background, lightning flickered and thunder rumbled.
Since the out-of-towners were leaving at a time far too close to the break of dawn, however, the circle ended up break up before it got to the silly and non-period stuff. I'd been discouraging Colin form singing his very silly but very not-medieval song he'd been practising until it got to that state, so he ended up going to bed (And very disappointed) before he got to sing it. I do feel badly about that, but Her Majesty had already been dissuading her sons from starting off the Arrogant Worms too soon.
Anyhow, Chen (A flute playr and a strong, if quiet, advocate of more music in our Barony of Castel Rouge) commented later that it was one of the best circles we'd had in a while, in spite of the missing people I cited. Or maybe because they were absent. Not because they aren't fine musicians -- they all are -- but because few of those same people would have had any new material, and part of what made the circle so good was that there were fresh performances on several parts.
Anyhow, most people wandered off to bed, but the fire was still going, so i sat, and talked with the people lingering, adn we put on most of the cardboard to burn away, sicne we could leave the wood for other visitors to the campground and nobody would mind, but we had to be rid of the papery stuff. It drizzled a bit, and sometimes the wind came through and put the fore-smoke right in my eyes, but it never really rained, for all the lightning and thunder flickering in the distances.
At last, after some good conversation, I went off to the washroom to get ready for bed - and immediately before I started brushing my teeth, the power went out.
It hadn't occurred to me until then that, now the kitchen-folk were done cooking, there could be a single place in the campground where this would be an issue. In fact, the light by the walkway tot he beach is supremely annoying if you want to stand on the shore by moonlight or by aurora-light and watch (As I had Saturday Night). It fouls night vision *and* loses some sight of the stars, and with the Lake level risen, at high tide one could not really walk out of its influence.
Still, a pitch black bathroom is no fun. (Among other things, I like being able to find spiders by sight, not touch. Lingering Arachnophobia.) I found the door, and borrowed a flashlight from the kitchen party, so of course, the power came back on almost immediately after. I did kind of regret that one can't really have a power failure without also having a clouded-ver sky, as it would ahve been splendid to be able to see the stars.
We found out later that down in Winnipeg, the storm was horrible, with branches down all over the place and at least two tall elms uprooted (That's just what we saw on our drive home). Up north by the Lake, that was the sum total of it.
And I went to sleep.
I was wakened in the morning by people int he Royalty's room next door) shoving their bunkbeds back where they came from - which meant thumping them into the wall. I still got up too late to see more than departing cars. Until next year!
We packed up and left not long after. Monday Morning is always quiet.
And so it was. And I only finish the account a week and a half later.
I can't mention this without mentioning that Lake Winnipeg, a dark and silty lake even when it's clean of pollutants, has been getting murkier each year, and the latest report is that it's as bad as Lake Erie was when they started the clean-up effort there. Of course, the "reassuring" reports all say it's safe to swim, as long as you keep it out of your eyes and your mouth, and don't try to drink. I knew this. I feel very strongly about the many things done to make it this way, from clearing the natural wetlands that used to filter it, to places dumping more sewage than they ought, or insufficiently treating it. And yet - I didn't swim long, but I did say "to hell with it" and dunk my head a few times.
Anyhow, I went out once, went back to chat with Branwen a while - and on my way back, tripped over a great huge rock I hadn't known was there. I Stood on it a moment to show Branwen how tall it was, then slipped backwards off it. Then I climbed over it and groped for the bottom, to find more great huge rocks. The water was too murky to see them at all.
I was less than five feet to the side from where I'd walked out. As far as I know, there were no invisible rocks udner the low tide line on prior years. (I was already utterly sure that one boulder line marking the end of the public and campground beaches had been partly moved aorund by some agency). It may be that wave action or human action moved them. It may be that, since the lake is higher this year than before, that they were visible and avoidable before. Anyhow, I scraped my leg nicely.
Branwen and I wandered the rest of the shore a bit, including visiting the icy ICY stream towards the end of the beach, then I went out a second time, more carefully, then sat on my towel to drip-dry. I found oput later that two of my friends had been tanning further down the beach, but I hadn't seen them (SCA folk look a lot like cabin folk when they're in nothing but a bathing suit, and I hadn't looked at any of the cabin folk closely, aside from one cute little kid who said some funny child-things on his way by me.)
I then changed, and talked with Her Majesty, and one of her Majesty's attendants, a woman who had given Branwen a pearl to replace the missing one in her brooch (A real pearl, it turns out, too. I *really* wish I remembered that Lady's name. She seemed very nice on several counts.) That same Lady had been doing a class on mixing pigments into paints during the Water Duel that I'd missed, and she gave me a very very fast summary of the basics. Not that I'm painting enough at this moment for it to be worth my while to do, but I like absorbing bits of info like that. (Same as I don't mean to make perfumes, ever, but it was fascinating sitting by the Lady who did at another event, and hearing ehr talk about the process).
I then spent the rest of the afternoon alternately lazing and helping to pack up the archery equipment. The first part of which involved dumping out thew ater form the unused milk cartons, squashing them, and hauling them to the fire pit. Tomaas and I did most of this - I was apparantly entertaining a couple of the ladies when i decided that dumping all the water in one place would be bad for the grass, and started emptying them by throwing the water in arcs as big as I could manage, and then hopping to squash the cartons. What can I say? Otherwise boring jobs get less boring if you get a bit silly. So long as you have the energy to do so, and I was wearing out rapidly.
Anyhow, more relaxing, then supper, much smaller than feast and all but the chili made of leftovers. Still, many thanks to the cooks; that's four solid meals they made us, leftovers or not.
Then, a dead tree having been chopped down for firewood (witht he campground owner's explicit permission), and all the milk cartons, and a ton of cardboard from the archery backstops, there was some playing with fire at fire pit # 1.
I did say I'd explain this in more detail.
We'll start by travelling back in time. (Cue wavy lines)
The first year Master Tarik came out to the event (At least, that I was present), he proceeded to demonstrate glass bead making during the afternoon, with a propane torch and all the specialized equipment. He was clearly an expert, and the class made one of the most popular ones for some years to go (Presonally, I liked bone & antler carving better, but I have a chance of trying the latter some day, and little chance of making beads seriously.)
Also during that same year, the feast-makers had decided to roast a boar over the open fire pit. Two problems with this:
- it was drizzling a bit, not enough to put out the fire, but enough to make the fire irritable and harder to keep going steadily. It was spitting.
- The boar was dripping more fat than expected. This meant that fat was spitting into the fire. This meant outright flare-ups.
The combination meant the pig occasionally caught fire, and had to be beaten out with a shovel (One of the few food-safe ways on hand that wouldn't also put out the fire). Lord Bearaich got very good at this. One of the other cooks (Thorolf, I think), lost his eyebrows in one of the flare-ups.
So, that night, Tarrach (Now His Majesty - well, actually, as of Saturday, "only" Count.) had tossed a glass bottle into the fire once he'd emptied it. The bottle, I should note, was nothing as innocuous as beer.
A couple of hours later, he and Tarik observed that the bottle was wilting and changing shape. This led to the two of them using the cardboard pieces waiting to be tossed in too make makeshift walls, and using other cardboard bits to fan the flames until the base got white hot (And all too many flying embers). Tarrach made rudimentary molds out of the available soil, and they tried to melt it enough to form it into the molds, or into shapes on its own, with whatever improvised tools they could find.Bearaich was giving lessons on how to use the shovel to put out the flames should Tarrach or Tarik actually light themselves. ("Use the back side. If you use the concave side, it only fans the flames more")
What's scary is they did get hot enough to manipulate the glass into the molds and shapes. Not quite hot enough to retain the new shapes on cooling, nor were the embers enough to prevent cracking.
Anyhow, the next year they tried it, with more properly made molds and a failed attempt to build a mini-kiln. The next year, they tried again, and last year, Tarrach made a much better kiln, with a proper blower, and tried to melt and cast bronze. It still broke apart too much to work entirely, but the proper process was clear.
This year, they brought a real kiln instead of trying to make one up on site, and the blower, and they not only attempted to do bronze and glass work, but, from what I saw, succeeded.
However, this year, once they had the wood and cardboard and all, they did what they'd meant to do the year before and succeeded only half-heartedly in doping, which is to ahve both fire pits going. And the s'mores and the Bardic circle were at the other fire.
I ate my oen token marshmallow, then sat and listened as Her Majesty Fina, one of her Majesty's attendants, our own Lord Alrekr, and our Baroness Faerisa all did some excellent music, starting with one of the truly happy ballads, about a woman burying her husband and baby (Which sounds to me like the opening section of the Famous Flower of Servingmen to a slightly different tune), and Alrekr's deep deep bass doing a most excellent rendering of Carrighfergus. At which point I talked Colin into getting my own music book - then went off myself to fetch water, and test out how my voice would do once my throat was properly wetted.
The answer seemed to be, pretty well. I joined in soon after, when Baroness Faerisa did "My Mother's Savage Daughter", a cool tune that could be snarkily dismissed as "new-agey Women power" except that it just sounds so damn good, and I like a lot of what it says.
It's also the single most Parodied song in the SCA. Alrekr followed with "Your Mother's Darkest Nightmare" (about her boyfriend), and "Savage Father" (There's also one about her sister "My Mother's Other Daughter"), to the same tune, then I introduced one more; "The Savage Daughter's Daughter". My comment was "I don't write filks, except, apparantly, when I do."
It got laughs at the right points, and the kind of humour contained therein didn't require me to be singing in top form. By the end of it, my voice was starting to feel like it had warmed up enough to acutally *sing*, so the next few songs I did, through the night, I didn't creak quite so much or sound so raw.
Anyhow, Lord Alexandre joined in, another fine singer, who does both parodies and fine serious songs.
The music got interspersed with Baron Wulfgang, and Her Majesty's attendant whose name (grr!) I still can't remember, telling stories about SCA history, or about how they got into the SCA (The woman in question went to Pennsic as her first ever event. Eerp! I've been around 10 years and still haven't and won't for the foreseeable future). Lord Douglas made a little paean to the SCA life. Her Majesty told us the punchline of the tormenting of Master Tarik. As I mentioned, he wanted to be an outlaw, but was forced to choose between that and a pyxis, a much worthy award. So the next week (That is, last Saturday), their Majesties had decided they would outlaw *someone else*, that someone else being a pyxis already. The new outlaw was then to call Master Tarik, and tease him horribly for only getting to be one of the two things.
In the background, lightning flickered and thunder rumbled.
Since the out-of-towners were leaving at a time far too close to the break of dawn, however, the circle ended up break up before it got to the silly and non-period stuff. I'd been discouraging Colin form singing his very silly but very not-medieval song he'd been practising until it got to that state, so he ended up going to bed (And very disappointed) before he got to sing it. I do feel badly about that, but Her Majesty had already been dissuading her sons from starting off the Arrogant Worms too soon.
Anyhow, Chen (A flute playr and a strong, if quiet, advocate of more music in our Barony of Castel Rouge) commented later that it was one of the best circles we'd had in a while, in spite of the missing people I cited. Or maybe because they were absent. Not because they aren't fine musicians -- they all are -- but because few of those same people would have had any new material, and part of what made the circle so good was that there were fresh performances on several parts.
Anyhow, most people wandered off to bed, but the fire was still going, so i sat, and talked with the people lingering, adn we put on most of the cardboard to burn away, sicne we could leave the wood for other visitors to the campground and nobody would mind, but we had to be rid of the papery stuff. It drizzled a bit, and sometimes the wind came through and put the fore-smoke right in my eyes, but it never really rained, for all the lightning and thunder flickering in the distances.
At last, after some good conversation, I went off to the washroom to get ready for bed - and immediately before I started brushing my teeth, the power went out.
It hadn't occurred to me until then that, now the kitchen-folk were done cooking, there could be a single place in the campground where this would be an issue. In fact, the light by the walkway tot he beach is supremely annoying if you want to stand on the shore by moonlight or by aurora-light and watch (As I had Saturday Night). It fouls night vision *and* loses some sight of the stars, and with the Lake level risen, at high tide one could not really walk out of its influence.
Still, a pitch black bathroom is no fun. (Among other things, I like being able to find spiders by sight, not touch. Lingering Arachnophobia.) I found the door, and borrowed a flashlight from the kitchen party, so of course, the power came back on almost immediately after. I did kind of regret that one can't really have a power failure without also having a clouded-ver sky, as it would ahve been splendid to be able to see the stars.
We found out later that down in Winnipeg, the storm was horrible, with branches down all over the place and at least two tall elms uprooted (That's just what we saw on our drive home). Up north by the Lake, that was the sum total of it.
And I went to sleep.
I was wakened in the morning by people int he Royalty's room next door) shoving their bunkbeds back where they came from - which meant thumping them into the wall. I still got up too late to see more than departing cars. Until next year!
We packed up and left not long after. Monday Morning is always quiet.
And so it was. And I only finish the account a week and a half later.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-15 03:19 am (UTC)A really good telling of the event, however, 3 comments:
1. The lady you can't remember her name - that's Despina;
2. Tarrach's been king twice, so now he's a Duke;
3. Tarrach told me that they built the kiln onsite again. They came up early, just the build it. He went to the beach and dug up the clay that they used. He also brought 3 bags of coal from home, to burn in it. It was really cool to watch.
You should do a write up for the Chronicle - you could just edit this down a little. Isabel (Doody) would love it.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-15 06:26 pm (UTC)Thanks ever ever so much for Despina's name!
I was thinking Tarrach had "only" been Prince before, but that's withing Northshield. Now I think you're right; he was Count when I first met him, wasn't he?
Two different people told me he'd brought the kiln. Now I'm all confoozled!
If I do rewrite it, I'll fix those, too.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-16 02:04 am (UTC)Tarrach - Prince of Northshield = Viscount; King of Midrealm = Count; King of Northshield = Duke.
As for the kiln, I'm just repeating what he told me. He brought the bellows with him, but built the actual kiln out of local materials. So I guess in a way, he did bring it with him, cause the bellows are the most important part.
Re-write it. It's a good review.