Dwarf Planet in Purple

Because everything is random these days.

Right now I am juggling four comparatively short writing assignments. Not sure if that's better for my brain than one long one. I don't really feel like doing any of them, but....

I feel these incredible urges to do something with my hands besides typing. I keep working on the trim for my German dress (SCA).

Tonight the boy toy cooked the second half of the roast beef we bought for Christmas. It was a sufficiently big cut that we ate only half for Yule and froze the other half. He used the last little bit of beef rub that he bought at the H*E*B supermarket in San Antonio.

He was SUPPOSED to head off to San Antonio to see his parents on Tuesday, but that's not happening for COVID-19 reasons. Instead, we're going to make Tuesday our little "Texas Day." He'll wear a Texas T-shirt, I'll wear the Texas socks and earrings he's given me in the past, and we'll have chimichangas and Tex-Mex sides for dinner.

Tuesday would have been my grandmother's 130th birthday. And today is the 59th anniversary of the first human spaceflight and the 39th anniversary of the first U.S. space shuttle flight.

Nice weather today, and apparently the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin are going to hit peak bloom by the end of the week. How are the authorities going to keep people away from the flowering trees? Should they do so?

Of course, the real question is how long this pandemic is going to last. Today Maryland postponed its primary election from April 28 to June 2. Great, so now I won't get my election-judge stipend for three full months. Not that it's a huge stipend -- $200 plus $50 for the training session -- but every bit of money is good. (And, seriously, will anyone bother going to the polls in Maryland in June? Already the outcome is pretty darned obvious.)

There are still some good things in the world. Today my cousin Dick's wife, Margaret, turned 70 years old. My Laurel friend in the Kingdom of Lochac sent me a PDF of a hard-to-find book. And tonight I watched a live, online Dropkick Murphys concert -- streamed from somewhere in Massachusetts -- with the boy toy in person and a bunch of SCA friends via a Facebook "watch party." So that was fun.

http://ladypatriciaoftrakai.blogspot.com/2020/02/another-year-in-sca.html

(Shocking, I know.)

Anyone with any knowledge of how to upload files to Blogger...?

I updated my Lady Patricia of Trakai blog:
https://ladypatriciaoftrakai.blogspot.com/2019/09/from-pennsic-onward-year-so-far-part-3.html

Soooo ... I'm trying, really trying, to write as much of my feature article (due August 15) as I can before my Pennsic trip (August 2 to 9). Wish me luck.

I know that many people (including Yves, based on our conversations of a few years ago) think that if I just write 10 percent of the article each day, the article will be done in 10 days. Er, it doesn't quite work that way, at least not with my thought processes. Usually I select one chunk and try to chew on it and organize it the best I can, and later tie all the chunks together with some smooth connecting words. At least the last feature I wrote had an obvious framework -- it was a retrospective on a speech given 60 years ago -- so I could start by describing the speech and then hanging comments from my interviewees on the framework, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. This one has a basic outline, but I still have to create everything from scratch.

Anyhow. This year I wrote up a Pennsic packing list as a Google Docs document and shared it with the boy toy. That way, he can help me a bit. Today he unearthed my stakes and air pump and he was just testing out my air mattress. I need more stakes and probably another air pump; he's going to shop for both tomorrow.

(Incidentally, my least favorite part of camping is inflating the air mattress. Just saying.)

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention ... I'm not going to Pennsic with T.V.P. after all. Last Thursday she told me she decided not to go to Pennsic this year because she wants/needs to spend more time with her new boyfriend, whose father is dying in Florida. So I said OK, because ... what else am I going to say? I don't think she is as emotionally invested in SCA-land as I am. Maybe she thought Pennsic was more like a Pagan festival. She's still my neighbor and friend, of course, and I reassured her that she's still welcome at Monday night dance practice.

I had hoped a little that I would be able to leave my car with the boy toy so he won't be so antsy to get out of the house after a week of no wheels. But we live on a bus line, so he'll just have to deal. And I won't have to worry that T.V.P. will want to leave before I'm ready to leave.

AAAnnnndddd... the news of the shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival is breaking on CNN. Boy toy went to high school in Morgan Hill, maybe 10 miles north of Gilroy, so he's told me all about the Garlic Festival. Thank goodness he's not there now. And, yeah, I do NOT need extra worries whether the local chuckleheads are going to lob something more dangerous than water balloons over the Pennsic fence....

If you wish to read about my recent SCA activities, here's the link: http://ladypatriciaoftrakai.blogspot.com/2019/06/two-events-one-site-year-so-far-part-2.html.

In other news, today was moderately productive. I cleaned the bathroom, took care of some freelancing paperwork, and got my passport renewal application in the mail. It's just in the nick of time, as you're supposed to be able to renew a U.S. passport by mail only if it was issued within the past 15 years and mine was issued in June 2004. *sigh* It has occurred to me that every time I get a new passport, we have had a Republican president, each one worse than the last ... though the incumbent toddler-in-chief is his own special kind of awful. Yesterday I tried to distract myself from his grotesqueness by thinking of my late ex-landlord Jack, who was a U.S. Army medic in World War II. He was sent to England, but at the time of D-Day he was still recuperating from a bad bout of pneumonia, so he didn't get selected for the first wave of the invasion. He was sent to France about three weeks after D-Day, when Allied troops were still ridding France of German soldiers, so I'm sure he saw his share of action then.

And for anyone who's wondering, no, I don't have any plans to travel outside the U.S. anytime soon. I just want to have a separate photo ID that's stashed away in case my wallet gets stolen. That's especially important for someone like me who has no immediate family left alive.

And speaking of the calendar ... today my cousin Tim's grandson turned 13 years old. A tall teenager!

Tomorrow the boy toy and I plan to go to a "colonial market fair" at the Benjamin Banneker site just across the river from Ellicott City. The 18th century isn't exactly the 16th century, but somebody might be selling some relevant historically adjacent supplies, like ribbon or linen thread. The boy toy and I also like supporting the Ellicott City area because of the recent years' floods.

These last few days have been rough on the species Felis catus. Not only did we witness the passing of Grumpy Cat, but a couple of my SCA friends lost one of their 5-month-old kittens to FIP, and early this morning an LJ/DW friend lost one of his fur-buddies to post-operative septic shock.

I'm grateful my Julia is still doing very well, even though she is doing her best to be a lazy-butt today, just because she can....

Personally, I had a most enjoyable time at my friend Melinda's cabin out in West Virginia. Another sewing retreat, along with music and target archery, is in the books. Granted, on Friday I futzed around too much with a shiny polyester (not-quite-finished) Italian Renn dress I bought at a spring 2018 SCA event for $3. It really does look like a beginner's project that was abandoned. This was the second time I've solicited opinions on how to make it into a piece of garb. However, I noticed that there was a small worn spot on the front of the skirt, which on such shiny fabric would stand out like a giant pimple on a model's face. I think I'll just cut it up for trim instead.

Last weekend the boy toy and I did some reorganizing of the small storage unit behind my condo (basically, it's an extra, non-climate-controlled closet). That involved opening a bunch of boxes of fragile items that had been sealed since I packed them after Mom's death in 1997. I did a good job back then -- absolutely nothing had broken over the years! And there were some things that I'd totally forgotten I had, like a couple of salt and pepper shakers made of blue and white china. They look like nesting chickens. I think my mother acquired them during her "blue and yellow kitchen" period in the 1970s. Boy toy and I added some of the items to the corner cabinet in the dining room and repacked others with less padding so that they would fit into fewer boxes.

I'm amazed at the amount of stuff my parents had. And the boy toy's grandmother too (who was about my mother's age, and who was close to the boy toy, so he inherited her china). I think it was their generation's culture -- they were the ones who didn't have much money in the Depression, and thus not many material possessions, so once they became young adults with their own homes, they wanted to "catch up." Plus, a lot of the modern kitchen gadgets we take for granted hadn't been invented yet, and add to that the social conventions that everybody wanted to entertain and that brides and grooms needed to receive gifts. No wonder, then, everybody had collections of china and covered candy dishes and aluminum-and-glass fruit "baskets" and pretty vases and hors-d'oeuvres trays and punch bowls and ... well, you get the picture.

I suppose I could try to sell this stuff, but I have no idea if it's worth anything. There's probably already too much of it on the market and not enough buyers. Ah, well. I will keep on enjoying these pieces, and maybe someday people will use them to pay for my funeral.

Tomorrow I'm driving out to the Eastern Shore for another "Revenge of the Stitch" SCA event -- a "garb wars" kind of competition in which six-person teams have 24 hours to sew up a whole medieval outfit from scratch. Should be fun, and I will continue to learn hand-sewing techniques.

I should end on a light note: you've got to see these briefs. Warning: you can't *unsee* them! :-D

Last weekend I was just SO happy for my friend Baroness Janina's elevation to the Order of the Laurel!! She looked relaxed and radiant. I presented her with a napkin on which I had embroidered a green laurel wreath. I didn't do the greatest job, but she said I did very well. To be honest, I wanted her to have *something* with a laurel wreath on it, in case her husband's health prevents them from going to Pennsic for the first time in, I dunno, maybe four decades.

Baron Rorik himself looked surprisingly good, considering all that he's been through (eight broken ribs, a heart stent, and lots of liver tests). I got to meet their son Andrew's new wife and her daughter, who is about 10 years old and is already like an instant granddaughter to Janina and Rorik.

Of course, Janina's and Rorik's household, Clan Cambion, was out in full force. There are SO many Laurels already in that household that, when it came time in Royal Court for a Laurel to speak on Janina's behalf, they all jumped up and played an amusing bit of court schtick: Andrew, wearing a marshal's tabard, stepped forward and said the honor would be decided with a shoot. So he had all these sexagenarian Laurels doing "rock, paper, scissors" against each other for the honor. :-)

Several other friends and acquaintances of mine received awards at this event (Bright Hills Baronial Birthday and Investiture). BUT! It was SO crowded in that hall. Bright Hills rents that VFD hall every February, and usually the event attracts 100-150 people. Last Saturday's attendance was 282!! (The Royal Presence, plus a baronial investiture, will attract a larger crowd.) I put my belongings on a shelf in the foyer, above the coat rack, because there was simply no place to stash my stuff in the main room.

The evening feast sold out earlier than I had expected, so I decided to ride up to the event with Sonya/Patches, who doesn't often eat SCA feasts because of her dietary restrictions. However, in celebration of Janina's Laurel, the members of Clan Cambion cooked huge piles of food for their own below-the-salt feast and invited the two of us to join them. There were enough vegetarian and gluten-free dishes to allow Patches to have something to eat as well.

In other news ... things are actually going well in other areas of my life. I actually have had a couple of potential clients approach me about additional writing jobs. I had an interview with one this past week and will probably have one with the other one soon. I am really, really hoping these come through, because I would love to diversify my income stream, so to speak. Plus, I need MORE money in general.

I don't often hear from Tall Dancer anymore, but he phoned me again around dinnertime as he was driving up to see his gaming friends in Kentucky. First time in at least a month, I think. He said he had lots of interesting news about his life, but it would have to wait until he drives back to Georgia on Monday, as he was just pulling up to his friends' house. Nothing like keeping me in suspense....

Packing for Massachusetts tonight! I haven't been "home" since 2015. About time....

I updated my "Lady Patricia" blog with my two batches of Lithuanian cookies: http://ladypatriciaoftrakai.blogspot.com/2018/12/cookies-or.html. The entire second batch was consumed at Tina's party last night.

Between cookies and Washington Revels and parties, I'm finally feeling a bit festive in my personal life. Of course, politics in Our Nation's Capital sucks ROCKS. 2019 is going to be an economically tough year, I fear.

Back to packing. Happy Holidays, everyone.