luscious_purple | Entries tagged with sca

1. I'm writing this post on Nick's new laptop, which is now mine, of course. I wonder if I'll ever feel as if it's completely "mine." His name pops up when I go to sign in, and I enter his password (thank goodness he used the one from his previous computer, because I didn't have time to ask him about All The Things before he died). I wonder if I should try out his LOTR Online game....

2. I really should pay DW a bit of money so that I can have some new icons.

3. I want some of those icons to reflect the current political situation, but I will not use the face of a certain dictator whom I hate. I don't want to see his face on DW.

4. It's the middle of May. I should really dig out the rest of my spring clothes (and start sorting out Nick's). However, I am also really far behind on the baronial newsletter.

5. I also have about a month to figure out whether I can go to Pennsic. More about that in another post.

OK, it's been ... two months and a few days.

All eight days of early voting ... a long blur of nearly round-the-clock activity. Of course, we didn't have much in the way of "a primary" back in the spring; the U.S. Senate contests were the only exciting things on the Maryland ballots then. But our quadrennial presidential elections bring voters out of the woodwork.

During early voting I spent all eight days at the same-day registration station. It amazes me how people move around and do NOT bother to get their address changed on their driver's licenses, or even get licenses from their new state of residence. It isn't rocket science. I was glad that a couple of the other election judges could translate between Spanish and English, but at times I could have used Korean and Amharic speakers. Our county is SO diverse!

Over the eight days of early voting, we registered 208 people to vote, and we also checked in dozens of regular voters when the check-in judges were busy. I say "we" because I usually had at least one same-day registration judge sitting with me. On most of the days I was paired with an elderly woman who was born in Belize and who refuses to celebrate Halloween because the holiday "glorifies demons." You meet all kinds of people at the polling place.

On Election Day itself, I couldn't do both provisional-ballot work and same-day registration, so I had to explain the same-day stuff to other judges and work the provisional ballot table. I think I had something like 55 provisional voters, which is a LOT for a small precinct with mostly single-family homes. I had a few who were military folks with out-of-state driver's licenses.

Needless to say, the presidential election results hit me like a giant gut punch and I spent the rest of the month in mourning. Of course, this didn't mix well with my need to get my feature article written by November 18. I felt as if I was just going through the motions.

When choosing the deadline months ago, I had assumed that Holiday Faire, an annual event in the Barony of Stierbach, would be held on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. For whatever reason, though, this year it was held on the Saturday before the Saturday before Turkey Day, so I had to skip it. Philcon, though, was on the weekend before Thanksgiving, but no way was I going to go to that and listen to 48 hours of R. crowing that the Orange Poopyhead will bring me SO many job opportunities. He sent me SO much crap from Breitbart and the NY Post with his own vaguely racist comments appended. I have been questioning my 40-year friendship with him.

There's a lot more, but the early holiday dinner is almost ready. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, and I hope you had a Good Solstice too.

I have to pick the boy toy up at the airport in a few hours. He's flying back from a week with his parents in San Antonio. I always insist on knowing the flight number when I'm picking someone up from the airport, because in 1989 I was supposed to pick up a co-worker at the airport, heard about a jetliner crash in Iowa (I think, IIRC), and had a panic attack because I had NO idea where she was coming from, which airline she was using, etc. (She has family and friends all over the country.) Fortunately, she was NOT on that plane and was waiting for me at Logan Airport.

I'll be glad to have him back, because he keeps me on schedule (in an "accountability partner" kind of way). I have been in major ADHD mode these last few days. Baronial newsletter, finishing "get out the vote" postcards to get them to Florida before Hurricane Milton, watching TV, reading news stories on the computer, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, I have a highly technical feature article to write.

The good news about early voting: I'm scheduled to work for all eight days of it. The bad news about early voting: I have been assigned to a different early-voting station. Not that much farther away, but still, I was looking forward to seeing the folks who work in College Park. Particularly that lifestyle blogger who supports her whole family with that blog. Dang, I wish I could do that!

Now that I am a baronial chronicler, I really find this piece hilarious. And eerily aligned with today's Nobel Prize in physics.

In late March, I wrote but never posted:

Now that my latest feature article is done, what do I do next?

As I had been promising myself, I started practicing the ukulele. Since I've taken up several musical instruments over my ever-lengthening life, I know that the beginning is the steepest part of the learning curve. My left-hand fingertips felt tender, but I can say I know three chords now: C, F, and A minor. All three involve only one or two fingers. I really want to learn G major, but that involves three fingers, which is a bit more cumbersome for my non-dominant hand and brain. Still, I want to learn, even if I learn at a slower pace than a youngster.

I am still singing with Laydes Fayre, Mistress Arianna's group, but I had to skip the March 22 practice session because I had to attend a church trustees' meeting about candidates for our next developmental minister. That's about all I can say because of confidentiality rules.

Then this weekend came about, and I am

I was probably going to write, "I am so tired I can barely write..." *grin* Fast forward to late April.

The weekend of March 22-23 was a double-event weekend in my SCA world. On Saturday I went to Defending the Gate, at which one of my friends got her Laurel (highest award for arts and sciences) and also stepped up as Baroness of Stierbach (with her husband as the new Baron). On Sunday my own barony, Storvik, had an informal "spring thing" at the Cheverly community center, an indoor space that we have only recently started using (but that works well for activities).

On March 26 the Key Bridge collapsed, which was huge news in Maryland, as you can imagine. I think I'd driven over it only a couple of times in the decades I've lived in Maryland. Usually I take the tunnels or I travel up the west side of the Baltimore Beltway.

On April 6 I was driving nowhere near Baltimore -- I was heading up to Erie, PA, for a rendezvous with the path of the total solar eclipse. I stayed at my friend Amanda's house -- how lucky for me that she had a guest room! Of course, the big question hanging over the weekend was: would the sky be cloudy? After all, in July 1991, I received a great demonstration of what totality looks like when the sky is overcast. Fortunately, while the morning of April 8 was disappointingly gray, patches of blue sky began to appear on the western horizon, and the crowd (at Mercyhurst University) and I were treated to an awesome sight.

This past weekend (April 13-14) I spent Saturday at Storvik Novice Tournament and Sunday at the Japanese street festival in DC. Storvik had to hold Novice Tourney really early this year because that was the only weekend we could rent the usual site. (This close to DC, sites that allow us to set up all our SCA stuff and have fighting and horses are few indeed.)

At the SCA event, I was excited to be called into court twice: first by Their Majesties, because I won the drawing for a "quest prize," which I will have to explain at another time, and second by Their Excellencies Storvik, who presented me with the Baron's Award of Excellence, which left me truly gobsmacked.

At the festival, the boy toy and I had various types of snacky Asian foods and I bought myself a couple of parasols for use at future SCA events.

Current Music: The String Cheese Incident

This morning I did another covid test and I am still positive. So no Laydes Fayre singing practice for me tonight. Just as well; I listened to a video of last Sunday's church service and had trouble singing along to the hymns. I would NOT have been able to harmonize.

Covid isn't killing me (if it was, I would have been in the hospital for all of February so far). I have a nagging cough and an occasional nose drip. No fever. No extreme fatigue, either -- I took a walk around the neighborhood this afternoon, for at least a mile.

I wish I could go to Bright Hills Baronial Birthday tomorrow for Mistress Janina's "Laurel-versary," but I don't dare spread my cooties.

I meant to include this in the previous post, but...

My church has sold its property -- the buildings and grounds. Closing date was January 26th (the day after my last post). There was one document that all of us trustees had to sign, but the board chair handled the rest of the paperwork for us. We now have a nice chunk of change that will go into a separate account; a group of Ethiopian Muslims have a new religious home; and we'll find out in a few weeks, during our annual pledge drive, how many of our members have taken a permanent hike.

The Ukrainian-themed SCA event was awesome! My breads were one of seven entries, and even though I didn't win, I got lots of compliments. Many of the activities and classes also had Slavic themes. My friend did a great job organizing the event!

Unfortunately, this past Tuesday I started feeling sick, exactly like the last time I had a virus back in August 2019. Well, that couldn't have been covid, right?? Finally I got around to swabbing my nose today, because I need to decide whether I'm going to dance practice tomorrow night, and ... dammit!! I have the damned covid!! I hope I didn't give it to anyone else at last Monday's dance practice before I felt sick.

... and now it is gone again.

(Note: "DMV" is the local abbreviation for "District, Maryland, Virginia." It has nothing to do with anyone's Department of Motor Vehicles.)

Last week we had two winter snowfalls, each leaving about 3 inches of the white stuff behind. This may not sound like much, but we haven't had a full inch of snow for 700 days or more, even while other parts of the mid-Atlantic region were getting snowed upon. TV meteorologists were calling it the "snow hole." But, of course, the grass is green again. Tomorrow the temperature will probably hit 70.

I'm actually working on an A&S project for my next SCA event. It is ... bread! This Saturday's event has the theme of "Holiday Court of Volodymyr the Great," because my friend Mistress Arianna is running the event and she has been fixated on Ukraine since the Russians invaded in 2022. So the setting of the event is Kyiv in 988 CE and Prince Volodymyr Sviatoslavych is celebrating the holidays with a grand feast. Bread and salt are the traditional hospitality gifts in Slavic culture, so there is a bread competition. And I just happen to own a book called Food and Drink in Medieval Poland. Not all the recipes sound that great to modern humans (stewed pig tails in gruel, anyone?), but the book happens to contain a redacted 14th-century recipe for "Wroclaw trencher bread." Two weeks ago I made a test batch and it was pretty good. Now I'm making a second batch, using the same "thick beer" starter. This time the proto-dough doesn't seem as much of a "slurry" as it did the first time around, so I added a bit more of the starter (which has probably been slowly evaporating in its cloth-covered jar). At least it seems to be expanding overnight. Tomorrow morning there will be more kneading and pounding and rising and baking....

In the waning hours of 2023 I wrote a post on my Lady Patricia of Trakai blog: https://ladypatriciaoftrakai.blogspot.com/2023/12/wrapping-up-calendar-year.html. I probably should write another post about more SCA stuff.

I hope everyone had a good New Year's holiday. I did things a little differently: after the Rose Parade (gotta watch that on TV per family-of-origin tradition), I went to a banner-painting session here in Storvik. We painted a couple of silk "Inspiration" banners for our current Queen to bestow upon people who inspire her in her service. (The artist, Dame Emma, had already drawn the outlines of the artwork on the silk, so it was like a giant group coloring project.) It was tons of fun.

In a way, the activity served to commemorate my personal milestone as of yesterday: the 20th anniversary of my first SCA event ever. Last night I also gave a Toastmasters talk on my late heraldry teacher, Pedro, who was one of the people I met that momentous day.

Current Mood: mellow

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! If Hanukkah is your holiday, I hope it was a totally happy one.

This month has been fairly busy, with the usual activities. Unevent, the Kingdom of Atlantia's annual business meeting, is permanently online, which means it's easier for people from all parts of the kingdom to attend (the kingdom stretches from Baltimore to Hilton Head Island). Dun Carraig had a baronial investiture at a lovely site on the north bank of the Potomac River; they'll use it again for the 2024 Spring Coronation. I managed to convince R. to attend the Washington Christmas Revels; the parent organization cut back from two weekends to one this year, ostensibly because renting Lisner Auditorium is more expensive than it used to be. I hope the Revels will be around for many years to come.

I also wrapped up the Year of Many Vehicles by purchasing a new-to-me 2011 Subaru Forester. My first Subaru. Remember how I explained that I bought a Hyundai Tucson, but it couldn't ever pass inspection? Yeah, I kept on driving it without renewing the temporary registration and hoped the cops wouldn't catch up to me. Then I brought the Tucson to the Sunoco near where I used to live. I had thought, gee, maybe the first inspection station I used was acting all tight-assed because I'd never patronized them before, and the Sunoco has a good reputation for fair dealing. But the Sunoco fellow told me the exact same thing -- sorry, way too rusted out to pass Maryland inspection, ever. And as this year winds down, having a "23" sticker on my rear license plate instead of "24" or "25" will be a giant clue to the local constabulary. So I went to a *real* dealer and bought a car that PASSED inspection. It's a joy to drive.

(I am calling this the Year of Many Vehicles because I started out with a 1999 Toyota Corolla; then I had a rental Grand Cherokee for one weekend after the Corolla was totaled and taken from me; then I drove the CR-V belonging to my temporary housemates; then I bought the 2008 Tucson; and now I have the Forester. That's five vehicles.)

Despite the new wheels, I've spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day here in Maryland. I haven't heard from any of my Massachusetts cousins, so I guess they have gotten used to my not traveling up there, so they didn't invite me. *sigh*

Thanksgiving weekend was quiet but tasty. The boy toy made a great meal for the holiday itself and found some innovative ways to use the leftovers. (Turkey and stuffing quiche is surprisingly good!) It was a little weird not going to Chessiecon, but since last year's convention was such a bust, I'm not surprised there wasn't one this year. I have no idea what's going to happen next month.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I had a great time at Atlantia's Holiday Faire, while R. went by his lonesome to Philcon. I don't think any of his friends were there. (Well, one longtime friend of ours from Massachusetts, a fellow named Phil, died at the end of October, so he's not going to any more SF conventions.)

My last year of serving as a church trustee is proceeding apace. Things have been a lot less hectic -- i.e., fewer emergencies. Granted, we are having a special board meeting tonight, but that's to decide what kind of arrangement we will have with our next minister -- someone in the UUA's developmental minister program, which would mean a four-year commitment to trying to fix our flaws, or a contract minister, who would just be an employee who does the ministerial work for a given period of time. We are now too small of a congregation to call a settled minister, who would be a permanent minister staying for an indefinite period of time.

The boy toy and I have some Christmas decorations up, including our new Christmas tree. (The old one was a pre-lit model whose lights stopped working, so we abandoned it in the move.) But we still have more holiday stuff, including the ceramic tree my Aunt Bev made for my parents and my mother's Santa pitcher, are still in our storage unit up in North Laurel. Little by little, we are emptying out the unit, but some of the stuff will have to wait until there's a new floor in the bedroom (long story).

Movies: I would like to see The Holdovers in the theater, because a film stylized to look like a quirky 1970s movie should be seen on technology that existed in the 1970s. I really, really want to see Maestro on the big screen, but it's not playing that close to me. Sigh.

I mean, once a month, really?

Anyhow, the highlight of the last few weeks was Fall Coronation, held in southern Maryland. I decided to camp over the weekend because I would be performing with the Laydes Fayre singing group in the morning and I didn't want to worry about traffic. I also didn't have to worry about futzing with my tent, because my friend Nellie from the dance group let me stay in her tent. We even carpooled together. I had a grand time, especially playing in the band for the dancing, and I received two roses and a small ceramic cup from our new Queen for my efforts.

Of course, while I was blissfully playing with the SCA instead of hanging around online, I didn't notice until I got home that Hamas had attacked Israel. Why does the world blow up when I'm having fun with the SCA?

... and I forget to update DW. My apologies.

Church is ... about as polarized as the nation at large, I guess. Only the issue is selling the church property. We had our special congregational meeting, followed by a vote, and I worked long and hard on that electronic ballot. The only question was "support" or "do not support" the trustees' decision to sell the property. Well, the "support" side won, 62 percent to 38 percent. But the losing side is still really, really struggling.

The SCA is ... great, when I have time for it. I haven't done a lot of A&S lately, except for working on the inkle loom I bought at Pennsic. I'm making an orange and black strap or piece of trim or whatever you want to call it. Just for practice.

Other things: Just after Pennsic, the husband of the leader of my SCA-related singing group had a massive heart attack, followed by a quintuple bypass, followed by a whole host of complications. He's still in the hospital, but slowly improving. Then I found out a friend who had esophageal cancer -- not the "heavy drinking/smoking" kind, but the "middle-aged man with a few extra pounds" kind -- died at the end of August. I think my last phone conversation with him was in May, maybe June.

Finally, I found out through an online search that the ex who abused me back in the 1980s has died at the age of 66. I'm not crying. I actually feel a bit relieved that I can wander around my old haunts in eastern Massachusetts without the chance of running into him. I'm also glad that he did not try to ruin my science-writing career. Btu still, it feels a tiny bit weird too.

Current Mood: contemplative

OK, cut me some slack here, because I went to Pennsic and I don't mess around with DW on my phone. I write better when I can type with all my fingers.

So, yes, I got to Pennsic after all! Splitting the cost of the trailer with my new minivan-driving friend worked awesomely well. I had an absolute blast!

I still have not replaced the Hyundai Tucson. Church stuff has gotten in the way again. While I was at Pennsic, some people who do not want the Board to sell the church property amassed enough petition signatures to call a special congregational meeting to debate the issue for the umpteenth time. And we are having a congregation-wide vote on the matter, even though our lawyer has opined that the vote cannot be binding under the laws of the state of Maryland. Can you tell I'm getting tired of this issue already?

As much as I want to write more about Pennsic, my sudden need for sleep is getting in the way. Sucks to get old.

First of all, Happy Birthday,

wookiemonster!!

I'm going to Pennsic! I wrote about it last night on my Lady Patricia blog (http://ladypatriciaoftrakai.blogspot.com/2023/07/pennsic-50-frenzy.html). The writing is not the best because I finished it rather late at night, after the boy toy made me some sort of coconut cocktail.

I also didn't go into detail about my latest vehicular travails. Remember that 2008 Hyundai Tucson I bought to replace my totaled Corolla? When I first got it, I immediately started using it to move into the new apartment/cottage, but of course that was more of a process than an event. And at first I didn't have the money to get it inspected. (If you buy a used car that doesn't already have a Maryland inspection certificate, you get a 30-day temporary registration, but you must get that certificate to acquire the permanent registration.) Finally, at the end of June, I had the money to get the work done and I found an inspection station about a mile from where I now live. The proprietor of that garage, however, informed me that the Tucson's undercarriage was way too rusted out to ever pass Maryland inspection, and that I shouldn't have bought a vehicle with 189K miles on it to begin with. (As if I wouldn't have bought something better if I could have afforded it at the time!) Fortunately, the tag-and-title place gave me a "7" month sticker instead of a "6," so, even though the registration expired on June 11, it looks as if it's registered until the end of July.

Obviously, I am *not* driving this rig to Pennsic, partly because I don't want to drive an unregistered car out of state and partly because I'm going to hit a bump or hole while the thing is fully loaded and really mess up the vehicle. Fortunately, I made alternate plans. I put a call out on Facebook and got a couple of responses and selected one. One of Patches' neighbors is taking her three kids to Pennsic -- first time for all four of them -- so we made arrangements to rent a trailer for her minivan and split the cost.

This will be my 13th Pennsic, but the first to which I am not driving. Should be interesting....

Current Mood: hopeful

I just realized I've been a very bad Dreamwidther (is that a word?).

Busy month. It began, really, in late May with Balticon. Once again, I roomed (platonically) with Mike T., who is still doing pretty well despite his Parkinson's diagnosis. I had not seen him in person since the previous Balticon, so we had plenty to talk about. I was there from Friday afternoon to late Sunday afternoon, because I took the MARC commuter train between New Carrollton and Baltimore. The fare only $8 one-way, so it's cheaper than parking in downtown Baltimore, plus the arrangement let the boy toy have the Tucson for the weekend. I didn't hang out with R. much. R. was very focused on helping his friend Ira sell his used books in the dealer's room. So I didn't have to contend much with R.'s reactionary views.

The following weekend was Storvik Novice Tourney. For the first time in a long time (duh, pandemic), I camped at an event. And ... I had forgotten what a BEAR that wooden IKEA twin bed is to assemble. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I will bring it to Pennsic, if indeed I go (and that is a story for another night because it's getting late), but for weekend events, I definitely need a folding camping cot. The comfort of a wood-framed bed is great for Pennsic, but I just don't have the energy to put into assembling it for 36 hours of eventing.

The weekend after Novice was the Baltimore Lithuanian Festival. One of my high school classmates, the one who lives on the north side of Wilmington, drove down with family members and we had a GREAT time together. My classmate presented me with an insulated water bottle inscribed with our high school emblem, a souvenir of that 45th class reunion I missed last October.

And then we had our church's annual meeting and elections ... but that is a big can-o'-worms that I don't want to open tonight. Need some sleep.

OK, I should really get back in the habit of updating this journal.

I left you all hanging, and I apologize. I will try to keep the updates short and sweet.

First of all, housing. The boy toy and I have found an apartment -- namely, an accessory apartment on the property of two longtime SCAdians whom I met at my first-ever SCA event in January 2004. It isn't perfect, but it has some good points, including new floors and a new fridge, plus a big front porch. I will move his stuff in tomorrow (he has been staying with a friend of mine in Baltimore County, but she has other houseguests arriving next month). Then we will move a few essentials from our storage unit to the new place. Then I will move Julia and myself there.

Vehicle: As I figured would happen, the insurance company declared my car a total loss. Fortunately, it gave me a decent amount of money for it (considering that the car was 24 years old). So this week I purchased a 2008 Hyundai Tucson. Still a used car, of course, but with LOTS more carrying capacity than a Corolla. Just what I wanted! It will burn more gasoline, but I will deal with it.

In case you were wondering, here is a list of all the cars I have owned:

1973 Chevy Impala
1981 Chevy Chevette
1979 Toyota Corolla
1985 Mercury Marquis Brougham
1996 Pontiac Sunfire
1983 Plymouth Horizon (inherited from my mother)
1993 Honda Accord
1999 Toyota Corolla

So, yeah, I am finally driving a 21st-century automobile, more than two decades after my Y2K flight.

Church: As I expected, there is a lot of pushback against the unanimous decision by us trustees to sell the church's real estate and find a new home for us. More meetings are coming in the next few weeks. It's not over yet.

Work: I recently finished a feature article and are starting work on another one. Still wish I had a "real" job.

Health: Shortly after the March car accident, I slipped on some mud and did something to my right knee. Now it is still sore off and on. My legs in general feel rather stiff. I wonder if it is an aging thing, a too-much-sitting-down thing, or a transfer of my stress from my brain to my body.

I really need to dust this journal off! Let me summarize here:

ELECTION: I worked as an election judge for four of the eight days of early voting and for Election Day itself. Same as the Maryland primary -- same-day registration during early voting and provisional ballots on Nov. 8. Fortunately, no giant windstorms and power outages this time around.

CHURCH: We finally have a place to hold in-person worship services! We are meeting on Sunday afternoons at the University Christian Church in Hyattsville. (This started only on Nov. 20.) Despite having the word "Christian" in its name, the church is a member of the Disciples of Christ denomination, which is pretty ecumenical. The Hyattsville congregation welcomes the LGBT+ community, and when I drove by it just before the election, I noticed that one of the messages on its outdoor LED sign was "Reject Christian nationalism." I can go along with that.

PHILCON: Even though I would have liked to have gone to Holiday Faire (an annual SCA event), I used the free membership to Philcon 2022 that I won at Costume Con 40. I rode up there with my fussy friend R. in his shiny CR-V. (Before our trip to Cherry Hill, he'd owned that vehicle for about 18 months and put a grand total of 3,200 miles on it.) For some reason, all the people I already knew at this convention were male, and they have been getting steadily more conservative. By the end of the weekend, I was craving the company of female friends.

CHESSIECON: Now this is a convention that is all about female energy. But it was dreadfully small ... *maybe* 120 people. And since it was at that Hunt Valley Inn that used to host Balticon, which is something like 10 times that size ... it felt empty, full of ghosts. The con committee rented way more function space than they could fill with programming, and they didn't sell out the room block, so the committee is now thousands of dollars in debt. Most of the (few) attendees believe that this was the last Chessiecon, sadly.

And now Julia is demanding her nightly treats.

P.S. I am definitely NOT missing the Virginia congressional candidate commercials.

Things are REALLY busy this month. Holy freakin' moley.

Let's start with this week. (Well, technically last week...) I had thought I'd be serving as a Prince George's County election judge only for the July 19 primary, but then I received a call asking me to work on the even-numbered days of the early voting period (July 7-14). No big deal, right? Easy money! Except ... I'm also madly working on my science-writing assignments (and not as far along as I'd wanted to be). AND we started a new church year, so the Board of Trustees (to which I belong, remember) must make some crazy-big decisions. AND Storvik's signature Novice and Unbelt Tourney was scheduled for July 9 instead of sometime in June.

AND my condo's HVAC system is on the fritz, and I won't have the money to get it repaired until after all this work is done.

AND there was a storm on the way.

July 8 and July 10 were OK days at the College Park early-voting site, the gymnasium at a recreation center. As the same-day-registration judge, I sat under an A/C vent and was really glad I brought a sweater. Brrr. July 12 was like that until dinnertime, when I heard a loud roar like a rainstorm of BB pellets on the roof, and then the lights went out. I was in the middle of updating a woman's address in the database when that happened, so I had to ask her to sit and wait about 15 minutes until the backup batteries kicked in and synchronized things. Some of us stepped outside and saw that trees were down everywhere and political signs outside the no-electioneering zone had gone flying. It turned out that the neighborhood had been one of the places where winds had gusted up to 85 mph, which is basically hurricane force. It wasn't a tornado or a derecho, though, but some other kind of meteorological phenomenon ("bow front" or something like that). Even the air smelled like fresh wood, filled with essence of living trees suddenly ripped apart.

I texted the boy toy at home and he said that we didn't have power either. So I grabbed a couple of bags of ice and some fast-food dinner on the way home from the early-voting site. (The commercial strip where I bought these items was chaos -- some of the businesses had power, some didn't, but the traffic lights were out, and people were driving every which way. Scary!)

Apparently the power came back on for my building in the early-morning hours of the 13th, but the College Park neighborhood mentioned above still was a disaster area. Somehow the polls opened, with a generator and two industrial-sized fans going. When I worked on the 14th, the last day of early voting, we had regular electricity until about 2:30 p.m., when the grid conked out for no apparent reason (the weather was sunny). The generator and fans had to come out again after it got stuffy in that gym. The ceiling had a big translucent skylight in it, but I started to worry that the light (both from the skylight and the little emergency lights) would fade just as we would be starting to break down the equipment and box everything up. Fortunately, the lights came back on around 7:30 p.m. Whew! But the last few voters took their sweet time to fill out their ballots and didn't leave until about 50 minutes after the polls closed. Aargh!

On top of all of this, I cut the cable-TV cord because it's just so damned expensive. I miss my CNN.

I tested negative for covid-19 several days after Balticon and have felt fine ever since.

The weekend after Balticon, I spent a Sunday at AwesomeCon, the commercial "comic con" for Our Nation's Capital. My barony had set up a booth in the exhibit hall to attract new people, and my role in the proceedings was to teach dancing for an hour. Patches, who knows much more about teaching dances than I do, had been drilling me on the ins and outs for more than a month. Something like 70 or 75 people showed up to learn an alman, a couple of English country dances and a few bransles. Thank goodness the room was equipped with a speaker that I could plug into my phone. I had brought along my friend's battery-powered speaker, but I think the carpeting and clothing would have muffled it up completely.

After AwesomeCon, I turned my attention to church stuff. Because we would be holding our annual congregational meeting virtually for the third straight year, I volunteered to run the electronic voting. So I signed up for an account on ElectionBuddy and performed test after test to try to get everything right. I think it turned out OK; some people said they didn't get their ballots, which had ended up in their spam folders, but that's to be expected. I let out a giant sigh of relief after sending out the official ballots and turned my brain off by taking a nap on the couch.

A few weeks ago, I learned that my former partner in the Lithuanian dance group back in 2016 had died. He went by the nickname Vyts (pronounced "veets") and had really badly bowed legs and was a terrible dancer. Plus, he said he had been divorced three times, and I couldn't help feeling that he was auditioning me as a possible wife #4. (The boy toy called him my "Lithuanian boyfriend.") I saw him at the Lithuanian Hall from time to time -- the last time in April when I went up there for a dancing event. (I am not dancing anymore -- I was just in the audience.) He looked as if he'd had surgery on his legs because they were straighter. I didn't have much to say, because I know from his Facebook posts that his political views were entirely opposite mine ... bleah. Still, it was a bit of a shock to learn that he had dropped dead at the age of 65, almost 66. Apparently he really was a big supporter of the Lithuanian community in Baltimore.

I know I'm rambling here, but I can't let June 17 end without noting that today is the 50th anniversary of the one day I went to school on a Saturday. The school board in my hometown could not end the academic year on Friday the 16th, because we would have been one day short of the state regulations. The teachers strongly preferred getting the school year over with on a Saturday rather than Monday, so that's what we did. (Not that we ever did any learning on the last day of the school year. It was always like "watch a movie, then get your report card.") And that's how seventh grade ended.

My strongest memory of the day is that someone let off a stink bomb in the playground crowd just before we were allowed into the building, and our assistant principal, Mr. R., stood on the steps of the main doors and shouted, "I see who you are! You're in trouble now!" That stentorian voice of his could silence hundreds of tweens and teens like nothing else before or since. We tiptoed around his massive bulk and crept to our homerooms.

And there was a giant disruption in the Force in the form of the Watergate break-in, and nothing was ever the same again....

This past Saturday, I went to the Lochmere event known as Night Under a Fae Moon. (Lochmere is one of the neighboring SCA baronies.) It was relaxing and productive at the same time. I didn't have any tasks to do, other than perform four carols/songs/motets/whatever with Laydes Fayre, an a-cappella women's group. And performing with them is fun, rather than a choir.

Every year (well, except for the plague years), this event has a component called "Lochmart," which is basically a flea market for SCA stuff. I brought a bagful of items and managed to sell three of them, netting me a total of $15. My friend Teleri sold her lightly used Panther hunter's tent for $400, half of its original price. A good deal all around.

I also got my new-to-me archery bow inspected by a marshal. This is a fiberglass recurve bow I bought at a yard sale for $10 last summer. (The sellers were people who had played in the SCA back in the 1980s and 1990s but are no longer active.) The bow is sound, but the metal nock thing on the string is in the wrong place. I will bring it to an archery practice session one of these days and see what can be done about it. I'm happy the bow is safe, because even a used fiberglass bow costs upward of $100 at Pennsic.

The boy toy and I had a quiet Easter. Instead of cooking up a huge ham, we just had some barbecued meats from Mission BBQ, plus a couple of homemade sides.

Today I took Julia the cat to the vet for another round of blood and urine tests. We shall see what the results will be.

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luscious_purple

Lady Patricia of Trakai

May 2025

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Dwarf Planet in Purple

Dancing in the shadow of light

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