Dwarf Planet in Purple

Happy Birthday, wookiemonster!!! The guy who remembers everyone else's LJ/DW birthday deserves some reciprocation!!!

Today I felt weirdly sad for some reason. Maybe it had to do with last night's shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Maybe I just felt overwhelmed. (I wish I didn't have so many big bills due right before Pennsic.) Last night I *had* been planning to mention the Red Sox vs. Yankees series, but the Gilroy news cleared the decks of my mind, so to speak.

The boy toy picked up five new stakes for my tent, plus a new air pump ... but the pump takes C batteries, and the only C batteries I had were labeled "Best Used By 2006." Uh. He's going to Harbor Freight tomorrow.

Great goodness, I keep *meaning* to post here and then I don't. I read more than I post. Honest, I do.

Anyhow.

The last weekend in April was Revenge of the Stitch, a "garb wars" type of SCA event. This was the fourth year and I've been on Johanna's team for three of them. Teams are given 24 hours to create an entire period outfit from the skin out. This year it was her grown daughter's turn to get an outfit, so she chose a woman's outfit from the Tang dynasty of China (Lady Tatsume is interested in both Japan and China). Johanna bought a bunch of silk in the NYC garment district while visiting her son, who lives up there now, so we were well prepared. We made seven different pieces of clothing, and I did a lot of hand-stitching, which, as it turns out, is much more tedious on silk than on linen. Tatsume's girlfriend, who was not on the team, seemed rather bored and petulant until she realized she could get some studying done for her classes. But the finished outfit looked fabulous on Tatsume, and we ended up getting second place out of five teams. The King and Queen were so impressed that they awarded all the competitors a Silver Nautilus.

Tent issues: This was the first time I'd camped in my tent since last year's Revenge of the Stitch, which was rainy. (This year's event was dry, thank goodness!) I got the tent out of the Rubbermaid storage tub and it smelled a little musty and looked a little more stained on the roof (despite the presence of dessicant in the tub -- several handfuls of that crystal-type cat litter). It really, really needs new poles and new ties for the side windows. The metal teeth on the screen-door zipper were just rotting off -- they were literally falling off the cloth part of the zipper. Fortunately, the canvas-door zipper still holds, but for how much longer?

I bought some Flex-Seal stuff on clearance at Target, so I can patch any tiny holes on the vinyl floor. But I really should ask Sonya and Maugorn if I could set the tent up in their backyard for a couple of days and get some serious work done on that poor thing.

(I guess I shouldn't start writing these reports just before I plan to go to bed, huh?)

Anyway ... one of the other heralds went around to "cry" the warning that the storm was coming, so I headed back to the Storvik encampment. My friends had already zipped up my front door, but not the back window of my tent, so I went in and did that part. The wind was starting to whip up, and my friends thought that my tent was wobbling about a bit too much, so we staked down the ropes that hold up the little canopies on the side windows. Neil said he thinks that I ought to run ropes down from the four upper corners of the tent (where the ridge poles at the ends meet the side poles) and stake those ropes down for added stability. Duly noted for next year, as I probably won't be camping again in 2011. I also offered my stakes to a few other people to tie down their tents better -- lately I've been carrying along a tote bag with all sorts of metal and plastic tent stakes that I've accumulated over my SCA career.

While I was still in the encampment, the rain came. I could actually hear it and see it approaching across the field before the drops started falling on me. It's not often that I can see that.

At least it was lunchtime by then. The cooks served food cafeteria style from warming trays onto foam plates, so feast gear wasn't needed (except for your mug). The fare wasn't fancy like some SCA feasts, but then again, the budget was $5/person and I also think that they were required by the site owners to prepare it offsite and schlep the trays of food over there. So it was decent, all things considered.

After lunch I returned to the heralds' tent to finish stitching. The cloth I had brought with me to make the pincushion itself was this vaguely gold-tone upholstery-fabric sample, and the backing was harder to penetrate with a needle than I had predicted it would be. Oh, well, I just kept doggedly soldiering on until it was done. Then I couldn't find Lady Esperanza, the organizer of the gift baskets, so I found someone else who was helping out at A&S Point, and she said to leave it on the table of prizes with a note. So I did.

I didn't get a chance to see much of the A&S competition, but I did check out a couple of the "History of Atlantia" tents (there were three). I went over to the Storvik encampment to see how the tents fared during the storm, and I got into a discussion of newcomer/chatelaine issues, followed by the arrival of a guy named Paul who is totally new to the SCA and needed help putting his brand-new pop-up tent together. Thus I arrived at the big populace pavilion just at the start of Royal Great Court, instead of prior to the court, so I wasn't able to herald Baroness Sorcha into court as Her Excellency of Storvik. :-( Darn, I really should have been able to do that.

Court itself was fairly long, and I couldn't hear everything from where I was sitting, but I did note that shalandara's husband was elevated into the ranks of the Order of the Pelican, and narniarose became a Companion of the Pearl. Congratulations to both! At the end, Their Majesties called out the handful of attendees who were around Atlantia during the Principality period more than 30 years ago, so we newer folks could all see who they are.

To be continued some more....