weekend so far (mostly SCA)

[cellio]

Friday night was another dinner for the 20s/30s group. Attendance was about the same as last time (around 25), but there were some new faces, including some people who are checking out the congregation. It was a pleasant dinner. This time there was fish in addition to meat, which I appreciated. (They didn't use a kosher caterer, so last time I ate lots of pasta and salad.)

Yesterday after I got home from services we went to kingdom 12th night, about an hour north of here. We got there just as a court was finishing; I hadn't known there would be more than one. There was an artisans' exhibition, but there was very little time to look at anything before I had to go to my first meeting. (I thought the meeting was later. Oops.) This was very much the day of long meetings, and next time I end up with multiple meetings at a single one-day event I will choose one to attend and not attend all of them.

The choir performed before court (the later one, I mean). I could actually hear the tenor parts! (This has sometimes been a problem with our choir, I'm told. I'm usually in the choir, but not for Christmas music.) The altos and sopranos were down in numbers compared to the tenors and basses, and each of the upper parts had one weak singer, so balance was a little off. Aside from that, though, and one piece that really suffered from this week's rehearsal being snowed out, it sounded good. The environment wasn't really all that good for performances, unfortunately. (There was one large room with lots of background noise.)

The site for the event was a little strange. They were using a high school, so most activities took place in one large room (the cafeteria), which was plenty big enough to accommodate that. But changing rooms and meeting rooms were separate, and they were far away. (This event would have benefitted from a published map.) We had to walk quite a way to get to the changing rooms, and had to go to a different building to get to the meeting rooms, yet we walked past many suitable classrooms on the way to those destinations. Was the school unwilling to let the SCA use rooms that were actually close to the cafeteria? How odd. I felt sorry for the people who have trouble getting around. (Oh, and pretty much all of the parking was a good distance from the building, too.)

The feast was good. Starch-heavy for vegetarians (few veggies), but that's normal. I guess I should start packing raw veggies when going to events. (I am not complaining about the cook here; most feasts have this issue, for various reasons.)

A lot of people took off right after the feast. I had planned to spend that time schmoozing with people I didn't get to see during the day because of meetings, but had limited success. Some of them will be at today's baronial party, for which I'll be leaving soon.

dagonell and Cigfran got snowed in, so they didn't make it down after all. Pity.

Comments

[jducoeur]

The grant level awards are pretty much thought of as stepping stones to the peerage. At this point, I don't think you could give out a peerage to someone who didn't already have the grant level award.

Interesting; AEthelmearc has definitely diverged from the East in this regard. We've argued about this back and forth, but the general consensus seems to be that the High Merits are explicitly not steppingstones, and shouldn't be. Of course, they're AoA-level rather than GoA-level, but they're the nearest cognates we have.

We've had peers receive the High Merit version in all three tracks: it isn't common, but it certainly happens. I'm a typical example on the arts side, having gotten my Manche for gaming long after getting the Laurel for dance. It's pretty common for Pelicans to get Crescents (especially immigrants who do lots of service for the Kingdom). Don't know how often it happens in the fighting track, but it's so phenomenally difficult to get a belt these days that the sample size is small...

[cellio]

I don't think I agree with the assessment that in AEthelmearc you pretty much have to get the grant-level award first. I haven't done the OP analysis, though, and dagonell is a herald and thus more exposed to these things, so maybe I'm wrong.

I know that the phrase "he doesn't have his [whatever] yet; let's get him that first" has not come up in the peerage discussions I've been involved in. Occasionally someone will say "this person isn't ready, but hey, he doesn't have a [whatever] yet so maybe we should recommend him for that in the meantime" -- but that's not the same thing. And sometimes someone is nominated to both the peerage order and the grant order, and the royalty (who are in a position to see that) may decide to act on the grant even knowing that they or their successors might give the peerage. But again, that is not the same thing (nor is it at all consistent).

Things have also changed as the kingdom has aged. In the beginning, there was a perception that we had some overdue peerages, and we certainly weren't going to wait to climb an award ladder to give them. Now the grant-level awards have existed for a few years and people are tending to get them at about the right times, so people who end up on peerage polling lists now stand a better chance of already having those awards than those who became peers a few years ago.

[alienor.livejournal.com]

Interesting; AEthelmearc has definitely diverged from the East in this regard. We've argued about this back and forth, but the general consensus seems to be that the High Merits are explicitly not steppingstones, and shouldn't be.

Atlantia split off earlier than AEthelmearc, but we seem to echo East in this regard (at least, from what I've been told, I'm not part of any polling orders, nor am I ready yet!).