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weekend so far (mostly SCA)
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.
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dagonell and Cigfran got snowed in,
so they didn't make it down after all. Pity.
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It doesn't function very well here, especially when you try to redefine things in the middle.
Ok, it's like this. Once upon a time we were a principality and we had the AoA-level awards. Everyone, and I mean everyone, understood that the level of skill necessary to earn (say) a Sycamore was much lower than that required to earn a Manche, the kingdom-level award in the same area (arts, in this case). So people from the principality of AEthelmearc had an extra award that they might get on the way to a Manche, and people from the rest of the East didn't, but the standards were so different that this didn't really cause any confusion.
Then, AEthelmearc went kingdom. The heralds who were running the place at the time, in some moment of one-upsmanship or whatever, decided that the AoA-level awards ranked higher in precedence than the Eastern awards (which were also technically AoA-level, but with higher standards). So Sycamores now ranked higher than Manches on paper, which had nothing to do with reality.
So, the analysts among us noted that one of two things would happen: the standards for the award would rise to meet the new position, or a new layer of awards would be added in order to keep the existing awards at a lower level. Some of us really didn't want to see a new layer right away, and felt that the standards should rise a bit now that we were a kingdom, so we argued for closing the principality orders and opening new ones. That effort failed, though, and it really only could have been done at the time we went kingdom. And the prediction played out: the first king and queen created grant-level awards to parallel the AoA-level awards we already had, and made them polling orders (like the Eastern orders had been) to distinguish them. So for all practical purposes, a Fleur (grant-level) is now more-or-less equivalent to an Eastern Manche, except on paper.
My fear is that someday we will end up like Trimaris, with 50-something awards, most highly-specialized, few understood by most people. I would rather have fewer general awards than lots of specific ones. Heck, some might lend themselves to being given multiple times, which would be fine. But we don't need a special award for heraldry or teaching dance or thrown weapons or autocratting or whatever...