Pennsic quickies

[cellio]

I'm home from Pennsic. Quick bits now; real report later.

Blackout: didn't touch us. I'm told it started about 15 miles north of the Pennsic site; I don't know if that's true. (Haven't read the newspapers yet.) Pennsic had one power outage some years back; we did notice, especially because the water system uses electric pumps and this meant no showers etc. Also, some of the merchants, particularly the food vendors, rely on electricity. That outage only lasted three or four hours, so everything was ok; if this one had included Pennsic we'd probably have some seriously grumpy people by now. :-)

Head count: 12,300 as of 4pm yesterday (Thursday). About 800 people showed up between 4pm Wednesday and 4pm Thursday; I would have thought that for an event that effectively ends on Saturday, there wouldn't still be that many people showing up. (If I only had a couple vacation days, I'd go for the middle weekend++, not the final one.)

People: met rectangularcat and her fiance, chaiya, patsmor, and a bunch of folks briefly at an LJ gathering. Spent time (but never enough time) chatting with Dof and Thora, Steffan, Yaakov, dglenn, jducoeur, and others. Missed Dorigen entirely; bummer. Also missed attempts to have longer conversations with Yaakov (who left Wednesday; I thought he was staying through Shabbat) and Steffan.

Music: the choir performance went well despite some last-minute snafus. Wolgemut was fun to listen to, though I didn't catch the entire show. I think they were also doing some physical comedy or some such during parts of the show, but I couldn't see from where I was standing so that was completely lost on me. When the music seemed to have died down for a while in favor of other theatrics I wandered away. Later I saw them playing in the marketplace and that was good because I could both hear and see. One of them was playing a very nifty bowed, keyed instrument called a moraharpa. He says it's Swedish. It looked very nifty and seems to be something I could actually play (I've always had trouble with fretting but I love bowed strings). I'll have to see what I can find out about this. I suspect it's modern, but even if I can't play it in the SCA I'd still be interested.

Egoboo: Someone in the dance tent introduced me to a friend of hers (by SCA name) and I got a polite reception; then the person told her my real name and the friend gushed at me. It's been a while since I've gotten the "oh, you're Monica Cellio!" reaction. It was neat. :-) (Turns out she's a fan of my music arrangements.)

Egoboo II: Ran into a friend from Carolingia who I haven't seen in a while and she called me by my old SCA name. I corrected her and then she said something like "yes, you're right -- Ellisif is bigger". :-)

Weather: The forecasts spoke of rain and more rain, interrupted by rain, but the first week was actually fine. The highs were in the low 80s, the lows were in the 60s, it didn't rain (significantly) until Friday, and things were fine. This was then followed by several wet days, with roads so muddy that we watched mud-surfing from our camp and the tractors were being used to pull cars out of their parking spots. Things started to clear up around Monday night or Tuesday morning, and the last few days were hotter and more humid. But at least the mud dried. This might have been the locally-wettest Pennsic I've been to, but it was still ok.

Email: deleted 900 messages on the first pass; have almost 400 that survived the first cut. Some of the 900 were mailing lists I know I'm not going to catch up on, but most were spam.

More after Shabbat. I have to snuggle my cats. :-)

Comments

[ealdthryth.livejournal.com]

Welcome back! Sounds like a good time. Maybe we will go next year. I went once (1995) but Eldred has never been.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Unsurprisingly, mention of a new insturment sent me scampering for google - moraharpa, an early version of the modern nyckelharpa, from around 1526 according to this site. Nyckelharps are relatively well-known, have encountered many US folk online who play them.

[cellio]

Thanks! I haven't had time to commence research yet. :-) Glad to hear that it might be period, though!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Welcome back! I look forward to reading more.
Shabbat shalom.

Welcome Home!

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to a more complete description of Pennsic. The last time Cigfran and I went was summer of 2001.

[indigodove.livejournal.com]

Welcome home! It will be good to see y'all next week :-)

[rectangularcat]

It was a real pleasure meeting you and sharing a meal. I am now in Toronto after the excitement of cortejo's party and going into labour the following morning - I was a houseguest! (She had the baby yesterday afternoon, both mom and baby girl are healthy)

I am still a bit over-stimulated from Pennsic. Wow, that was fun. Overwhelming but fun. Anf I know I took things easy - slept on a regular schedule and eating as well but I am still not used to the feel of modern clothes and these flush toilet things...

I think the power outage affected the campgroup slightly as on Thursday we kept having people from the East encampment coming over to the trailer blaming us for shorting out their power. I am glad that we didn't lose power though for an extended period of time. It would have been quite medieval though....

Well off to be social!

[cellio]

Cortejo: Wow, what timing! Invite all your friends for a party and then have the kid before they all leave town. :-)

I really enjoyed meeting and chatting with you at Pennsic. And yeah, Pennsic can be overwhelming, but in a good way. Steffan ap Kenedd (that's misspelled; I don't have a good handle on Welsh) says that only Pennsic is worth the effortthat only Pennsic requires. :-)

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

I think that was in 1990, our first Pennsic, on the way home from which I asked Debbie to marry me (she said yes, of course). Yaakov's reaction: what took you so long?

I had my 2-meter ham radio along on that trip. When the power went out, I put it on to listen to the by-play between the troll and the chirurgeons and the power company. Someone came into the encampment describing a series of flashes about 1.5 seconds apart from the transmission towers paralleling I-79. I relayed this to the power company person, who said it told them what had happened - a series of transformers blew, and as the next tried to compensate, it would overload and shut down. Much like what happened here.

Jon Baker, N2CPN (not that I know where the radio is now; it might have been useful during the blackout).

[cellio]

I think that was in 1990, our first Pennsic, on the way home from which I asked Debbie to marry me (she said yes, of course).

Sounds like a good Pennsic. :-)

it might have been useful during the blackout

I assume ham radios run, or can run, from batteries? I wonder how many ham operators are still out there; this sounds like just the thing for communicating in major blackouts, when cell phones don't work and land lines are overloaded.

One of the members of our camp was on staff this year, so he had a radio on their network. They had some spare bands (channels?), so they kept one permanently broadcasting weather info. Given that rumors of Major Impending Storms are usually the biggest rumor-mongering problem at Pennsic, this makes sense to me. I don't know if anyone was listening to news, though; we heard about the blackout from someone who arrived that evening.