Pennsic (long)

[cellio]

This is the long Pennsic entry.

I was going to say "in no particular order", but it's actually chronologically ordered by jump-off points, sort of.

House

Last year we had hornets' nests; this year I had what I thought was an inactive birds' nest. I later concluded that it had been active when I saw lots of swallows hanging around that window. Oops. Swallows are nice to have around, too. Oh well. They can build nests 50 weeks out of the year for all I care, but they get evicted for Pennsic. I'm actually surprised they found the nest after the house got moved from the storage area to our camp. (Hornets, on the other hand, are unwelcome at all times IMO, because evicting them is dangerous.)

This year's home-improvement project was to add fake oak beams under the loft. The loft is held up by trios of 2x6s; doing the construction with actual oak 6x6s would have posed challenges. But hardwood beams are what they would have used, so I finally added a vaneer: quarter-inch plywood cut to width, mitered corners, with bits filled in with putty and the whole thing stained. I was worried about the fact that the beams are actually more than 8' long, meaning that I couldn't do each surface with a single piece, but that actually isn't all that obvious after staining. I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. My tube of putty rebelled (more came out a hole in the bottom than out the nozzle), so I'll need to do some more work next year, but that's fine.

I cut the boards to length on site, rather than relying on the measurements I took last year. It doesn't take that long to cut quarter-inch plywood with a hand saw, after all. Partway through all of this a woman from across the street came by and offered me a cordless circular saw. I thanked her for her generosity but explained my fear of power tools and declined.

This was my project for Monday and Tuesday of the first week. It took until yesterday for the last of the wood stain on/under my fingernails to disappear.

Valuable lesson learned from Alaric: how to pound nails up. Gravity is not your friend. :-)

Despite copious newspaper taped to the walls near the beams and spread on the floor, I still managed to drip/splatter some stain in places where I didn't want it. Oh well; I was going to cover those walls next year anyway, and the carpet hides most of the stuff on the floor.

After the beams were done I mounted the brackets for the two small oil lamps (under the front beam), so this was my first year of having all three lamps. (I bought them all last year, but had only been able to hang the large one from the ceiling.) The lamps shed a lot of light, but erratically. I still don't grok oil lamps, I guess. I have an idea for a change in wick-deployment technology for next year. And I brought all the lamps home (to clean them), so I can experiment with this in the comfort of my own home.

There were a few nights this Pennsic when I was able to invite folks into the house to chat by lamplight, rather than sitting around outside (also well-lit but not always as comfortable). I enjoy being able to do that. The entire camp doesn't fit in the house and I'm not looking to replace our common area, but it's nice to be able to use the house in this way for smaller groups. Makes me feel hospitable and all.

I had a crasher one night during the first week, someone whose tent didn't get set up before dark. So I was able to offer floor space in the living room. :-)

Even though this is the fourth year for the house, I still got a lot of visitors who wanted to see it. One person was a repeat from last year (I recognized her); she was coming by to tell me that I had inspired her to build her own, which is now in progress. I look forward to seeing it.

Neighbors

The above-mentioned neighbor was at Pennsic with her husband but without a group (so they were camping alone). The husband had to leave after a few days, leaving her by herself. She's a nice person and we invited her over several times to visit, for food, and so on. It's nice to meet new people, though I failed to get post-Pennsic contact information so I don't know if I'll ever see her again.

Some of the members of Wolgemut, a German loud band, were camped about a block away. That meant we got to hear them practice in the afternoons. That was fun, and the four-year-old in our camp went nuts over this. (He's a big fan.)

Our barony camp consists of several sub-camps and then the "open" camp. This allows us to register 100 people or so as a single entity in the land lottery, making everything easier for all concerned. This year our group had the incoming baron and baroness as immediate neighbors, which was nice. It means we got to see a lot of them, especially her. They're nice folks.

There are a few clueless parents from hell in the baronial camp and they posed some initial problems for our group, but they got sorted out pretty quickly. Sometimes bluntness is a kindness. :-)

New Shower

Our camp uses a propane-fueled shower, complete with hot-water tank, filtration, and chlorination. (One of our people is an engineer with the water and sewer authority. We run pipe from the main spigot, not hoses like everyone else.) The plumbing has been stable for a few years, but the shower enclosure itself was unwieldy and a challenge to put together and take apart. This year Leifr replaced it with a system of tubes that slot together and can be hand-tightened. The new enclosure goes together much more easily, supports more parallel processing, can be done largely without tools, and is more stable to boot. He did a great job with it, and it only took a small group of us about 10 minutes to put it together (including the utilities closet to hide the tanks etc).

No, I don't call this "camping"; why do you ask? :-)

Rufina, a friend from another camp who used to be an archeologist, came by to dig our sump. She has strong opinions about the correct ways to dig, and about tools. We offered to feed her as many meals as she wanted in exchange for this, but I think she only came by once or twice. I'd feel guilty about this if she hadn't initiated this exchange and enthused about digging.

Grendl's Party

Rufina has a hand puppet, a mouse named Grendl. She does a very good job with him and is entertaining to watch. The mouse really does have its own personality and everything. While she was in our camp digging, she told us that his "birthday" was the next day and she had a cake. She wanted to invite some friends but her camp wasn't set up yet, so we let her use ours. This turned out to be a lot of fun, and the cherry cake was wonderful. (Cherry and orange are my favorite cake flavors. Separately. :-) )

Now, this was the first week of Pennsic, when schedules are loose and wacky ideas flow freely. So we had a bunch of people sitting around camp, and we had wood, and we had tools, and we had paint, and we had a mouse coming for a birthday party the next day who really deserved a present of some sort. So we made him a toy castle, completely with materials on hand. Rufina (and Grendl) really liked it, and we had a lot of fun doing it. And when Adina from across the street offered the circular saw this time, some of my camp-mates took her up on it.

Old Friends, New Friends

I visited Dof and Thora in their camp a couple times. They never made it up to ours, though they're getting more mobile now that Leora is 7. 7! It's easy to lose track of time when you see someone only once a year.

I only got to see Steffan once, and not for very long because he and Elspeth were on their way out. That's disappointing; I was hoping to spend more time with him. He was only there for the second week. I miss the long, deep, rambling conversations we used to have by email.

I spent smaller amounts of time chatting with assorted see-only-at-Pennsic friends. I wish I'd had more time with Yaakov. They apparently left Wednesday night, so I missed them when I went hunting on Thursday.

I met rectangularcat and her fiance Steve. They're nice folks from An Tir who were at their first Pennsic. It sounds like they enjoyed it, so I hope they'll be back. I invited them for dinner on my night to cook; I don't know if they had been planning to stay as long as they did before the heavens opened and rain trapped everyone for a few hours. :-)

There was an LJ gathering on the schedule so I went, hoping to put faces to names. I actually didn't recognize most of the user names at the meeting, though I did recognize snarkyman and redsquirrel, and I already knew jducoeur and dglenn to see. Someone took a list of names, so I hope there'll be a post in sca or pennsic_war or something with the complete list.

It was amusing to see which names got the "oh so you're so-and-so" treatment. The largest amount of name recognition seemed to be for jducoeur, and I had more than I expected. For a bunch of people I mostly hadn't heard of, I didn't expect that. I guess a lot of people read other folks stealthily or something. Or maybe just occasionally. The names I recognized are people who comment in friends' journals, so I guess that's a vector too. (So, um, if any of you folks from the meeting are reading this, say hi, ok? :-) )

After the meeting Justin took me to where chaiya camped, because I'd wanted to meet her. She's a nice person and we spent some time over the rest of the week chatting. I also got a much-needed massage from her late in the week, and bought her a wood chest in return.

While meeting Chaiya I ran into "Old Marian", who's in the same camp. I haven't seen her in a few years. She used to run a wonderful food business called Battlefield Bakery where I could reliably find her, but it closed a few years ago. I still miss it. It and Sated Tyger (the latter gone for 15 years or more) were the best period-style food to be had from the food vendors at Pennsic. (Most of the vendors sell modern food, like Chinese, cheese-steak sandwiches, and Italian ices.)

Food

For my dinner I cooked the following:

• roasted chicken with sage and other herbs (cooked at home, frozen, and reheated at Pennsic)
• yellow squash and eggplant, roasted with salt and pepper
• carrots, parsnips, peppers (red and yellow), and garlic, roasted (should have used another bulb of garlic)
• bread (brought up frozen)
• (purchased) meringue cookies (a big hit)
• [EDIT:] spinach tart, made at home, frozen, and reheated at Pennsic (this was primarily for the vegetarian, but others had some too)

I had broccoli that I'd meant to throw in there, but I forgot about it until it was too late. Oops. So the dinner was low on green stuff.

I roasted all of the veggies by putting them in foil pans with olive oil, wrapping them in foil to seal them, and cooking them a while on a grill. I credit ralphmelton for showing me that veggies sealed in foil actually cook well on a grill. For the chicken, I just spread foil on a grill, sprayed it with non-stick stuff, and spread the chicken out on that to reheat. Aside from the fact that the chicken went from reading 120 degrees to being somewhat blackened in just a few minutes, it all went well.

I'm growing uncomfortable with kashrut in camp and I don't know how to address my discomfort. I do not believe our sanitary standards are up to home levels, and while my camp-mates try to be good about separation and stuff, they just aren't as attuned to it as I am. (Well, some are, but not everyone.) I cringed one morning when someone cooked pork sausage on one of the grills, and treated the grills as suspect for the rest of the war. (Later that day when no one else was around I scrubbed it and kashered it as best I could, but I cooked on/in foil after that and I encouraged others to do so too, ostensibly to make cleanup easier.)

I can't ask the camp to keep kosher just because I do, but not being able to cook or eat in camp would also be a problem. And don't get me wrong; people do make real efforts to make sure there's food I can eat on their nights to cook, and are often good about segregation, and I really appreciate the efforts. But for each problem I notice and fix or work around, like that pork sausage, I have to wonder if there are others I don't know about.

I already make kashrut compromises for the sake of Pennsic, so I guess I'm already on a slippery slope. But it's getting awfully slippery here.

A friend (maybe chaiya, not sure) suggested that I might be able to segregate some of the stuff, working with the couple of other people in camp who also care to some level. I'll have to give this some thought. If, for example, I could be assured that one of the two grills would never contain non-kosher meat types (or dairy), that would make things easier. But would it cramp other people's cooking habits too much? Especially since I didn't bring a grill? (I don't own one and probably wouldn't be able to transport it if I did.)

Our meal plan wasn't supposed to start until Friday of the first week, but Micolina showed up on Wednesday and she's an enthusiastic cook, so for all practical purposes communal meals started then. This, along with her tendency to also organize lunches, meant that I came home with more of the food that I had brought to eat than I had planned on. I made notes this year about what I did and did not consume, which should help with not overbuying next year.

I did not have any of the fabulous chocolate milk this year. Past behavior suggests that I would drink the entire quart in one sitting -- coolers being so iffy for storing milk, don't'cha know? -- and that would be bad. I meant to pick up some on my way out to take home, where maybe I'd get it to last a day or two, but I didn't make it to the store. Oh well. (The chocolate milk is like crack: it's made with whole milk, and it's really, really good.)

Weather

The weather during most of the first week was very comfortable -- not too hot, not too humid, and no significant rain. (There was a brief sprinkle once.) On Friday night it rained a lot and the roads got treacherous; I feared for the late-night walk to the privy. (No flashlights on Shabbat, though I try not to use flashlights outdoors at all at Pennsic anyway. Succeeded this year, too.)

The rain continued through Saturday. Sunday started to clear, but then we got a huge downpour during our baronial dinner. This made the roads muddy enough that some folks up the road started to do body-surfing in the huge pool of mud. This was entertaining in a goofy way, and eventually several others joined in, including some from our barony. There were plans for games and stuff after the dinner, mostly for the kids, but playing in the mud turned out to be more appealing to folks. There was a performance I wanted to se Sunday night and I was concerned about walking back afterwards, but fortunately, I had a seeing-eye apprentice to lead the way. I bet Degan didn't know that walking ahead of me to look for the deep puddles and slick spots would be part of the job description. :-) (He volunteered; I didn't ask.)

The rain eventually stopped on Monday, and by Wednesday things were drying out enough that they actually watered that same road to keep the dust down. There were still swampy bits, though, and the public-transit system (wagons pulled by tractors) that normally supports Pennsic just never happened this year. (Well, I saw one wagon taking people up to the archery range on the top of a hill, but wagons were not circling the lake in the woods at all.)

One morning there was an interesting juxtaposition in the announcements: please keep the roads clear of vehicles, and the parking lot is now closed due to mud. Um... my car was already parked, but for a while I wondered what they wanted new arrivals (and people who had left to do grocery runs or the like) to do. The answer turned out to be some new auxilliary parking areas, including on the battlefield. This led to the challenge later of getting those people to move their cars once the parking lot was open again...

The last few days of Pennsic turned out to be hotter and humid. (You'd think that after all that rain, there wouldn't be a humidity problem.) On Thursday the heat index was something like 115, I'm told, but the temperature stayed below 90 the entire time. Can't complain too much about that.

Dani

Dani was supposed to arrive on Sunday. (He's not as much of a Pennsic junkie as I am, but that's ok. Partially-separate vacations are actually a good idea IMO.) When he hadn't shown up by 4 I checked for messages and learned that his car had died. Being Dani, he left an evocative description: he had turned the key and heard a sound not unlike an engine imploding. When I talked to him he said he'd had it towed to someplace that was at least open on a Sunday, but they ended up not being able to do anything for him. He finally made it up to Pennsic Monday evening (in time for the choir performance), after having to go to Saturn where they replaced the entire ignition system. Whee. (The car is only four years old; it seems early for that kind of failure.)

It's a pity that he lost a day of Pennsic, but it could have been a lot worse. In particular, the repair might have taken several days and I might have needed to fetch him -- which wouldn't be a problem for getting him there, but might have been a challenge getting home given my small car, his inability to drive stick, and Shabbat.

Performances

I Sebastiani, "the greatest commedia del'arte troupe in the entire world", was up to its usual levels. The show was fun, and we learned that they've actually been getting some recognition in the mundane world for their skill. Steffan told me that they've done a number of performances in "real" venues in Boston, and they announced at the show that they're going to Italy next year, by invitation, to perform at a commedia del'arte conference. Neat! (I didn't know there were conferenes for that.)

For those who don't know, commedia del'arte is renaissance improvisational theatre. Each show is built around a plot outline, a "scenario", but the dialogue is mostly improv. (It's apparent that a few lines were carefully prepped, but not most of them.) The best modern analogue I can point to is Second City Theatre, who we saw in Toronto in April. (In fact, I think I recognized one of their scenarios, though the rendering was of course modern.)

AEthelmarc also has a commedia del'arte troupe, led by tangerinpenguin, and they performed the next night. I was particularly amused when a gag from the previous night emerged in their show -- from the audience, not from them. Their show was a followup to their show from last year -- sort of a sequel. They did a good job with it. I was particularly impressed with blackpaladin; I think he's grown a lot in skill in the last year. I also liked whoever is playing the Spanish captain now (no longer Gaspar, but I don't recall who it was).

The Debatable Choir performance went well. There was some back-stage angst and chaos immediately beforehand, but as far as I can tell no one in the audience knew anything was wrong. That's the way it's supposed to be. I am pleased with my performance personally; aside from one song where a problem in another part led me to miss an entrance, I think I was always correct and usually emotive. I'd like to see a videotape of a performance to better tune the latter -- interaction with the audience is important, but it's hard to know if we're really succeeding either individually or collectively. (Personally, I don't see well enough to know if I'm really making eye contact and stuff like that -- and anyway, there were lights pointed at us that made this challenging. I've learned to fake eye contact but don't know how well I pull it off from a stage.)

Vigils and Stuff

Earlier this summer Michael Alewright, a friend from our barony, was told he would receive a Laurel at Pennsic. So his household organized a vigil for Monday, with a reception in the main baronial tent and Michael receiving visitors in my house. This went well, and a couple people from our camp (Micolina and Huen) did a ton of work with setting up, serving food, and cleaning up. The vigil started at 4, so I was surprised when I returned to camp (after performances) at 10 to find that he was still in the house. I thought he would have joined the party in progress by then, but there were a lot of people who wanted to talk with him and they were being talkative. They wrapped up the vigil proper around 10:30, and the party continued in the baronial tent for a while. It seemed to go really well in general, and most important, Michael was happy.

(Michael looked absolutely spiffy in his new clothes for his elevation, by the way. The pants that lefkowitzga made were particularly stunning.)

Tuesday night at court their magesties gave a Pelican to someone from a neighboring shire. Until half an hour before court we thought they were giving her a writ, with the elevation to occur later in the week. So there was some scurrying during court; their magesties gave her the award and asked us to organize a reception for her, and by the end of court we were able to make an announcement. The Pelican is given for service and generally requires being organized; I guess the royalty relied on that. :-)

The recpient's home group wasn't really set up to host this, so we ended up holding it. We had some leftovers from Michael's vigil and Micolina did a lot more to supplement it (too much; we have to work on her perceptions of food quantities). It came off well, and the fact that it came together in about 21 hours of elapsed time is a real credit to Micolina and the folks from Sunderoak (the shire in question).

Arts Geeking

I took a class called "The Middle East during the Abassids". This is the ruling dynasty that was in Baghdad and Damascus from the mid-tenth-century. They aren't my period precisely; they drove out the Umayyids, who went to Iberia. So my persona lives under Umayyid rule (al-Rachman III, specifically, the first western caliph), while the Abassids are in charge farther east. Anyway, I took the class because I thought it might give me information that would be useful for my persona. (We know that some trade occurred, for example, so information about artifacts from farther east is still potentially helpful.)

The class itself was kind of a meander, but the handout was good (lots of pictures) and the instructor had some artifacts and replicas of various stuff -- everything from keys to cookie molds. It turns out he's an archeologist who has been working on digs in the middle east for a decade or more, so afterwards I asked him if he had an imformation from points farther west (specifically Iberia). He said he hasn't dug there personally but he can give me some leads if I contact him after Pennsic, so I'll do that.

I did not run into Tibicen at all this Pennsic, so my music-theory geeking was greatly reduced. But I did come across a promising new (well, new to me) instrument, which I mentioned in my quick summary: the moraharpa, a bowed, keyed instrument. It's about the size of a hurdy-gurdy; I didn't get a good-enough look at the keys to assess range, but I'd guess about an octave and a half from listening to it. (It has three strings, but two are drones. This may sound familiar to players of bagpipes, appalachian dulcimers, and hurdy-gurdies.) I plan to resarch this with an eye toward eventually owning and playing one. It was nifty!

I chatted with Baroness Megan about my house, and about how the walls should be covered with carved stucco but I'm looking at ways to fake that because I can't carve worth anything. She mentioned seeing some molds in England that had handles on the back: the wall was plastered and then the mold was pressed into it. I'd been thinking about molds too, but I'd been thinking in terms of casting sections and then affixing them somehow. I hadn't thought of doing it the other way around! For my first pass I'm going to see what I can do with pre-fab pieces; I've found both wood trim boards and pressed metal ceiling tiles (designed to be painted) that have suitable patterns.

I also receied a visit from a tile-maker who's interested in talking to me about the floor of my house. He has some research leads; I'll contact him after Pennsic.

I finally got to see the inside of Tomasso's Italian canal house. (He built his a year after I built my house.) I'd seen pictures on his web site and corresponded with him, but it was nice to meet him and see the house first-hand. He actually has a propane-fueled refrigerator in there; he gets through two weeks of Pennsic on one can. We're a six-can camp right now as far as propane goes, so the incremental cost of one more can, in exchange for safe storage for meat, milk, and other ultra-perishables, has a lot of appeal. (But maybe I'm just sensitive because for the first week the only time my cooler got ice was when I personally put it there -- never mind that I put ice in others' coolers when I was buying anyway, and that other people did some ice runs during that time.)

Wrap-up

I left around 1:30 on Friday, giving myself plenty of time to get home before rush hour in Pittsburgh started. The cats were happy to see me. :-)

Dani came home Saturday afternoon, earlier than I expected. Apparently they were expecting a storm that afternoon (dire warnings included hail), so they were motivated to pack the rest of the camp quickly. Some people stayed Saturday night, leaving their pavillions up; were I in that position I might have packed the canvas while it was still dry and slept in a nylon tent for one night. (We had some lying around.) Different strokes, I guess.

Dani asked me if I had a maroon towel. Yes, I said; did I forget to pack it? No -- someone else in camp also has a maroon towel and apparently I took the wrong one -- and he's emotionally attached to his maroon towel and wants to arrange an exchange of hostages. Oops. I have to laugh, though; the stereotypes say that I, a woman, should be able to distinguish the subtleties of these towels (on close inspection I agree that this probably isn't mine, but I wouldn't have noticed), while the man who owns the other towel isn't supposed to care about such things as long as the towel he ended up with is functional. :-)

I took a bunch of pictures which I haven't downloaded yet. dglenn took a nice picure of me that will replace my current fuzzy SCA userpic, once I get to that point.

Comments

[cellio]

I wasn't assigning blame. In fact, I tried to write this generally enough to not identify any of the relevant parties. All sorts of things can go wrong right before a performance.

Thanks for the compliments on the house!

[fiannaharpar.livejournal.com]

My feeling of blame is all my own, I just felt terrible about it. I have little patience for angst, especially when i'm involved and didn't mean for it to go all angsty :-)

I love the house. It's really incredible, and you are so fortunate to live there two weeks out of the year.