War Practice (SCA)

[cellio]

Dani and I day-tripped War Practice (at Cooper's Lake). We're not big fans of camping, and we're not really set up for it anyway. (The Pennsic setup isn't practical for war practice.) It's just as well -- apparently they had some pretty fierce storms Friday night, and more were predicted for Saturday night. (I don't know if they happened.) Saturday during the day was lovely, though.

As we were walking in from the car, we ran into Prince Rurik and one of his retainers. Rurik is a great guy, and he seemed to be happy to see us. (I didn't really think he knew us from Adam. Pleasant surprise.) He insisted on giving us his retainer long enough to carry our cooler (which I was carrying) to the main area, which I thought was really nice. I tried to decline, on the theory that reigning royalty probably needs the help more than I do, but he insisted. This is the same Rurik who pretty much always helps clean up events, including when he was royalty last time. He's a great example of courtesy and supporting the society.

While we were eating lunch, Degan (one of my apprentices) introduced us to two friends of his at their first event. They're Jewish, and it sounds like one of them is less observant than he wants to be, and we talked a little about Shabbat/SCA stuff, but they all had to run off to a class so we didn't talk for long. I had hoped to run into them again later in the day, but it didn't happen. I hope they enjoyed themselves. They seemed like nice people.

I've finally seen hound-coursing! I keep showing up to events where "that happened this morning" and missing it. It's been growing in AEthelmearc over the last year or so. I saw four greyhounds (heh -- I didn't know they come in non-grey too). They were using a piece of plastic for the lure, with a cord and several pullies to form a "course". I only saw two dogs run it, and both of them got distracted by other things moving through the tall grass and had to be nudged, but they did both tackle the plastic in the end. It makes me wonder how they solved that problem in period, when (I presume) grass was not neatly trimmed the way it tends to be today. The person I spoke with didn't know; I speculated about setting the pullies higher off the ground, and she said that there were some places that were specifically set up for coursing and maybe those lawns were more carefully tended. (I am assuming that at least sometimes, coursing in period involved lures rather than rabbits, and that said lures had to be rigged somehow. I don't know how, though. I hope in time the folks doing it now move away from plastic to some other (non-live) lure.)

I finally connected with dagonell again in person (it's been a long time), and we spent a couple hours chatting. That was fun. I also saw Lia, a fellow music geek (from West Virginia) for the first time in a while. There were several people I missed, but large events are like that.

Court was long. Baronial court had what I thought was a poor balance of schtick to real business; some of that would have worked better at smaller events. Kingdom court ran more smoothly, except that it seemed that a third or so of the people who were receiving awards had to be fetched from their camps. Oops. Several people I know received well-deserved awards. I'm partcularly happy about the Fleur (grant-level arts award) for Leifr for his glass-blowing.

We left not long after court. (Dani wanted to leave sooner and stop for dinner on the way home; I pointed out that we had to wait for the end of Shabbat before hitting a restaurant, so we needn't be in that much of a hurry to leave. It all worked out.) I hope that if a storm did hit last night it didn't do as much damage as Friday's, which knocked down some trees and a bunch of tents.

Comments

[kmelion.livejournal.com]

did you direct the newbies to the various SCA-Jewish email lists?

[cellio]

Not yet. I was expecting to run into them later, when someone would have paper and pen and I wouldn't be in the midst of lunch. :-) But I'll get my apprentice to put us in touch.