cellio | Pennsic

I don't know when I'll get around to writing a fuller report, but here are a few bits. (Pictures will definitely have to wait until I get back from NHC.)

House: We almost certainly need a new axle. I have a lead (from Dave Cooper) on someone who can do the work, and Dave says the house can sit in N10 for a couple weeks while we arrange that. Whew! I was worried that they would need to move it to storage next week (as a different Cooper had implied), and that the bent axle would damage the new wheels and tires we just put on.

My camp-mates are wonderful for dealing with a lot of the hassles this caused for us this Pennsic. And I'm told that they changed tires today while I was at home for Shabbat. My ratio of problem-solving (or general usefulness) to problem-causing (directly or indirectly) was down this Pennsic, to my embarrassment. (Not just the house, though that's most of it.)

People: tangerinpenguin decided on the spur of the moment to come to Pennsic, so we were treated to his company for a few days. It was good to see him again, and I hope we can lure him back again soon.

Thursday night was my night to cook, and I was delighted that galeran and his ensemble were able to come play background music for us (in exchange for dinner). They are entertaining, and I admire any group that tries to keep two harps in tune in Pennsic conditions. (If you have one many-stringed instrument, you simply mandate that everything else will retune to it during a performance if needed. Two is harder.)

I played visit-tag (that's like phone-tag, but in person) with loosecanon; I'm sorry we never connected! For people camped a block away, that turned out to be harder than it should have been. I also missed dglenn; I hope you found the delivery I left for you on Thursday.

I did get to visit with hlinspjalda and Mr. Fixer for a few hours one day. It was nice to catch up with them. Their daughter is now as tall as I am.

Placeholder: Mr. Fixer and I had a thought-provoking conversation about Tisha b'Av that won't fit in the margin of this journal entry.

One of my camp-mates became ill Saturday night, to the point where they took her away in an ambulance. Initial suspicions involved food poisoning or a bug. Actual prognosis: gallbladder attack requiring surgery the next day. Oof. That sucks at any time, but especially when it costs you your vacation.

I visited with osewalrus and beckyfeld on their last planned day at Pennsic. Eventually I left so they could finish packing; a few hours later osewalrus came by my camp ("aren't you supposed to be gone by now?") to say that his car loved Pennsic so much that it decided to stay a while longer. We agreed that if all went well I would drive him to the repair place to pick up his car tomorrow, and if things went less well I would drive them all to the airport so they could get home for Shabbat and Tisha b'Av and deal with it later. (There was also an offer of hospitality in there, of course.) Things went well, so they were able to leave the next day.

Sign of changing Pennsic patterns: I was not too concerned about finding a parking space for my car on Thursday of the main week, because of all the cars I'd seen driving through the camp that day. And, in fact, I found a spot in row 9, an improvement over where I'd parked the previous Friday. Friday there were also lots of cars driving through camp; the break-down that used to be mainly on Saturday (with spill-over to Sunday) is now starting Friday or even Thursday for lots of people.

Performances: I thought our joint choir/consort performance went very well, and I heard a lot of good comments about it. I attended and enjoyed performances by I Sebastiani and I Genesii, both commedia dell'arte troupes. I missed the Pennsic Choir this year; I was cooking at the time, but they were doing a program of Christmas music so that wasn't high on my priority list anyway. Next year ariannawyn will be directing that choir.

Courts: Hrefna's elevation to the Order of the Laurel was Sunday night, at a baronial reception in the royal encampment. It mostly went well and she seemed to be very happy. Because she was trying for a period-appropriate ceremony (Norse), we waited until afterwards to present her with the ancestral fruitcake. (Well, some orders have ancestral medallions...) She got to pass it on on Tuesday night in kingdom court to much amusement. ("Is there a medallion? Is there a cloak? Is there an ancestral fruitcake?" I haven't seen the fruitcake openly called for before.)

I was pleased to see byronhaverford and foodshrink inducted into the Order of the Gage, AEthelmearc's mid-level fighting award.

Classes: The published class list left something to be desired -- specifically, a time-ordered listing. They published class descriptions sorted (not very well) by subject, and those descriptions included time and location, but this did nothing for the "I have time now; what's available?" problem. Some enterprising person noticed this and made up a schedule that was being sold for a couple dollars; we got one mid-week. Lots of people were grumbling about this, so I trust that this format won't be repeated next year.

Anyway, in part due to that and in part due to many classes having already passed by the time I arrived, I only went to one class -- the symposium on the Boreal Master. (Go ahead and Google it.) I shall have to give some thought to presenting a paper next year; this was too much fun. Especially fun was Dofinn-Hallr Morrisson's presentation on lyre technique. I didn't know a lyre could make those sounds...

War: The king of the East decided that the sides were too unbalanced to make for a fun war, so he conceded all the war points up front so the contests could be "just for fun". This struck me (and others) as kind of odd; I guess there are people who take winning Pennsic really, really seriously, but I don't tend to hang out with them. Fighting with wildly-unbalanced sides isn't fun; I've fought in wars where the ratio was 2:1 or 3:1, and either you get clobbered right out of the gate or you never get to engage, depending on which side you're on. So gross imbalance I understand. What I don't understand is what that had to do with this year; an interview with the Eastern king published by the newspaper quoted him as saying that they were down by 250 fighters. There are, what, 2000 or so fighters at Pennsic? 250 sounds like an advantage but not an insurmountable one.

Weather: Better than normal. It was often hot and humid but temperatures were in the 80s, not in the 90s. There was rain but mostly in shorter bursts, not the hours-at-a-time rains of years past (to say nothing of the days-at-a-time rains we've seen). A lot of the rain came at night, even.

There's other stuff I should probably write about, but we have to go back up tomorrow morning to finish breaking down the camp, and then I'm headed off to NHC, so I don't know when that will happen. If you went I'd appreciate it if you'd point out your Pennsic posts to me, as I might not see them otherwise.

Pennsic

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