Pennsic bits
Aug. 31st, 2014 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioI never got around to writing up a big Pennsic entry, so here are some highlights in bullet form:
- Seeing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
osewalrus and family again was very nice -- been a while. Had the beginnings of a thoughtful theological discussion; need to figure out venue for continuing intermittently over time.
- Missed some other distant friends, again. :-(
- Camp meals got more complicated; we now have (different) people who are gluten-free, vegetarian, nut-allergic, and lactose-intolerant. All the cooks did a great job of stepping up to the challenge.
- Tisha b'Av fell during Pennsic. Thank youosewalrus for chanting Eicha (Lamentations) for me. I have complicated feelings about Tisha b'Av but this helped me engage with it.
- Our choir concert was ok. I saw some good performances, and the local commedia troupe (I Genesii) really shined this year.
- T-Mobile completely failed me this year. Last year they had cell coverage (not great bandwidth, but enough to check in with cat-sitters and the like). This year at the opening weekend there was some signal. During Pennsic itself -- nothing, not even basic phone service. (I found this out when calling Dani after I arrived.) I contacted them afterward and they shrugged, saying their coverage isn't good in that zip code. Sigh. (Fortunately, I had borrowed a Verizon hotspot from work "just in case", after determining that nobody else needed it for actual work that week. Verizon delivered 4G signal just fine.)
- The KickStarter that I (and, it turned out, one other camp-mate) supported, for a solar charger for USB devices, didn't make its planned July ship date. In fact, it's now the end of August and they still haven't made it. Next Pennsic, I guess!
- Our camp has some loud people and likes to have loud gatherings sometimes. Further, some of the loud people are late-night folks while different ones are early birds. We set up the house right next to the common area to provide shade, but this does not play well with the noise problem. But my camp-mates are good sports; after last Pennsic one person suggested a coping mechanism, and I was greeted with it when I arrived:
- Seeing
osewalrus and family again was very nice -- been a while. Had the beginnings of a thoughtful theological discussion; need to figure out venue for continuing intermittently over time.- Missed some other distant friends, again. :-(
- Camp meals got more complicated; we now have (different) people who are gluten-free, vegetarian, nut-allergic, and lactose-intolerant. All the cooks did a great job of stepping up to the challenge.
- Tisha b'Av fell during Pennsic. Thank you
osewalrus for chanting Eicha (Lamentations) for me. I have complicated feelings about Tisha b'Av but this helped me engage with it.- Our choir concert was ok. I saw some good performances, and the local commedia troupe (I Genesii) really shined this year.
- T-Mobile completely failed me this year. Last year they had cell coverage (not great bandwidth, but enough to check in with cat-sitters and the like). This year at the opening weekend there was some signal. During Pennsic itself -- nothing, not even basic phone service. (I found this out when calling Dani after I arrived.) I contacted them afterward and they shrugged, saying their coverage isn't good in that zip code. Sigh. (Fortunately, I had borrowed a Verizon hotspot from work "just in case", after determining that nobody else needed it for actual work that week. Verizon delivered 4G signal just fine.)
- The KickStarter that I (and, it turned out, one other camp-mate) supported, for a solar charger for USB devices, didn't make its planned July ship date. In fact, it's now the end of August and they still haven't made it. Next Pennsic, I guess!
- Our camp has some loud people and likes to have loud gatherings sometimes. Further, some of the loud people are late-night folks while different ones are early birds. We set up the house right next to the common area to provide shade, but this does not play well with the noise problem. But my camp-mates are good sports; after last Pennsic one person suggested a coping mechanism, and I was greeted with it when I arrived:
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-01 12:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-03 03:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-01 03:04 pm (UTC)Indian food, especially from the south with its preference for coconut milk over dairy, works really well.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-03 03:10 am (UTC)But Indian is tasty and would satisfy the constraints, so it's worth thinking between now and next Pennsic about how that could work. Thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-03 01:41 am (UTC)Which is odd, because T-Mo worked just fine for me nearly the entire war! Text messages flowed like beverages of all sorts (and like rain on Land Grab, dammit) and I had no trouble making nor receiving calls -- save one time which I attribute to my phone starting to die of old age, and in that case doing a power-off-wait-20-seconds-power-on was all that was necessary to restore my service.
I rarely got out of the WW&P shop this year; that must change next year. I did get to your camp's party on middle Saturday but it was late in the evening, as after shop-close I'd first gone to my student's wedding reception until *that* shut down. That night was one candidate for best night of the war, for me.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-03 03:13 am (UTC)Sorry I missed you at our party. I was not there for all of it, and when I was there it was kind of hard for me to see who all was there because of the combination of crowds and low light. I mean, we light our camp pretty well for a camp (that doesn't use torches), but it's still dark compared to my usual environment.