cellio | Entries tagged with sca: barony

( gaming )

And tonight, to celebrate Dani's birthday, we went out to Casbah for dinner, where we learned that sitting on their (enclosed) patio during a thunderstorm still poses challenges, primarily acoustic. (But also some dampness because it's not completely enclosed; we ended up asking to move to another table partway through the meal.)

One of Casbah's standard appetizers is a cheese plate. The specific cheeses vary, but you can always get an assortment. Tonight all three of the cheeses we got were clear winners. Dani wrote the names down, though we've tried in the past to find cheeses we've eaten there and it's never worked out so far. Maybe this time will be different, but I'm not holding my breath.

Tonight we hosted a pot-luck dinner for about a dozen SCA people. We declared the theme to be 14th-century English. We should have asked people to register their intent to make ember-day tarts; we had three. :-) All different and all tasty; this is certainly not a complaint. I was just surprised. (This happens to us. One time we declared the theme to be "once in a blue moon" and got half a dozen blueberry pies.)

As the hosts we provided the main course. I made sweet-and-sour fish, and because we had a vegetarian coming, I also made roasted and boiled chickpeas. Both went over well -- the fish surprisingly so since my haddock filets fell apart in the cooking so the presentation was off. But it still tasted good. And it turned out the vegetarian is actually a pescatarian, so the chickpeas weren't strictly necessary, but hey, people ate them (and I have enough for lunch a couple days this week).

One person brought beer bread, and explained that she had spent an evening at the Sharp Edge researching beers so she could choose an appropriate one. She ended up choosing a Sam Adams, but I didn't catch which one. The bread was tasty and I scored a small chunk from the leftovers. (I've actually been a little too aggressive in clearing out the bread etc before Pesach, so I can use this.)

We also had an onion soup (made with almond milk, not meat stock), rolls, a cheese pie (other than the ember-day tarts, I mean), and three desserts. There was the usual pot-luck issue of too much food overall, but everything was good and got eaten to significant degree. (I had anticipated that vegetables might be in short supply -- this isn't a strong theme in medieval English recipes -- and ate extra for lunch.)

The gathering was one of the highly-irregular get-togethers of a loose household. Once upon a time household dinners were roughly monthly, but in recent years that hasn't been happening and it's now very irregular. (Part of this is probably because the head of the household is in poor health. She did not attend today.) But it's a fun group of people to talk with and many of these people don't come to events often, so the dinners help keep folks connected. Almost everyone thanked us for having this, citing reasons along those lines. So maybe we've breathed a bit of life back into the tradition, and maybe someone (other than the person who seems to do more than her share of dinners) will pick it up and do another one in a few months.

Query to the brain trust: I have USB headphones that include a microphone. What free software can I use to record voice from that microphone (preferably on Windows XP but I also have an iBook with OS 10.4 available) and produce something like WAV files? (I know I'm not going to get stellar audio quality from this setup; that's ok. The immediate goal is to record torah chanting -- think "teaching tapes", except no one uses tape any more.)

Followup on UJF: I spoke with the campaign manager on Friday and she was very apologetic. She promised to take appropriate action. (I've updated the original entry to reflect this.)

This week my employer's landlord started giving preferred parking spots to people driving green vehicles (definition not provided). Not that I'm going to turn down the convenience (my Honda Fit qualifies), but as one of my coworkers pointed out, are those the cars for which they want to minimize driving? (Should we try to get the gas guzzlers to stop on the first floor instead?) I used to always park on the top indoor floor, mostly so I could park in the same place every day and not have to worry about remembering at the end of the day. Now that I think about it, that decision represented about 2-3% of my commuting distance.

You know that "25 things about me" meme that's been going around? Maybe it's older than you thought. Or maybe not. :-)

The local SCA got some decent TV coverage recently.

Via

jducoeur: Facebook company secrets were revealed by someone who applied paper analogies to digital media. Oops. No, white-out doesn't work on bits. (From the news story it sounds like it might have been the court that screwed up, which presumably means they can't sue anyone for the leak.)

Birkat ha Chamah is a once-every-28-years observance, and it's coming up this April. I wonder if anyone local is doing anything for this. It sounds kind of peculiar, but it'll be a while before I could next satisfy my curiosity. (The timing is inconvenient with respect to Pesach, however.)

Glow-in-the-dark body cream, pointed out by

browngirl.

Thanks to

xiphias for pointing out this comic to me: ( moderately-large image )

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Damn damn damn.

During Pennsic we learned that the reason Baron Len and Baroness Anna were absent (he was baron when I joined the SCA and she soon joined him on the thrones) was that she was in the hospital with a mysterious malady. Later in the week we learned that it had been diagnosed as pneumonia. She was in the hospital, being treated. That's supposed to be treatable these days. (She was not extremely old or in very poor health.)

In the last week there have been a couple messages on the baronial mailing list saying "still in ICU, still no visitors allowed". (I was watching this go by while out of town.) And today we got the message no one wanted to have to see.

What's especially sad about this to me is that, about a year and a half ago, Len fell ill with something mysterious. She was there for him and helped him recover once he got a diagnosis. Things were getting better. And now, after all this, she was stricken.

Len and Anna welcomed me into the SCA when I was a clueless college student, and taught me grace and maturity and how to live in society. If I learned a tenth of it, I count myself lucky.

I'm curious how other SCA groups with predictable influxes (this usually means students) handle the introduction. We have demos at the beginning of the school year on our two major college campuses, so the first general meeting in September doubles as the "talk to the people from the demos who were curious enough to come to the meeting" meeting.

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( long )

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In mid-September, there were no events on the local SCA group's calendar at all. Event frequency had been on the decline for a while, but we hadn't previously reached the "nothin' -- nothin' at all" stage.

I just came from an officers' meeting. (I'm not an officer; I was there as a mentor for a new autocrat.) Tonight there were proposals for four events, including three first-time autocrats. This is good news! (Two were approved; two are tentative pending site confirmations.) Now, let's see if we can make it a good experience for the new autocrats and continue to reach out to others (new and old).

jarethsgirl's event, Dance and Romance on February 11, was approved. Yay! There'll be dancing all day (including a ball in the evening), gaming, performances, and other activities; food is pot-luck with desserts organized by the local cooks' guild (yummy). There is no charge for the event (donations will be accepted).

I met

jarethsgirl tonight. She's in her first year in the SCA and is interested in running a dance event, so I agreed to be her mentor. (New autocrats require a mentor here.)

This should be fun. Years ago, before the meme of "all events must be all things to all people" started to take hold, we held a series of dance events called Harvest Festival. (She's looking at a spring event, so she has to get a different name. :-) ) It sounds like she wants to do something similar -- dance sets interspersed with performances, fairly casual (not a formal collegium, just dancing with some instruction), and maybe a partial pot-luck (provided main dish, people bring sides) or maybe more conventional food. We've definitely got a bunch of local dancers who ought to be interested, and she'll talk to them about coordinating that part of the event (lining up teachers, assembling sets, etc). We're looking for an inexpensive site so we can make this a donation-funded event. I have some ideas, and she's going to look at options near where she lives and also get her hands on the "site book" (a binder full of notes on sites the barony has used in the past). This is a very reasonable event for a new autocrat to do; in fact, my first event as autocrat was Harvest Festival.

It'll be nice to see another event and a new autocrat, too.

For the last several years there's been a gradual decline in the number of events my local SCA group holds, and at the moment there is nothing on the calendar at all. We're a large, old barony, so this really shouldn't be the case. This prompted someone to ask, on the baronial mailing list, the quite reasonable question: why don't you (plural general) autocrat events?

(Translation for non-SCA people: autocrat = convention chair = organizer.)

I used to; I've run about a dozen events, give or take, some small and some large. It's been several years since I did so. I haven't posted a reply to the mailing list (the silence has been deafening, actually), but I've been thinking about my reasons (which I wouldn't post there in these words, but this is my journal).

First there's the Shabbat problem; almost all SCA events are held on Saturdays (or, less-commonly here, over weekends). There's no reason an event can't be held on a Sunday, but people don't seem to like the idea when I bring it up. But I'm going to set this issue aside for the moment, because if this were the only barrier I'd push the officers for permission and I'd run a successful Sunday event and that would prove the point.

I would not be willing to autocrat an event that collects the corporate tax, because I find it offensive, deceitful, and actively harmful to the long-term health of the SCA. Free events (which don't collect this tax) are certainly possible (we've had them recently), but they do limit the options a bit. It would take some work to convince the officers to go along with one that isn't held on a university campus, but that's what I'd want to do. We've got some officers who are staunchly pro-tax, so this could end up politicizing the event before it gets off the ground, which would be unfortunate. I'm not afraid of the fight at officers' meeting; I'm mildly afraid of the consequences. But that's a relatively minor point, I think.

A big reason that I don't autocrat any more is stamina. The autocrat is expected to be first on site and last to leave. Yes, you recruit people to help with setup and cleanup, but the autocrat is expected to be an active participant in those activities too. It looks bad if the autocrat goes home early, or sits there while cleanup happens. I do not hold such things against an autocrat, because I've been there, but I've heard enough to conclude that most people haven't been and do. I'm just not up for the extra-long day like I used to be. And that would be harder on a Sunday because of the need to be at work Monday morning. (Tangent: running an event is not attractive enough for me to be willing to spend a vacation day.)

For a while we've had some vocal members who expect every event to cater to the needs of every sub-group. I've seen autocrats get publicly chewed out for not having organized children's activities, for instance -- and I have not seen the populace rise to the autocrats' defense. There's been a bit of a trend in the other direction recently; yesterday's event had fighting and fencing and schmoozing but no feast and no other organized activities, and I didn't hear any complaints about that. If this keeps up I'll re-evaluate this point. And while I'm perfectly willing to tell someone he's being unreasonable (especially if he's doing the entitlement thing rather than the volunteer thing), the existence of the mindset does make me ask myself "do you want to invite hassle?".

Writing that helped me realize something important. Autocratting used to be fun -- just my way of pitching in. Now it seems like a job, with more demands and less personal pleasure, and it's a job I don't need to take on -- so I'm not inclined to take it on. Am I getting old and cranky? Maybe. Am I less invested in a group that has done some annoying things over the last decade or so, and thus less inclined to help out in ways I don't enjoy? Yeah, I think so.

Autocratting isn't fun any more, but cooking still is. If we had a Sunday event (that does not collect the tax) I would be delighted to cook the feast, if someone else were to be the autocrat. But I think we've got more interested cooks than interested autocrats, and the others can cook on Saturdays and don't mind the tax, so I doubt I'll ever get the opportunity to cook another feast.

Today the local SCA group hosted the Academy, a (roughly) semi-annual event consisting mainly of classes. (The event rotates around the kingdom; we don't hold it locally that often.) It went pretty well. The event was held at CMU, which is no more than a mile from my synagogue, so I just walked there after services. It turned out that I beat Dani there by 15 or 20 minutes and he had my garb, but a friend had a spare tunic I could throw on until he got there so that was fine.

Some classes that I wanted to take were cancelled due to instructors not being able to make it at the last minute. Oh well. I did get to take a nifty class on making cheese; Broom (there's more to his name, but that's what eeryone calls him) is an entertaining teacher.

Tofi, who moved to LA a few months ago, came back for this event, so it was nice to be able to spend time chatting with him. He seems to be happy with his new job, and they managed to sell their house here pretty quickly.

There was an "ask the laurel" table set up at the event. This sort of thing is an open invitation to wacky questions and there were some of those, but it was all in good fun. More importantly, there did actually seem to be some useful exchanges of information and advice, so that's good. I don't know how much, but hey -- it gave people a place to hang out and gab, and that's not bad. :-)

As a pleasant change of pace, admission to this event was free (you had to pay to eat, which is appropriate), so there was no offensive corporate tax. So I made a point of supporting the event; I volunteered for the clean-up crew (which turned out to be an easier job than I expected) and also volunteered to do advance cooking, though the latter wasn't needed. I'd like to see my group do more free events.

But first, apropos of nothing... Words I never expected to pass my lips: "I'm sorry $CAT, but it's not time for your medicine yet". :-) (Erik has been getting medicine mixed into canned food, and he's absolutely loving it. Good! The others are jealous, of course; canned food is not the norm in this house. I let them lick my fingers.)

Today was baronial 12th night, a nice little event. This is the third year in a row in this format -- Sunday, free, pot-luck -- so I think it's now established as ancient tradition. It was a fun event, which is also tradition. :-)

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A member of another large SCA group recently posted about changing patterns of activity and participation. This got me thinking about my own barony, which is one of the older and larger groups around (30+ years, around 250 people).

For several years now I think our group has been in decline, and that the slope has increased in the last couple years. There is always a danger, of course, that the "glorious early years" I remember were nothing of the sort and that my brain has become adled after (pause to count) 23 years, but I don't think that accounts for all of it. Or, at least, if that's it then such factors are affecting several of my friends, including some who are not dinosaurs.

This is not a whine. I don't expect anyone else to "fix" whatever problems are there. I don't make any promises about my own efforts to fix problems I perceive, either. I'm just trying to analyze it from a sociological/anthropological point of view, because I'm curious about how such things happen, what can be done to reverse trends, and -- most importantly -- what can be done by groups that aren't yet there to improve their odds of not getting there. ( Read more... )

No answers here -- just possibly-flawed observations and speculation.

lj bug

I've been thinking lately about my evolving participation in the SCA. ( Read more... )

We went to the shiva for Ray tonight. (The funeral was yesterday, so this was the first one.) They had a good-sized crowd, mostly members of their congregation (I assume). A few other SCA people were there.

I had failed to give some SCA friends a heads-up that there would be a short service there; I hope they weren't too uncomfortable. The service was actually longer than what I'm used to, for three reasons: (1) Reconstructionists include more liturgy than we do; (2) the leader was having the group do the "let's all read this passage together" thing in a number of places, and that's always slower than just one person reading; and (3) the leader threw in other commentary along the way.

After that was over we spent time talking with the family members. Esther seemed to be very glad that we were there. It sounds like Ray's last few days were frustrating but not painful. She seems to be coping ok so far, at least in front of other people.

One of the people I met at New Light a couple weeks ago was there, and I spaced on where I knew her from and had to be told. Oops. Context is everything, I guess. (She turns out to be a relative of an inlaw.)

The SCA household has a dinner scheduled for tomorrow night. Esther is in that household, so I was semi-expecting the dinner to be cancelled in deference to the shiva, but I haven't heard anything about it. So I don't know what our plans are for tomorrow evening at this point -- maybe going to the dinner and leaving early enough to go to the shiva?

Ray Tucker (SCA: Guido Aldina, husband of Esperanza Halevi) died last night. He had been sick for a while with a respiratory problem, and was in the hospital a couple weeks ago when it got bad. So we knew this was coming, though we didn't know when.

I called them last evening to see if we could visit, but Esther said he wasn't up for it. She also said that evenings in general are bad (I wish I'd known that earlier), and we should come on Saturday. I guess she wasn't expecting this to be quite this soon either.

Esther has family and a good group of friends here in town, so I imagine she'll get through this better than many would. But they were married for an awfully long time, and this has got to be rough.

I'll miss him. He was a neat person -- generous and courteous, with eclectic knowledge and a sense of humor.

Last month, the officers of my local SCA group proposed changing the way we hold elections to restrict who can vote. The proposal was controversial and they had to have know that. I wrote then about why I thought this was a bad idea.

Last night was the next officers' meeting, where these changes were to be ratified. As it turns out (I'm failing to surpress cries of "I told you so"), the notion that these restrictions were now required by the kingdom and/or corporation was baseless. Someone got a ruling from the kingdom seneschal that our open policies, as they stand, are fine.

In addition, many officers (and other people) present spoke in favor of retaining our current policy on this point. Almost everyone in fact voted that way. One officer voted to restrict voting anyway.

My estimation of a couple people who were involved in this has dropped (not surprising). One of them is probably saying the same about me, but that's not my problem. At least that bit of ugliness is over now. (And hey, my estimation of some other people has risen, so it all balances out I guess.)

Now, onward to getting the officers to agree to structure events in such a way that the new, objectionable corporate tax can be avoided. (Early signs on the group email list are leaning positive, but there is also correlation between those who support the corporation in this matter and those who are email-averse, so that doesn't necessarily mean much.)

Very quick. But I have a few minutes before Shabbat due to making unexpectedly-good time home.

At choir on Monday we had two new people. I hope they both stay; they are both nice people, and near as I can tell they are both good. One came out for dinner with us afterward, which is a good sign. The new alto was picking things up very quickly; I infer sight-reading skill.

Tuesday Dani and I went to the first meeting of a group of SCA dancers who are going to get together a couple times a month and work on harder stuff. I stopped going to dance practice years ago, in part because we never did harder stuff, so this is appealing. We spent about two hours working on one dance (Gracca Amorosa, 16th-century Italian) and had it in decent shape by the end. (Part of this time went to learning 16th-century Italian steps, which were unfamiliar to many of us.) We need to work on it more, but after a little more practice (and some memorization work) I could dance this at an event. Neat. We had seven people, which was about right (I think).

I don't know if I'm going to go to all of the meetings -- I don't want to constrain my schedule too much. However, if I skip all the ones that are going to focus on English country dances (which are pretty uninteresting to me), that will probably be about right.

Enterprise Wednesday: what was that tripe? The actors should sue for being forced to associate their names with such drivel. Porthos (the dog) was the only redeeming feature. I want my 53 minutes back. (West Wing was kind of "eh", which for that show is disappointing. At least one of the Twilight Zone episodes was very good.)

Last night I went to part of the choir practice for Ray and Jenn's church group, because the SCA choir is joining them on songs for R&J's wedding. (Aleluia Psallat, Deo Gracias (not Deo Gracias Anglia!), and Exultate Deo.) Their choir has about 20 people, I think, so with our dozen this should make for an impressive sound.

And now it's time to turn down the oven and light candles.

It is said that if you put a frog in boiling water it will jump out, but if you put it in cold water and heat the water to boiling it will stay there until it cooks.

The SCA is kind of like that.

( history: the society and the corporation )

( recent events )

Yesterday I went to Johan and Arianna's to help paint the new kitchen for Pennsic. It's a 10x10 Tudor facade, with a canvas roof, so painting involved mostly trying to paint brown timbers without splashing paint on the white walls. We were not entirely successful, but that's what the touch-up pass is for. We got interrupted by rain, but we got most of the painting done. This is going to look quite spiffy when it's set up, and it lets us eliminate one modern fly.

Before the rain the temperature was above 90 and it was very humid. The rain didn't actually do much for the humidity (it was a sprinkle, not real rain), but today is much cooler and less humid so something happened. I guess I was out in the heat and sun for too long yesterday, because I was really wiped out at the end of the day and didn't go to the party I'd wanted to go to.

Wednesday night I went to the officers' meeting for the local SCA group. ( Surprising things happened. )

Tonight I lead services at Tree of Life. Dani's out of town and the weather was hot until today, so I'd already decided to have cold foods for Shabbat. Cold cherry soup is good this time of year, and cherries were on sale Wednesday. Yum.

Here is a (bad) scan of the cover art for the SCA newsletter I mentioned before:

Someone else is doing the calligraphy, which will go in that block at the bottom. The lines aren't as fuzzy and faint in real life as they are in this scan; I just can't get the software to cooperate. (It also insists on believing that my scanner is 11" long when it's really 14", hence the tight fit. The original is just over 11" tall...)

It's based on a page from a Hebrew manuscript c.1275 (German). The original has one of the names of God in the center in large letters, with birds (like the one in this picture) and leaves/flowers surrounding it. I replaced the name with a comet, which is the symbol of the local SCA group. Most of the other critters are based on ones in the original.

I'm drawing the cover for an upcoming SCA newsletter. (It's a special edition of our local newsletter -- all articles, no bureaucratic stuff.) I hope to finish it, or at least get most of the way there, tomorrow. The major stuff is all pencilled in, except for some stuff that requires drafting skills that I'm too tired to try to conjure up tonight. So tomorrow I'll do those, fill in some fiddly bits, and, I hope, ink. (It's a black-and-white cover, so I don't need to paint.) I didn't plan far enough ahead to scare up someone whose calligraphy doesn't suck to letter in the title and stuff; I think I'll do my bad calligraphy on a separate piece of paper and invite the editor (whose calligraphy is better than mine) to plug in her own if she likes.

When it's all done I'll scan it in. So you guys will actually see it before the editor does. :-)

Current Mood: tired

Monica

weekend round-up

SCA dinner

random bits (and browser-tab-cleanup day)

[SCA] barony 12th night

baruch dayan ha-emet

[SCA] newcomers at general meetings

Pennsic

interviewed by alienor

SCA: local events

dance event

SCA: autocratting events

Academy

SCA event

waning SCA groups?

SCA participation (ramble)

shiva

Ray

SCA politics

quick takes

frogs in the SCA

(no subject)

cover art

art

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