Entries tagged with sca: barony

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a day of song and story (SCA)

Yesterday Earl Sir Byron and Countess Sir Ariella hosted an SCA event at their castle. The day was focused on song and story, with classes interspersed with performances. It was a fun, intimate event with about a hundred people, including visitors from outside our group.

I attended a class on commedia dell' arte -- practicum, not history, meaning it focused on techniques for getting on stage and doing improv. There were some "improv games" as part of the class. I am not a comfortable actor, which is why I took the class. I had fun and learned things. Our local commedia troupe also demonstrates that there are strong female roles available besides lover, love interest, and servant-girl; in the alternate reality where I have time and skill to consider auditioning for commedia, I'd be looking for something that fits me less badly -- at my age (and, frankly, body type), I'm not going to be convincing as a young lover.

I also attended a class on trumpets, which included "make sound 101" with mouthpieces and plenty of sanitizer. I had wondered where pitch comes from; is it like a kazoo, where you're responsible for producing the pitch and the instrument then shapes it, or what? No, nothing like that -- the vibration speed coming off your lips is what regulates pitch. Huh. I did manage to make sound come out of a trumpet by the end of the class, though I think I was the slowest learner in the room. (Yes I can get sound out of a shofar, though not reliably!)

The Debatable Choir concert went reasonably well, I thought, though the effect of some sick members was noticeable to us (don't know how noticeable it was to the audience). We had some "sunlight through the windows into the eyes" moments, a challenge when we haven't memorized everything. One nice thing about an event like this is that you get an appreciative audience and can do a longer concert, which was nice!

The food was excellent, and the cooks for both lunch and dinner took extra care to provide ingredient lists, avoid cross-contamination of ingredients, and account for all the dietary restrictions they knew about. I had a full meal despite not eating the meat and without having to bulk up on bread.

The baron and baroness held a short court and I got a pleasant surprise: a baronial award for arts, specifically music. My last baronial award was in 1990 (!) and my last award at all was sometime in the 1990s, so I figured I had transitioned into "crusty old fart who's part of the furniture but not otherwise noteworthy". (I've been part of groups that got group awards a couple times since then, but I mean individual recognition.) I had forgotten how good this kind of recognition feels -- and it doesn't have to be big stuff like high-ranking kingdom stuff; acknowledgement and thanks from people who know you is hugely positive, at least to me. For anybody who's inclined to dismiss or ignore things as "just a local award", think again -- and remember to make award recommendations at that level. (I need to get better about that.)

The scroll was made by two choir members, wordsmithed by the scribal guild as a whole based on a medieval inheritance edict for a woman. Cool!

( pictures )

Pro tip for scribes: there are two important things in that last picture. For the herald who's going to be reading the scroll in unknown-in-advance lighting conditions: a clear transcription in a large, clean font. And for the recipient, the names of those involved, so we know whom to thank! In this case, thank you Reinhart von Regenbogen, Ceindrech verch Elidir, and Debatable Lands scribal guild!

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Pennsic

I'm home from Pennsic. Brief notes in the form of bullet points:

My good friend Yaakov HaMizrachi was elevated to the Order of the Laurel! Yay! The Laurel is the SCA's highest award (peerage) for arts and sciences. He's also now known (additionally) as Yaakov HaMagid, Yaakov the Storyteller. The ceremony felt like a reunion of old friends, and it was a nice touch that they had his son chant the scroll (in Hebrew).
The part of Atlantian court that I attended (because of the previous) was very well-done and engaging. I don't live there, I don't know most of those people, and yet I was not bored. They moved things along without it feeling rushed, and everybody speaking from the stage could be heard clearly. They also mixed it up, instead of doing all recipients of one award and then moving on to the next. Sprinkling the peerages throughout the court works well and, really, it's not a big deal for order members to get up more than once in an evening. (Also, if peerage ceremonies are burdensomely long -- theirs weren't; ours sometimes are -- it's nice to be able to sit down between them.)
I don't think I've ever heard "we're ahead of schedule; let's take a 10-minute break" in the middle of court before, though. I wonder if someone on the stage had an urgent need?
They elevated another bard to the Laurel, and that one sang his oath of fealty. While he was doing so I wondered if the king would respond in song -- and he did. That he used the same melody suggests some advance coordination (beyond "we're singing"), I wonder which of them wrote the king's words.
I had long, enjoyable conversations with both Yaakov and Baron Steffan. I miss the deep email conversations I used to have with both of them, before the great fragmenting of the digital-communication world (some to email, some to blogs/LJ/DW, some to Facebook, some to Google+, some to Twitter, some to places I don't even know about). It's harder to track and stay in touch with people than it used to be.
No I am still not going to start using Facebook. It's frustrating that by declining to do so I miss more and more stuff, but I'm not ready to let yet another thing compete to be the center of my online life. Also, Facebook in particular is icky in some important ways.
SCA local group, that means you too. Plans for a baronial party at Pennsic were, as far as I can tell, announced only on Facebook. (I've checked my email back to the beginning of April, so no I didn't just forget.) And thus I did not bring a contribution for your pot-luck. I do not feel guilty about that.
The Debatable Choir performance went very well. I conducted a quartet singing Sicut Cervus (by Palestrina), which I think went well. Two of the four singers had not previously done a "one voice to a part" song with the choir, and I'm proud of them for stepping up and doing a great job. I hope we got a recording.
I went to a fascinating class on medieval Jewish astrology (taught by Yaakov in persona). I've seen zodiacs in ancient (and modern) Jewish art and in synagogues, and a part of me always wondered how this isn't forbidden. It turns out that astrology is more of an "inclination", a yetzer, than a hard-and-fast truth -- there are stories in the talmud where astrology predicted something bad but the person, through good deeds, avoided the bad outcome. Also, in case you're wondering (like I did, so I asked), the zodiac signs get some solar smoothing, so if there's a leap-month (Adar Bet) there's not a 13th sign in those years.
Our camp has two wooden buildings (besides the house on the trailer, I mean), which we wanted to sell this year because we're making a new kitchen trailer that will replace both of them. We succeeded in selling the larger one (yay!). Maybe we'll be able to sell the other next year. (We'll set it up and use it for something else, because potential buyers would want to see it set up.)
Overall the weather was good. There were big storms on the first Friday ("quick, grab snacks and alcohol and head for the house!" is our camp's rallying cry), but only occasional rain after that and it wasn't sweltering-hot, which makes a huge difference.
The last headcount I saw was around 10,500.

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ginger cheesecake

Once a year the local SCA group has an informal gathering that includes a pie competition. "Pie" is pretty loosely defined. For today's I set out to make a ginger cheese pie, extrapolated from the cheesecake recipes in Digby and Platina. Basically, I used Digby's proportions for cheese, butter, and eggs, but replaced his cinnamon and nutmeg with Platina's ginger. I didn't just start with Platina because he uses lard. (In the filling! Ick!)

I wanted to make a ginger-lover's pie, though, and the small amount of fresh-grated ginger called for in Platina just would not do. So I expanded on that, but it still wasn't ginger-y enough, so I'll keep tweaking. Mind, it was still good; it was just...understated.

Here's what I did:

First, turn a pound of fresh ginger into crystallized ginger. ( Read more... )

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[SCA] a good day for the barony

Today at the Agincourt event

byronhaverford received a writ for the order of the Chivalry and

hildakrista received a writ for the order of the Pelican, both to be answered at baronial 12th night. Woo hoo! (These are both peerage orders, the highest honors the SCA gives out aside from the rank you earn if you sit the throne. Chivalry is for skill at arms and Pelican is for service.)

hildakrista's husband, Brandubh (who is not on LJ), was also elevated to the Pelican today. (He'd received a writ at Coronation last month.) He looked really spiffy in the clothing

lefkowitzga made for him; I don't have pictures but I assume somebody will post some. :-)

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pear-and-ginger pie

This afternoon's barony meeting included a pie contest. Three categories were declared in advance: seasonal fruit, seasonal vegetable, and anything from a period source. Whimsy was also allowed, such as the geometrically-challenged rectangular apple dish. Until a few days ago I had been planning to enter a certain documentable apple/pear pie, but then the Cooks' Source thing happened and I figured that might be a popular choice. :-) (

illadore is from our barony, though does not currently live here.) As it turned out, a fourth emergent category presented itself based on the entries: "stolen". :-) So I could have, but I didn't know that in advance so I instead skipped anything with apples and set out to experiment with pears.

Here's what I did, and I am not particularly fluent in dessert pies so I would definitely welcome feedback. (I was going to also make a savory one but discovered I was missing a key ingredient. Oops. Not that we wanted for pie to eat...)

Combine 1C sugar, about 2T ground ginger, and about 2T flour in a bowl. Peel and slice thinly six Bosc pears, and add to bowl. Stir until everything is distributed. Put filling into a 9" crust (deep-dish would have been better) and sprinkle the top with about a quarter cup of crystalized ginger (in very small pieces). Bake at 375 for about 50 minutes, covering the edges of the crust with foil for the first half.

I got the proportions of sugar, fruit, and flour from a modern recipe for apple pie. The pie was a little too juicy (some liquid spilled, too), so I needed more flour or less pear, I guess. But it's worth noting that the apple-pie recipe called for a top crust; I don't actually like pie crust all that much, so unless I'm redacting a period recipe that calls for it, I make my pies open. I don't know what effect that had on the juiciness.

I thought the pie was a little too sweet; next time I'll use no more than 3/4 cup of sugar.

I had expected the crystalized ginger to have more of an effect on the pie. And in fact, fresh out of the oven the little sample I baked alongside the pie was nicely gingery, but the full pie, cooled to room temperature, was not. Next time I'll mix the crystalized ginger in with the fruit.

This pie as I made it is parve. (I used a frozen pie crust that was also parve.) I wonder whether a little bit of butter in the filling would add to it (though then I'd have even more liquid on my hands).

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weekend round-up

( gaming )

( SCA afternoon )

( cookout )

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.

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SCA dinner

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.

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random bits (and browser-tab-cleanup day)

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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[SCA] barony 12th night

( Read more... )

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people,
sca: barony

baruch dayan ha-emet

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.

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sca: barony

[SCA] newcomers at general meetings

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.

( Read more... )

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Pennsic

( long )

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interviewed by alienor

( Read more... )

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sca: barony

SCA: local events

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).

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dance event

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.

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SCA: autocratting events

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.

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Academy

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.

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SCA event

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. :-)

( Read more... )

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waning SCA groups?

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

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SCA participation (ramble)

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