Monica

Wednesday night as we were preparing dinner a mighty storm came roaring down on us. It started with high winds, during which we dropped the canopies and made sure tents were secure. As the rains started, most of us headed for the house and a few instead headed for the pantry and kitchen, the other buildings (rather than tents) in camp.

In the house we opened the camp-ward windows (which were not wind-ward) to watch the storm. After a few minutes someone spotted an impending visitor, and a moment later we opened the door to alaricmacconnal, bearing an umbrella and a mischievous smile. He noted that they in the kitchen/pantry were well-stocked with food and drink and they were concerned about us. We requested goldfish crackers and water and he headed back across the camp.

A few minutes later he returned, bearing a box of crackers, a jug of water, and a bottle of white wine. (Fish calls for white and not red, right?) We thanked him and he returned to the pantry rather than joining us. We went back to watching the storm and listening to Lucetta tell a Russian fairy tale.

Several minutes later Alaric was back, this time bearing a bottle of red wine, mere moments after we had finished the bottle of white. He also offered us uncooked pasta, but we declined that offer. The storm ended not long after; I don't know what the next round would have been.

The next night, at about the same time, another big storm came through. This time the people heading into the house brought sustenance -- and it's just as well, because I don't think the pantry folks would have sent an emissary out into a hailstorm.

Yesterday I wrote about performances and later I'll write about some corporate-level stuff (BoD meet-and-greet, SCA census). And I still have to pull pictures off of the camera. This post is miscellaneous other stuff.

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On Sunday I helped a friend paint her house. (Well, priming, actually -- painting commenced today.) Painting isn't hard; why is my body complaining about it? It's as if some key joints woke up and said "hey, we're in our 40s -- the warranty has to have expired by now!". Sheesh.

I've had a loaner cat for a few days, while a friend was out of town dealing with family stuff. The visitor is a very easy-going cat; two of my cats need to learn to chill. :-) But, he's gone home now and all is well. (When I wasn't home I kept him in one room lest there be trouble otherwise, and this had the effect of turning him into something of a puppy-dog when I let him out. Very friendly cat...)

Someone named Darter, who does a lot of photography in the SCA, posted his Pennsic pictures recently. Hey, I recognize that singer. (Seriously, I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see a reasonable picture of myself, because I can't do decent posed pics no matter how important it is, and I'm rarely the subject of candids.)

Speaking of Pennsic, I had to call a number of trailer-repair places before I found someone who would talk to me about the damaged axle on the Pennsic house. About a week and a half ago I talked to someone who promised to go take a look soon. I sure hope he got up there this weekend. (How did I find repair places? After several false starts trying the referral path, I started working my way through the listings here.)

Thursday I got a phone call from the "retention manager" at the Trib, who assured me that they are trying to solve my delivery problem. In the last few days I haven't missed a paper, which is good; I do wonder how long it will last. We've done this before. Well, she asked me to call her Tuesday with an update, so I can ask her about the long-term fix then. This is, by the way, the first time someone has called who has left a return number, so that's progress.

The Coopers were able to move the house this morning without apparent problems, fortunately. The trailer does need some repairs -- probably one axle should be replaced, at least. One of my camp-mates spotted some writing/engraving in the middle of the axle (completely eluded me), so we now have a part number. (Also most of a serial number, though a couple digits were too hard to read, but I don't think that's useful for anything.) Someone had a good idea: ask the Coopers who services their vehicles, on the assumption that they don't drive their tracters in to Butler or Newcastle for maintenance. I need to find someone who can make a house call; the trailer is not road-legal (and probably couldn't be made so without fixing the problem for which I would want to take it somewhere... um.)

We spent all day up there doing camp set-up. Dani is now the assistant plumber (since the previous assistant has moved to another camp). We got all the camp infrastructure in place today (and most personal dwellings); we're farther ahead than we usually are on the first Sunday. I didn't think I had done anything really strenuous, but now some muscles are filing complaints. Oh well; they'll get over it.

It should be a comfortable camp this year. There's never a lot of space at Pennsic, of course, but we managed to get an optimal shape, so we have a straight path through camp and relatively few ropes in inconvenient places.

Now, home for a few days before going back up.

Sunday was a planned work day for my Pennsic camp -- specifically some house repairs. Last year we replaced several sections of siding that had gotten mushy because we didn't know from day one that caulk is important. There were some sections we didn't get to last year, so we attacked those this time. Dani and I had done a scouting mission and several camp members had gotten together two weeks ago to prime and paint plywood, so this "should" have been easy. That noise you hear is heavenly laughter. :-)

When we did that scouting mission (a month or so ago) there were lots of wasps or hornets swarming around. (I was disinclined to get close enough to armed insects to determine which these were.) We've had nests before, so I brought up some chemical weapons this time -- and we found nothing. Ok, we found an occupied bird's nest (they can stay until Pennsic), but no wasp/hornet nests at all. That's great, but a little mystifying.

First lesson learned: a power inverter works better if you have the cables -- or, failing that, if the cables are not in a car at a gaming convention in Columbus. Oops. We were so careful to make sure I had the box before Dani left for Origins; it didn't occur to either of us that the full-looking box was not actually full. Fortunately, alaricmacconnal is handy with copper wire, which he was able to pick up on his way up to Cooper's Lake.

Second lesson learned: the circular saw really is too big for the power inverter (I think the person who thought it worked last year was mis-remembering), but a jig saw is good enough to make straight cuts in plywood. (A lesson we learned last year is that you can't really measure for the replacement piece until you've removed the old piece, which means cutting on site.)

Third lesson learned: rain is wet. :-) Ok, we already knew that, and we knew we were gambling some on the weather. We got rained on twice, but each time only lasted about 15-20 minutes and people were smart enough to come down from the big metal ladder. :-) A bigger storm rolled in as we were finishing, so we got to drive home in that.

We've had some impressive storms in the last few days. I don't think we got the predicted hail this afternoon, but on both Saturday and Sunday there were some pretty fierce winds and impressive light shows.

After I got home (and cleaned up) Sunday night I was able to visit with college friends from Seattle for a couple hours. I'm not certain they had had their first kid when last I saw them, and they were in town this weekend to drop him off at CMU's pre-college program. Wow -- been a long time. It was good to catch up some (though it was incomplete).

Pennsic went well this year. This entry is going to be long. It is also incomplete; there'll be more in future entries.

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Last week, when I helped lead services, I received many compliments. In that situation it's always hard to tell where something is on the scale from "just being polite" to "heartfelt compliment", so it's best to not get too excited (though of course compliments feel good and I assume there's at least some degree of positive feeling involved in any such). However, I'll give a little more weight to the several people who approached me this week to tell me how much they enjoyed my singing last week, and to the multiple people who apparently told my rabbi this. Woo!

Thursday morning I led part of shacharit, as I mentioned before, and then led mincha at my congregation. I seemed to be more at ease with some of the text Thursday evening than I usually am. Repetition helps. :-)

This morning's study and service were back up to their usual numbers. My rabbi is back in town (yay!), but came back with some sort of bug (oops). I hope he's well enough to keep the appointment I have with him on Monday.

Today was the first day of Pennsic set-up. I got a message from our land agent that my house is in place, but that they managed to break the jack on the trailer hitch. Sigh! This is the second time that has happened. So it's in our camp, but it's not moving out at the end until I can replace that jack. I'll find out more when I go up there tomorrow. Last time it took 3-4 weeks for a mail-ordered jack to come, though I took the first web-based supplier I could find so maybe I can improve on that. The first thing to do, though, is find out how it failed so I know whether I should be buying a different jack. (That is, did something stupid happen, like driving it without raising the jack, or did it fail in a situation where it shouldn't've?)

I went early to services on Friday so I could sneak a peek at the sefer torah I'll be reading from next week. The rabbi asked me which scroll I wanted to use, the one with the clearest text (which is heavy) or the lightest one (which has less-clear, though acceptable, text). I told him that I don't have hagbah (the job of lifting the scroll overhead for the congregation to see), so I had a clear opinion on the subject that was subject to veto. :-) (Apparently the person doing hagbah can cope, though, so I get the good text.) I tripped in a few places reading from the scroll on Friday, but I'm now in pretty good shape from the practice copy (in the tikkun), so I think it'll be fine.

Last night we went to Kathy's PhD party. She successfully defended her thesis a couple months ago and officially gets the degree next month. She commented that she has spent more than a third of her life in grad school. That's kind of a scary way of looking at it. I don't think I would have the stamina. (Or the financial wherewithall, possibly.)

The party was a mix of SCA people, coworkers, and relatives. Often those kinds of gatherings fragment, with the SCA people talking about things that are utterly cryptic to the others. That didn't happen as much last night, and the relatives and coworkers didn't bolt early. That's good.

I'm thinking of having a birthday party this fall -- round number and it's an excuse for a party at our house, so what the heck. I hope we can achieve a similar dynamic, because I'd like to invite a mix of people.

Johan and I went up to Cooper's Lake last week to inspect the trailer and make sure the new jack will fit. (It will, but we need to go back with different tools to attach it.) On the way up, we made a stop by the Highland Park water filtration plant, which is really his project (lead engineer). It's quite impressive -- very pretty, and you'd never guess that there's a water-tratment plant inside if you weren't looking for it. It really blends into the park. A particularly fun part is the babbling brook; you see, they need to aerate some of the waste water before it can proceed to the river or wherever it gets dumped, and this is usually done by piping it over chunks of cement and stuff in a chamber. But this is a park, so he got authorization to make a pretty brook with rock beds and stuff. While we were standing on a bridge looking down on it, a couple of people out for a walk joined us and he was explaining to them how it worked. They were very complimentary, and they thanked him for keeping the park pretty. After we left, I asked him how it felt to have fans. :-) It really is an impressive project, and I gather that he's gotten engineering awards for it. While I love what I do for a living, there's got to be something neat about doing something that has an immediate, positive impact on the community in which you live.

Oh, and a link, courtesy of Johan: http://www.toostupidtobepresident.com .

Shabbat was low-key, which was a nice change after the road trip the previous weekend.

Sunday we went up to Cooper's Lake to deal with flat tires on the house trailer. (In theory we were also going to deal with hornets, but we didn't.) The house had sunk down a lot since last fall; this fall we will have to jack it up well beyond what we think will be needed. We ended up removing the two flat tires, as they had popped off the rims so we couldn't just reinflate. We have two spares (or will tomorrow; the place I ordered from accidetally shorted me one and promises a replacement ASAP), so this is a problem we can solve after Pennsic. Just as well; it turns out that most places that repair tires aren't set up for trailer tires. Different equipment, apparently.

Sunday we noticed that someone apparently hit a corner of our house, probably with another trailer. (The scraped paint goes fairly high.) Whoever it was scuffed up my fresh paint job and broke off one of my fake stones. Sigh. I'll fix it after Pennsic.

We got the results of our property-tax appeal. They lowered our assessment slightly, but not nearly as much as they should have. They knocked off half or a third of the cost of the central air they mistakingly thought we had, and near as I can tell they did not consider our comparable sales at all. Grr.

Tonight is D&D, where maybe I'll blow things up and feel better. :-)

Somebody at Sunday dinner (can't remember who now) asked about the little house I use for Pennsic. Here is a link. The pictures are out of date; we added some decoration this year. I have the new pictures scanned now (yeah, actual film -- no digital camera yet), but I haven't updated the site yet.