cellio | Entries tagged with sca: events

Hey, SCA people...

SCA events are customarily on Saturdays (or weekends centered on Saturdays). This is, as I understand it, to allow Sunday for the people who traveled from out of town to pack up and go home and be ready for work/school the next day.

There haven't been any in-person events for a few months, and in the US there won't be any before February. There are, however, events happening online on a fairly regular basis. The SCA is fundamentally a social organization; of course the events will move online rather than shut down entirely.

Online events on Saturdays are inaccessible to those of us who keep Shabbat.

However, nobody needs Sunday to drive home from them, either.

Do you suppose we could have some of these online events on Sundays instead?

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!

This past weekend I had the chance to participate in something really spiffy -- a recreation of a historic coronation ceremony. Most SCA ceremony is fundamentally modern, dressed up in renaissance trappings; the chance to do more-serious recreation is pretty special.

Of course, there are some special considerations -- historically, ceremonies like this would have been Christian religious services (part of a mass, I think), which in addition to being problematic for some participants (ahem) also would be a violation of SCA rules. So some work needed to be done on that, but I'm impressed by how real it felt nonetheless.

baron_steffan wrote/adapted the ceremony based on the Coronation service of Maximilian I (1486). Music was a central part (rather than being incidental as is sometimes the case), and we had about 20 singers from across the kingdom (about half from the Debatable Choir), organized and led by

ariannawyn. We sang four songs: "Te Regem Laudamus" (adapted from a "Te Deum"), Non Nobis Domine, the roll of kings and queens (more on that below), and "Da Pacem Domine", which we'll be using throughout the reign as processional music.

By ancient custom, the coronation ceremony includes the reading of the roll of all the past kings and queens. Usually this is read by a herald; we chanted it (adapting the Te Regem). One thing that was fun about this was that, to make it not clash, we sang Latinized versions of all the names (thanks Steffan!), and "collapsed" different rulers with the same names. So if you listen to the chant you'll hear Christophers 1 through 6, but that's really two different people each ruling three times. Some names underwent more transformation than others; I think the biggest change was "Rurik" to "Rodericus". I wonder how many of them were startled by hearing their names this time. :-)

dagonell has collected the ceremony, its documentation, the sheet music, and recordings (and other stuff from the event). Check it out! (The recordings here are of the music parts; I do hope somebody was recording the rest of the ceremony and that it'll make its way to that page.)

I don't go to a lot of SCA events any more, and almost never ones not in my local group, but this was totally worth the effort.

Yesterday's music & dance event was a lot of fun. We knew we wouldn't get the usual contingent from the East Kingdom because of a dance event there (that we didn't know about in time), but a bunch of people from the Cleftlands came from Ohio and that allowed us to have some good cross-fertilization. It's nice when you don't know all the people in your classes, after all.

I taught "Reconstruction 201: Balli". 201 because it's more complex than Arbeau and Playford, but only 201 because it's not ultra-advanced either. Ordinary people can do this, and I was pleased to see people who had never tried to work out a ballo from the sources do so in the class.

There were seven students, including alaricmacconnal who I had specifically asked to come with a recorder. (The class was advertised for dancers and musicians, and I wanted to make sure there would be at least one non-me musician there prepared to play from the original manuscript.) There are some ambiguities in the notation for the dance I chose (Marchesana), which is one of the reasons I chose it, and Alaric picked up on one I hadn't seen and made it work. Cool! I don't know if his interpretation is right, but it works well with the dance steps so I'd say it's a keeper. (And because the students were mostly dancers and not musicians, we just breezed past some of the music-specific ambiguities like use of accidentals. At a basic level dancers don't care what notes you play if the timing works.)

I taught the technique that Rosina and I used when we reconstructed the balli for Joy and Jealousy: start by independently counting up how many tempi (measures, in modern parlance) of what misure (think time signatures, sort of) you think the dance and the music call for. Then compare and start reconciling, drawing on other manuscripts and translations as needed. We did not get all the way through the dance -- I find workshops really hard to plan, timing-wise, and I talked too long at the beginning before diving in -- but we got far enough that people seemed to be getting it and enjoying themselves. Several of the students were non-local and I failed to get contact information, alas, so I don't know if I'll ever hear about reconstructions they end up doing. I hope I do.

One of the visitors from Cleftlands, whose name I asked and have failed to retain (sigh), was amazing to watch on the dance floor. She had excellent posture, made eye contact, knew what to do with her hands, and seemed to always be aware of the room around her. I asked: she's a professional dance teacher. :-) Maybe next time she'll teach a class on these things!

(A class I would like to see, but don't know how to structure, would be something like "beyond the specific dance" and would cover things like that, using the space (constraints and opportunities), and adjusting your styling based on the instruments providing the music. This last is something that the Italian sources specifically call out as something to strive for, and I have only the basics of it.)

The choir performed a subset of our Pennsic concert and I thought it went well. There was somebody in the audience who was the perfect magnet for making eye contact; I hope we didn't all pick him. :-) (Ok, I did move around the room, but not necessarily with an even distribution...) The consort also performed, and the students in a choral class sang three songs. It was a good set of performances.

The food was tasty and there were more vegetarian-friendly dishes than I'm used to (yay!). The assorted sauteed veggies in which ginger and garlic (separately) were treated as full-fledged components rather than scant additions were particularly nice. :-)

It turned out that this was lefkowitzga's 30th anniversary of autocratting her first event, and her co-autocrat was a first-timer. Nice blend of seasoned and new there.

We had a very nice schola event this past Saturday at the baron and baroness' castle (hence the event name). The classes I went to were quite good, lunch was tasty (including a nice vegetarian soup), and the feast (cooked by

illadore) was excellent.

We missed the first couple class sessions (it would take an awful lot for me to willingly miss Shabbat morning services...). The session that was just about to start when we got there didn't have anything that grabbed me (good stuff but topics I already knew); I wish I had noticed the last-minute addition of a battle-tactics class. I would have taken that for the novelty. But I didn't notice it so instead I ate lunch and talked with people.

Leifr and

risiko gave a slide show on their trip to Scandinavia -- not the typical vacation pictures you might expect, but lots and lots of stuff from museums off the beaten path. It appears that in Scandinavia, like in the parts of Israel I visited, they are perfectly content to let people crawl around ancient ruins instead of protecting everything behind glass. That definitely enhances my experience of such sites. (In contrast, I remember visiting Plymouth Rock decades ago and being surprised to find that it was roped/walled off so you couldn't get near it. Also, that it was much smaller than I had imagined.)

After that I went to two cooking classes taught by a visitor from the Cleftlands (we had a bunch of people from Ohio, which isn't usual for us even though it's nearby). The first was on mustards and the second on sauces. Mustard might be worth getting a blender for; mmmm. :-) (A tip he gave: mustard seed can be gotten in quantity from Indian groceries. I wouldn't have thought of that.)

At dinner we sat and conversed with some visitors from Cleftlands. The feast, as I said, was excellent. It was all from Forme of Cury (except one sauce that was ~20 years later, Illadore told me) and it hit that rare combination of tasty and well-balanced and vegetarian-friendly (without short-changing the meat-eaters) and aesthetically pleasing and well-timed and a plausible re-creation. It had chicken with mustard sauce, roast beef (with sauces), tarts for ember day (cheese/onion pie, more or less), cheese, nuts, fruit, pickled vegetables, a salad of greens, peas, mushrooms, and more, with apple pie and gingerbread for dessert. We often eat well in this barony, but especially well this time.

This was a free event with a lunch and feast that cost money. I don't think we've tried that model before; we've had completely-free pot-luck events (usually though not always with a donations basket set out), and we've had events where there is a site fee and food fee (the usual event model). A (good) feast adds a lot to an event for me so I prefer that to pot-luck, but I also want us to do free events, so I'm glad to see this combination being tried. I wonder how we did on donations.

( Read more... )

Yesterday after I got home from services we went up to Cooper's Lake for AEthelmearc War Practice. This is a multi-day event (I think it's up to four now, maybe five), but, well, only Pennsic is worth the hassle of camping, so we just went up for the day. And it's been raining all week, so I would have punted even that, but we had reasons to be there.

New since last Pennsic: they finally put a traffic light at the end of the exit ramp from I-79N onto Route 422. Yay! That left turn (onto an often-busy 55MPH road) is the worst part of my drive to Pennsic. (The left turn out of the campground is the worst part of the drive home. No, I didn't get that lucky. :-) ) There seems to be some small amount of development along that stretch of 422; there is another (new) light before getting to the campground, at what used to be an open field sometimes occupied by a farmers' market, and now occupied by a gas station, a McDonald's, and a Subway. Hmm. If they add a beer outlet and grocery store, the two weeks of Pennsic business might pay for the rest of the year.

( the event )

( local event )

We're day-tripping AEthelmearc 10th-year tomorrow. Events at Cooper's Lake tend to spread out, making it hard to find people, so here are hints for me for those who care. I plan to be at the investiture of our new baron and baroness (morning court), the reception following, a (different) reception for a Laurel elevation, and court. With luck, I should also be able to catch the artisans' forum. I'd kind of like to see the equestrian activities, but I don't know the schedule for that. We are not staying for the feast.

Sunday afternoon we'll be back at Cooper's Lake, in the oversized-trailer area, painting my house.

Maybe I'll see some of you!

The event went well, from what I saw. People seemed to be having fun, we got entries for both the brewing and illusion-food contests, I Genesii did a great take on the Purim story, and people ate the food. There were about 20 no-shows, which I didn't know until late in the day, which explains some of the food excess. Not all of it; for some things either I over-estimated or I just plain didn't know how much people would eat.

( food analysis )

Most of the advance prep for the Purim feast is now done (which is good, as it's almost Shabbat). Tonight

lorimelton and

ralphmelton valiantly peeled and chopped the veggies I'll need first thing in the morning while I hard-boiled a gross of eggs and did some other stuff. Ralph taught me a trick for peeling eggs (which, he pointed out, is described in a book I own): it's easier to peel them if, after soaking in cold water immediately after cooking, you then put them back in the pot and bounce them around to crack (but not remove) the shells. I don't want to actually peel them this far in advance, but things should be much easier Sunday morning now.

Last night the autocrat took me shopping at Sam's Club (I don't have a membership), where I sometimes got items that would have cost me twice as much for half as much at Giant Eagle. Yay, Sam's. Selection is limited, though, so I still have to pick up a few things. (They had no almonds, spinach, or parsnips, for instance.) Last night we also delivered much of the food and all of the gear to the site, which will also make things much easier on Sunday.

The event has been keeping me very busy this week, and work has also been hectic (not that I can directly read LJ at work anyway), so it's probably safest to assume that I won't catch up on the last few days. If there's something I should see, please tell me? Thanks.

This morning I learned that the Strip District (source of food, not porn) pretty much closes on Sunday. Fortunately, I had called the alleged Mecca of pickles, olives, grape leaves, and the like before going there. And fortunately, Dani -- who loves olives and therefore has a vested interest -- is willing to pick a few things up for me since he works nearby.

After brunch I picked up the pots, platters, untensils, and miscelleanous supplies I'll need. Oof. My car is full of stuff. If this were a 200- or 300-person feast instead of a 100-person one, I don't know if I'd be able to fit all the stuff in my car. (And that's not counting food!) Fortunately, I can take some stuff to the site on Wednesday, including much of the food (which I'll have just bought). The autocrat has a membership at Sam's Club, so she's going to take me shopping for the good prices.

Next I went to pick up the smoked salmon from someone who volunteered his smoking services. Mmm, it looks and smells great! It might be more than we need, but I doubt it'll go to waste.

Then, it was home to do some pre-cooking. I tried two desserts, one successful and one not so much. Once again, dough is my undoing. We'll be fine, though; I knew that was an experiment, so I didn't count on it. (Hmm. All of the desserts have nuts in them. I should come up with something that doesn't. I can't document hamentashen, or I'd do that.)

I also made 15 meat pies and all the kosher meatballs. I had planned to do more meatballs, but I ran out of steam. I'll do the rest Tuesday.

(I don't have the budget to buy all kosher meat, and I wouldn't be able to justify it for the small number of people who care. So instead, I bought a smaller amount of kosher meat and will prepare that separately. Everything at the feast is kosher by ingredients, but most of the meat won't come from a kosher butcher.)

Tomorrow night I have class. Tuesday night I make chicken soup, meatballs, and probably the white beans (which are served cold and are best after a few days). Wednesday is shopping (and delivery of all the food cooked thus far). Thursday I prep some vegetables, hard-boil a gross of eggs, and make a couple other things. All week, I use the bread machine to make dough for fish pies. With luck, Saturday night I relax before getting started Sunday morning. I think I'm going to take next Monday off from work. :-)

A week ago, we had about 50 reservations for the Purim event. 24 hours ago, we had 80 (about what I figured we'd top out at). Half an hour ago, we had 100 and pending inquiries. That's a lot more people than I thought would want to come to our event!

I do have meatier stuff I want to write about, but things are a little hectic. Sorry I'm not being that interesting right now.

Plans continue for the Purim feast in two and a half weeks. I expect we'll get a bunch more reservations at tomorrow night's meeting. I did a test run of one of the looks-good-but-haven't-eaten-it recipes tonight, and it passed. I'm pretty happy with the way the menu is shaping up. I'm also grateful for the offers of help I've received.

Apropos of Purim (but not this event), I recommend megillah2a to anyone who's either following the Daf Yomi cycle or just interested in some of the talmud's coverage of Purim.

Our associate rabbi is starting a beginners' talmud class. Good! It's during the work day -- not so good for me, but if it works for others, I'm glad. I hope someday to take an evening class from him.

The person signed up to read torah this Shabbat fell ill, and I've been tapped to pull together something. I'll probably read rather than chant because that's faster to prepare, and everyone's ok with a partial reading given the circumstances. A couple years ago I wouldn't have been capable of pulling something together at almost the last minute, so that's progress! (Last time I got one not-too-long aliya up to speed (with chanting) in about six hours of work, and then it was just maintenance from there. I remember when it took six weeks.)

I received a call from my vet's office today. I had the last two appointments of the day, and gee the snow and sleet are looking bad, and if I wanted to reschedule they just wanted to let me know that that would be ok... yeah, I can read between those lines. :-) It's just routine checkups, so I suggested we let the vet and technicians go home a little early.

A few of my non-local readers -- though I cannot now remember which ones -- have made comments in the past about possibly coming to the Purim (SCA) event in Debatable Lands on Sunday, March 4. If that's still interesting to anyone reading this, making reservations soon would be a good idea. We're about half-full right now. Event announcement. I hope to see some of you there!

A good discussion of rights by

xiphias.

I'm cooking an SCA feast for Purim. I have recently learned that I can get goat, and I have this lovely-sounding recipe for a goat stew. Must investigate. (I have a draft menu that is now awaiting comment from some of my partners in food perpetration.) I'm looking forward to the event, especially the treatment of the book of Esther by I Genesii, the local commedia del'arte troupe.

For gamers and foodies, from ohiblather comes this link to cupcakes of Catan.

Someone published a parody of Second Life, called Get A First Life. The makers of Second Life, rather than sending a "cease and desist" letter, sent a proceed and persevere letter. Good for them!

Forwarded by osewalrus, Nigerian kitten spam.

( SCA event )

( Dogs in the Vineyard )

( Shabbat lunch )

( Purim SCA event )

( short takes )

( This will be long. )

( SCA event )

Today was the Dance and Romance event, a (mostly) dance event with games, music, and random schmoozing. I had a lot of fun. This was

jarethsgirl's first event as autocrat and it went very smoothly. Ensemble Rigodon (that's On the Mark's SCA persona) performed and we were well-received; people even got up and danced to our last piece, Rostiboli Gioioso. That was fun! One of the songs we did was a poem by a local poetry laurel that I set to music (based on a minnesang); alas, the poet was not there to hear it. Oh well, some other time. The choir also performed and sounded good. The consort was supposed to perform, but either they didn't or I managed to miss it somehow, which is disappointing.

I played with the consort and other guest musicians for part of the evening ball. It's been a while since a local event had enough planned dancing to be worth bringing the dulcimer, so that was very pleasant. I haven't been paying much attention to dance practice, so I was surprised by some of the pieces that got done at the ball. I didn't know our dancers did Prexoniera (an Italian ballo) until I saw my arrangement of it in the music binder. There were several other balli too, and Gracca Amoroso (a later Italian dance that I have to re-learn one of these days). Cai and lyev seemed to be doing much of the teaching during the day and doing a good job of it.

I got to spend time talking with dr_zrfq, who came up from Atlantia, and lorimelton and ralphmelton, who don't often come to events but like to dance. I met some new members from our group and one of our neighbors who were at their first "regular" (local, non-camping) events.

I expected this event to draw 50-60 people. I didn't hear a head count, and we might not have one because there was no formal sign-in unless you needed to sign a waiver, but I think we were over 100. That's great for a (mostly) local dance event! We had some visitors from nearby groups, too.

The event was at the University of Pittsburgh's student union, in their ballroom. This was the first time we've used the site and it was nearly perfect for this event. It would work well for other non-fighting events without elaborate food needs, too. We had two rooms, one about twice the size of the other. The floors are carpetted (I tend to assume ballrooms have bare wood floors) and very comfortable to dance on. There were enough tables and chairs (while still having plenty of space to dance in), and we were able to have pot-luck food (no cooking facilities on site, but plugging in crock pots etc was fine). Apparently Pitt is enough of a union shop that we weren't allowed to do much setup and cleanup, which is both fine and surprising in a site we didn't have to pay for. Parking cost $5, but since the event was free that's fine. Parking was a couple blocks away -- a bit of a hassle for carrying the dulcimer, but not impossible.

We should do this again.

Sunday night we went to see the Narnia movie (finally). The previews were mostly aimed at kids, with one notable exception (The White Countess); that was an odd combination. One of the previews was for Hoot, which appears to be another in the theme of "these kids, and only these kids, can save the world (or their small part of it)". I find that while I'm willing to suspend that sort of disbelief in a fantasy or SF millieu -- Narnia, my recent D&D game, and a number of novels boil down to this plot -- I am usually unable to do so for stories set in the real world. So Hoot came across to me as dumb and lame, even though I was sitting there waiting for Narnia.

A doctor friend was recently opining that "some guy" is responsible for about 80% of ER visits from violent crimes, and if we can just find him we'll all be better off. "For instance", he said, "you get reports like 'there I was, sitting on my front porch at 3AM reading my bible and minding my own business, when Some Guy shot me!'". Err, this might be more challenging than he thinks.

I caused a telemarketer to violate the script this weekend. I was lured in by him pronouncing my name correctly, so I didn't immediately detect his true nature. Then he said "I'm calling from the PA Pro-Life Commission" (or some such) and I interrupted and said "you really have a wrong number". He stopped mid-shpiel and apologized. Negative points for calling in the first place but positive points for not persisting. And maybe this one will actually put me on their do-not-call list.

A random thought: in this age of global communication, when giving an email correspondent your phone number it is polite to mention your time zone. On the internet nobody knows you're a dog, and also, nobody knows you're in Bangladesh. Or wherever. Fortunately, Google can answer these sorts of questions pretty easily given the phone number, unless it's a cell phone.

Saturday is a local SCA event, Dance and Romance. It's a free event (pot-luck food) at Pitt, and as the name implies, there will be a lot of dancing. Ensemble Rigodon (that's On the Mark's SCA identity) will be doing a short concert, and lots of us will undoubtedly be playing dance music all day. Should be fun!

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.

Monica

[SCA] event-planning: planting a seed

a day of song and story (SCA)

fun with ceremony (Coronation)

[SCA] music & dance event

[SCA] Castle Schola

[SCA] barony 12th night

[SCA] war practice

[SCA] Siege at Harlech Castle

[SCA] weekend plans

Purim

busy busy busy

busy (SCA-filled) day

[SCA] wow

some updates

[SCA] Purim event

short takes

Coronation (SCA)

assorted updates

Pennsic 35

[SCA] Coronation

SCA: dance event

random bits

dance event

SCA: autocratting events

Academy

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