Monica

A long time ago, I published a set of instructions for building a yurt (aka ger), the Mongolian temporary dwelling. I had built one for SCA use, building on knowledge from others, and collected what I'd learned as the next contribution. I'm sure there've been plenty of works since then that should have deprecated my little article, but it's floating around out there so I get inquiries from time to time.

The letter from the middle-school class in Myanmar asking if I thought using bamboo would work was the most unusual query I'd gotten until the one from the fellow in Scotland considering a housing change who wanted to know if it would stand up to force-11 winds. But tonight I got something even better.

This was a request for permission to adapt my article. You see (the writer says), in Star Wars there's this (race? nation?) called the Mandalorians, who have many parallels to the Mongols, and he wants to publish a manual for building a vheh'yaim, which is something like a yurt.

The sender's web site refers to a Second Life Mandalorian community. (Also something called Star Wars Galaxies, which I infer is another online community. And also Wookiepedia, but the obvious URLs don't turn anything up.) I wonder if there are also Star Wars re-enactors who actually build stuff the way the SCA and Klingon and Civ War folks do.

The world-wide web: it's not just for Earth any more. :-)

(I said yes, and in the time it took me to compose this entry he wrote back to say that it's theoretical now, but he won't be surprised if that changes.)

I got mail from another school class looking to build a yurt. Did some education journal just run an article on yurts or something? These are ninth-graders in Albuqueque, so it's probably just a coincidence. (I'm out of the loop on tent supplies. Where do people buy canvas these days? I mean raw materials, not prepared tent parts.)

I dropped Baldur off at the vet around 7:30 this morning. Around 9:30 I got a call saying everything had gone fine. That was much faster than I expected. And the good vet of years past called; I'm glad he was the one to take care of him. (This was the vet I saw regularly until his hours completely shifted to weekdays and the more-distant location.) I can pick him up between 4 and 7; given weather forecasts and traffic, I think I will aim for earlier rather than later.

Ironically, Erik is finishing a round of antibiotics and Baldur is about to start a round (for the gingivitis that led to the dental treatment). So the pill-in-canned-food exercise is just going to shift one cat over, it seems. Baldur has been jealous of Erik getting special treatment, so now it's his turn. I wonder if I can head off any sickness in Embla that might be looming by just giving her the good stuff too?

The form I had to fill out when I dropped him off asked me to rate (good/fair/poor) several factors, including "appetite". I decided against writing in "enthusiastic". I do have hopes that simply hiding a pill in his food will work, though; with Erik I've had to crush them and mix them in. Baldur resembles a vacuum cleaner when eating, so I might get lucky.

Several years ago, I wrote an article for an SCA newsletter on how to build a yurt (aka ger), the Mongolian round semi-portable structure. I and some friends built one for camping in at Pennsic, so I wrote down what I did and shared it. Every now and then I get random questions and/or thanks from people who've found the article.

The most recent message is from someone who said he does "Roman and Bible reenactment" and had just built a yurt. (Unknown: what a yurt has to do with either.) Its first use was to be for his sukkah. He closed with "Shalom in Jesus".

Um, ok. A Christian? A "Jew for Jesus"? A re-enactor whose re-enactment extends to holidays?

I wrote back to thank him for the message and answer a question. And just to be helpful, I pointed out a couple halachic issues he might consider in using a yurt for Sukkot. I did not translate the Hebrew for terms that a Jew or a scholar would likely know. I didn't really expect to hear from him again.

He wrote back, citing a tertiary (at best) source for alternate interpretations. He also gave a cite for a round, domed sukkah in Amsterdam in 1722. This doesn't match up with anything either of us is trying to recreate, of course, but it sounds interesting. (Not interesting enough to go out and chase, though. It's a curiosity to me, nothing more.) He didn't say what they used for the roof cover or how it was attached.

He also described himself as Jewish, messianic, and a karaite. I didn't know there were still karaites out there. I'm not certain what the combination of messianic and karaite means, but I'm not going to ask him.

Karaites were a "sect", for lack of a better term, that accepted the written law but none of the oral law. They spent Shabbat in the cold and dark because they interpreted "kindle no fire" as "have no fire" rather than "light it in advance". It sounds like it must have been miserable. I thought they all died out several hundred years ago. Maybe this is a "neo-karaite" in the sense that we have "neo-pagans" who aren't tied to the original pagans?