(no subject)

Our Independence Day was forecast to be totally drenched by (almost a storm) Arthur but the predictions also claimed that the majority of the rain and wind would be past by early afternoon. So we went ahead with our plans.

We had eleven friends and one son over for a cookout & pavilion-raising. Unhappily for me, the night before passed sleepless until morning and I ended up asleep, lulled by the moderate amount of rain hitting the house, until almost 1330... and I'd invited folks to start arriving 'anytime after 1300'! I went from luxuriously sleep-sated to panicked upon seeing our bedside clock. Bossman was already long awake, of course, and he'd elected to let me sleep myself out. He prepped the grill, cleaned the kitty box, and washed dishes before I even shook the sand from my eyes. I had enough time to prepare the fixings for the berry shortcake (strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries, sweetened - with the pulp and juice of one overly-ripe white nectarine added in since the rest was a tad dry) along with whipped crème and pound cake. Then I got the pasta salad made. It was a boxed mix of tri-colored spiral noodles with red pepper bits and Ceasar dressing, to which I added cherry tomatoes, sliced black olives, cucumbers, and minced bacon. It wasn't bad at all. We bought steaks for everyone who showed up since they were there partially as a work party. The owner of the pavilion, Barb (Felicia in the SCA) joined us and wracked her brain trying to remember how she and Donovan used to raise their pavilion. That was the only occasion of stress - lots of 'experts' who had definate opinions about how it should be done and few people with any real idea. But success was achieved and the 13x18' oval pavilion was set up. Along with its absolutely ridiculous ten foot sunshade, which is only 5 feet wide and hardly fitting to be called a 'shade'. What a silly looking thing it is! And it adds far too much space to the final footprint of the pavilion.

Nonetheless, we have a single-dwelling setup for this Pennsic. It is not a design I would choose for us to have. I'd harbored minor thoughts about offering for it rather than buying the single-pole 16x16 we are planning on buying but after seeing it up I abandoned that idea with near violence. For a single couple who sleep in the same bed I'm sure the tent is fine. But for the two of us who sleep on very different surfaces (and his is queen-sized while mine is a twin), the tent is woefully small. We'd planned on dividing it in thirds with his sleeping area at one end, mine at the other, and a 'kitchen and salon' in the area defined by the space between the two ridgepole uprights. That space is a measly 4.5 feet. Granted, it is the full 13 feet wide but it is only six inches wider than our kitchen table and six inches less wide than that silly long sunshade. I haven't brought it up to Bossman but I am sure we are going to be changing our plans about the layout. He has been resistant to any sort of planning discussions so I've decided to think everything out as best I can, draw floor plans for him of each arrangement I can anticipate, and then just present them to him to chew on without expecting any kind of actual discussion. Most likely I will learn what he's decided to use as we are setting up, and he'll be confused as to why I hadn't 'known' what we were going to do.

I don't care. He's coming to Pennsic instead of staying home and that is all I care about. He can be as frustrating as he wants to be so long as I get him there for recharging his batteries and rekindling his spirit.

The steaks went over well, as did the eight (!) hamburgers that one of the guest workers brought. Another brought deviled eggs (I was going to make those but she volunteered... now I have 18 orphaned eggs to turn into egg salad for sandwiches). The berry shortcake did, too, with enough left over for us to enjoy last evening after dinner. And once everyone was sated and the pavilion was stored away again, we retired to the kitchen table for a game of "Five Crowns" until our neighborhood's illegal firework-setting was over. Some folks really spent a lot of money on their fireworks but the lack of proper training in how to use them was apparent.

(no subject)

I just finished reading Gordon Dickenson's Wolf and Iron. It is probably a fine book but the knowledge brought to me by scouting and playing in historical reenactment makes me very grumpy with most post-holocaust novels. (Just as it did with M. Night Shyamalan's movie The Village). Dickenson made an interesting study of man & wolf as independent partners in his tale, but the world he described, while possible, contained far too many errors in 'supply' if you will. Everyone has guns with sufficient bullets - or so they seem to believe, using them as easily as urban gangsters did in the prohibition times. The protagonist, while an educated man who'd been in the Boy Scouts, apparently never had to worry about the proper way to dress out small game, for he never meets a rabbit or squirrel that might end up poisoning him. (In some small game, there are glands one must avoid nicking while dressing them out. I don't know what they are or where they would be found. It isn't common knowledge, even to a scout.) The protagonist's wife manages to 'be sewing clothes' for their child near the end of the book without there being any mention of how the heck they found scissors, thread, needles - or cloth since their only product source is a burned and gutted farmstead nearby which had been stripped out by raiders. And while they are planning their home, they do not make any plans for fabric production, even in terms of 'our family will need this'. No spinning, no weaving, no area set aside for curing leather, which they do seem to be able to produce, judging by glancing comments. But yet in a hidden steading set up to cohabitate with a male wolf, there are no sentences about the difficulty of actually process and tanning hides around a wolf who likes to chew and destroy the protagonist's possessions. But they do set up a forge. And in an area riddled with raiding parties (remember that most of his supplies for home-building came from scavenging a nearby ranch that he witnessed being raided and burned to the ground) he manages to make sufficient charcoal (from pine trees) to use in his forge without tipping anyone off that he is there. They have two horses - one a mare but the other gelded. No worries about that. No chickens, no poultry at all, scavenged flour and seed for rust-proof oats but no plans for processing the harvested oats to make flour later on. He relocates the farmstead's haybarn to his place, and the hay, but makes no move the following summer to provide replacement hay. His lady 'puts up vegetables in glass jars' - without replacement lids or rings, or a source of wax for sealing.

It makes me roll my eyes.

A Palermo tunic.

All I wanted to do was make a tunic (a surprise tunic made possible by the purchase of twice the amount of fabric I needed to make my night-rail. Most likely I thought I was going to use it to make a chiton). I thought it'd be fun to use the off-set neck opening such as the one on Roger II of Sicily's tunic. And I thought it'd be easy to find examples of the style online.

I was wrong. It does appear in middle-era Russian garb, and in Magyar's clothing (referenced but the research no longer available online), which they seem to have gotten via the Avars, and in some cases this style is called 'middle-period Byzantine' although I could not find a single example of it using that search phrase.

I have now thrown caution to the wind. I shall make my surprise tunic, of the deepest purple someone such as I should never wear, in the style of Roger's tunic and just not worry about it. Perhaps while I'm wearing it at Pennsic someone will bounce up to me to say how delighted they were to see someone wearing "_____style clothing" and I can pick their brains.

It is very, very purple. And my sleeping gown will be of the same fabric. I am actually thinking of using flower-patterned trim on it, because, um, because it is just a nightgown of cotton/linen blend and is more a private garment than one I'd wear out and about. I have two yards of printed-stripes fabric that will make great bits of trim for both of them once I decide which stripes will be sacrificed in order to use the others. I do love striped fabric for trim-making.