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We went to Jamestown Settlement on Friday and did volunteer stuff until closing, then came back early, early Saturday morning to do the same. Once again I didn't make it outside of the registration room to actually see the reenactor's camps. It was crazy-populated. We had nearly 700 volunteer reenactors, spanning the timeline from Early Greek (Spartans, mostly) to Modern (Virginia National Guard). There were a bunch of new groups, too, mostly in the post 1800s category. I was impressed with one group, which was some Afro-American men who travelled here from a southern state I didn't catch the name of, to portray a "coloured Troop of the Civil War". More power to them. I would have a very hard time tamping down my anger to do what they are doing, educating visitors about the military role of Blacks in the American Civil War. We also had a not-Jamestown-employees band of Native reenactors onsite too, who had a lot of fun interacting with our professional Powhatan interpreters. And two airplanes! Two sets of camps brought in their own airplanes - in pieces! because vehicles were not allowed onsite yet - and put them back together again for display. One of them is actually flyable.

I spent most of the rest of the week asleep or wanting to sleep thanks to (I think) a sinus infection. Tossed a fever for a couple of days but kicked it back again. My face still hurts and I'm sick of Sudafed but I avoided going to the doctor's about it. Thanks to my slothfulness I got a lot of reading done. Mostly cozy mysteries, but a biography of the artist Raphael was nice. It was written in the first person, which I don't generally like, and the personality certainly showed through - I didn't care for the guy much. I have no idea if the actual man was that self-absorbed.

My spouse went in for dental surgery on Friday morning. I spent five hours in the waiting room so I could drive him back home. Poor guy! Thanks to the opioid thing his dentist didn't prescribe anything stronger than 600mg of Motrin for him. Considering that the man drilled four holes into the bones of my husband's jaws (one of each side), I think that is ridiculous. Bossman has been tossing back Motrin alternating with Tylenol and I swear to gawd, I am seriously considering sneaking one of my not-used hydrocodine pills into his nightly meds so he can sleep tonight. The good thing is that the first few days are the worst and then he should be able to be comfortable with just the Motrin. Once his jaws grow bone around the inserts he'll get dentures that lock into place. I am really, really hoping that he grows bone quickly enough that he has his permanent dentures by Pennsic. We paid an arm and a leg for these - over $16,000 out of pocket. Tell me again that the US has good dental/health systems, eh?

Today we went shopping for flatware to replace our drawer full of pieces from two or three incomplete and different sets. 47 years of living, especially while raising children, can destroy the integrity of a silverware drawer, that is for sure. My gawd, what a grind today has been. What a struggle. Worse, there was nothing that resembled the 4-place set we'd bought for camping but ended up keeping for daily dining. Four places is not enough... and the flatware has no identifying mark whatsoever for me to try to reference. I don't even know what brand it was, just that it came as a boxed set at Target (or Penny's) years and years ago.

We stopped walking through stores in the mall and came home where I searched through website after website for something I'd like. I am sick of looking at silverware. And disappointed that I couldn't find what we wanted.
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Last Thursday I proposed to my card-playing friends that we bring our Thanksgiving leftovers to our game and thereby have an easy supper together. They all agreed. And today, preparing for that supper, I realized that we had no leftovers to contribute save a bit of the cranberry sauce. So I pulled mini quiches out of the freezer along with a peach tart from Trader Joe's. When our first guest arrived, he came with store-bought cole slaw, baked beans, and potato salad because he, too, was out of leftovers. The next set came with store-prepared rotisserie chicken, King Hawaiian bread rolls and a cake - and the last one to show up had another cake. Yup. Three days after Thanksgiving our leftovers were all gone. We started the evening with a good laugh at ourselves.

Bossman and I volunteered at Jamestown Settlement on Friday and Saturday. It was hard to make ourselves get up at 5:30 in the morning on our free days off, but it was worth it. As it happened, we didn't interact with our SCA friends who were there as volunteer costumed interpreters. I was stationed inside the conference room with a vacuum sealing machine while Bossman, being an angel, hefted two large (LARGE!) coolers full of meat and ice from the butchering area to my table and then took the ice-only coolers back to the butchers and the vacuum-sealed packages of meat to the big freezer in the 'kitchen' (two freezers, one fridge, two sinks, and a large shelf storing huge wooden bowls and platters.) We processed two pigs. I was a little grossed out by the meat handling - seeing unwrapped pig chinks on bare ice gave me a twinge or two even though I knew that the temperatures were fine for that. It was in the 20s (f) overnight so there is no chance that the meat would have gone off overnight. The coolers were packed full when we got there at 8am. They were empty when we left at 3:30.

And can I just say that pig guts are - - - yucky. Livers and hearts felt like handling squid fresh from cold water, and the lungs, which I'd never touched before were odd. Just odd. So light in the hand it was almost like handling three or four balloons that had been tied together.

The staff was grateful. They are used to doing the butchering and then having to stay an extra two hours to package things up. 8-7 makes for tired workers the following day. We had everything done so well that there was nothing left for us to do on Saturday beyond washing out the coolers and then running off copies of a dance master's book. And then we went home amid a shower of "thank you"s.

So this non-costumed volunteer work is very satisfying. We did swing through the fort and say hi to our friends as they were manning their stations. Next year we'll remember to find out when they get their lunch break (they got them in shifts of three) so we can take our break at the same time.

And we now have extra T-shirts from the Fort, given to us when we looked at the bloody pig parts and then at our white JS polo shirts and light khaki pants. Saturday we wore jeans.
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