It's not the pace of life that kills you...

[triadruid]

...but it might make you stumble from time to time.

Another action-packed weekend for E3. Friday night there was a meeting for God Auction which got several weeks' worth of information covered, which is good because it's several weeks' closer than I had really envisioned. And Apollo is already starting to download/knock on the mental doors...yeesh. He's playing to win, that part is for certain.

Then home to write up a bit of report and play some NWN (first time I'd managed that successfully in months), then bed at around 1am and business meeting Saturday morning at 9:30. Thank all the little gods of bureaucracy that we got our consensus process sorted out, because the agenda was FULL and the rest of the day no less so. We got out of there on time, though, and went to grab lunch. Then the decision-making started; originally we were going to go to the KC Highland Games and then Sunday morning I was going to drop by Lilies War and look for a bow. Then it sounded cleverer for all three of us to go to Lilies, and then catch the end of the Games (and the concert, importantly) on the way back south. This seemed reasonable, not least because we'd already missed much of the early "games" due to other activities already mentioned. Smithville Lake continues to be approx. 2 miles beyond "Are you sure we didn't miss our turn?", and not all vendors had set up yet, but the big bowyer did and I picked up a very nice white recurve that all three of us can draw effectively. Didn't pick up arrows there, as the SCA uses only wooden arrows and they were >pricey<, even without points. Pictures later, if I can remember to do so. One salient element that we didn't notice until later is that the bow (Italian-made) has "Victory" on it in blue lettering along the top arm; we toyed with the idea of putting the same in Greek on the bottom arm, but that would essentially make it look like a Nike™ product. :P

So onward, I'm carrying around this fool bow the rest of the day because a) it's shiny and b) the car is in the other direction. We've already paid for the entire war by now, so we decide to walk around a bit longer. We come around a corner, and kittenpants wonders if we'll manage to see her ex-stepfather, whose wife was staffing the Troll gate. "She said he was parking across from the battlefield", she comments, which doesn't exactly narrow it down much (maybe 1/3 of the acres-wide campsite). To which I reply, "Well, that'd be around here somewhere... unless that's the back of T's head right there." Sure enough, that great Irish melon was indicative of family, and we got to hang out with him for a couple of hours, in which time he managed to embarass himself worthily by forgetting featherynscale's name, and a few other tidbits. He did have water for us though, which was most excellent of him. We then wander through the rest of the merchanting area (it's Saturday and classes haven't really started, and we apparently just missed a tournament called "Olga/Helga Ball"), fail to find anything compelling (including at Calontir Trim, which was my other stated reason for going), until featherynscale smells amber and takes a dogleg left. She managed to wrangle a nice dealer's rate on some lovely pieces from a land pirate there, so I don't think anyone found the day a complete loss.

Day? I misspoke; at this point it's only 6-something. Did you forget we were headed to the Games? So we change in the parking lot (not really needing/wanting to wear so many period-costume layers at the Games, and no one but me is wearing Scottish garb anyway), and head down to Riverside. Note, we have not been to the Games since they were out in Wyandotte County Fairgrounds, having missed them the last several years for various reasons, and we have no real conception of where "Riverside Park, by the Argosy Casino" is. This becomes evident about the sixth time we crisscross that square mile of northern KC Metro, trying different road configurations searching in vain for a sign, advertisement, the sound of pipes, something... just about the time we give up, our final attempt opens the fairy mound and we discover the park tucked away behind the casino. Very clever; I can only guess that the casino donated the land to the city of Riverside, making the only real access roads pass it by. This becomes important later.

If we hadn't had passes already, I'm sure we'd have quit looking much earlier, and perhaps we should have. It's now about 8pm and the food court is deserted/closing, and more importantly bereft of meat pies. Scotch eggs, funnel cakes, or haggis are your options. We haven't eaten since before Lilies, but that is not long enough to make these seem like a good nutritious dinner. So we wander the shopping area for a bit, visit with some merchants we know, and eventually arm-twist featherynscale into letting kittenpants buy her the pouch she's admiring. The Elders concert starts at 9 and runs for two hours, so we dash off-site to find something to eat that's approximately in our dietary field of vision, and settle on a place called Crazy Olives inside the Argosy. Casinos are still weird, by the way; this one is a bit like Islands of Adventure crossed with Atlantic City, and somewhere in the superstructure there's a waterwheel and what may actually be a real-live riverboat, though I doubt it. Dinner was actually tasty for the most part, but VERY slow and we settle our check about 10:30pm. Well hell. So home we go, thwarted in our plans for pipes, but at least we can go drink some water and sleep before tomorrow.

Because the weekend's not over yet. Sunday morning brings an unholy 9am meeting for kittenpants, a sore throat and two attempts at sleeping in two different beds for me, and a crushing load of laundry and a missing set of keys for featherynscale. This all eventually seems to work out to our satisfaction, and KP takes a nap while FNS and I go look for fabric/shoes before setting up for Gaia's service. No luck on either of those tasks, particularly, but the service goes off without a hitch, and we got to have an impromptu "how-many-people-does-it-take-to-tighten-a-55-gallon-drum-drum" clinic. The answer is 3, if you were wondering; many thanks (and almost-happy-birthday!) to stregalunae for engineering that, by the way. The service itself (a discussion forum called Soapbox Sunday) was neither as boring or as acrimonious as I feared, and actually seemed to go well and inform our delegates about the community's position on some matters before they go to GA. Wonders may never cease... cleanup was minimal, with the exception of the Mystery of the Sliding Stacking Chairs, and dinner was relatively quiet and uneventful at Bo Ling's (we opted not to go to the group afters, as we were all a bit Done with the World at that point). The option of going out to a movie was floated, but no one could remember what was out that we wanted to see, and we were in two cars already, so we went home and watched The Wicker Man instead (the original, of course). featherynscale had never seen it, and much discussion afterward of "What do you suppose the actual target audience of that was?" ensued. Eventually bed, hampered on my part by sleeping in that morning, but eventual sleep and morning and now work.

And that's what I did on my summer vacation. The End. (except, of course, that this is only one weekend, and not even one of the three planned summer vacations)

Comments

[zylch.livejournal.com]

You could always learn to make your own arrows, and then sell them at exhorbitant prices. (The trick is to put the heavy bit at the front. Everything else is gravy.) Surely there's some nice ash somewhere out in the woods?

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Sure, sis, I'll get right on that, as soon as you and your ExArch degree come show me how. ;)