Has it been ten years already? Apparently it has. What started out as the “baby girl whose time had come” has grown into a precocious, pretty, caring girl who today celebrates one full decade among us.

Of course, now we’re coming up on the really fun part of her childhood.

(And by “fun” I mean, of course, “intensely scary and challenging.” Whee!)

Happy Birthday, Erica. You are the sunshine in all our lives.

After months of discussion, planning and apprehension, I was packed off to the wilds of somewhere-in-Washington for a four-day SCA event called Autumn War.

Lilith, Lyse and I arrived after sundown Thursday evening. The event site greeted us by unleashing a swarm of yellowjackets. You see, the place Lil’ had selected for her tent turned out to be right over an underground nest. Oops. She took several stings, including one right on the top of her head… and Lyse took a sting under the fingernail for having to go in after that persistent little critter. Me, I just took one at the waistline. (Turns out I’m not allergic. Who knew?)

The rain and the fact that it was dark calmed the nasty flying things down after a short while and we found a better place to set up camp. Falling asleep to the sound of rain on your tent is an experience I’ve almost missed, from back in the days of going to school in Concrete, WA from a campground while we waited for the house we’d bought to finally be available. But I digress.

Thursday night (minus the bees) and Friday morning (minus the bees) was much fun.

Friday evening, the event really kicked off. You see, most people didn’t specifically take time off from work, so the vast bulk of attendees started streaming in around nightfall Friday. I was sort of looking forward to some rest, so I headed off to the tent at what I guess to be around nine or ten o’clock.

I didn’t get any sleep. You see, apparently there are these drums. And the drums are loud, damned loud. And they’re in use all damned night. Every night. What the hell? And since the clouds had gone away, the temperature dropped way down to around 40 degrees… so by the time the drums stopped at about 4am, it was bitterly damned cold, and I was curled up shivering.

In other words, I didn’t pack nearly enough Warm Stuff To Cover Up With. Thank heavens for my Columbia Sportswear coat liner and that lovely wool cloak I was borrowing.

Since I don’t want to be at this all morning (I have to get to work eventually, sad to say) I’ll try to sum up the rest of the event:

• I never went hungry, and the food was dee-lish.
  
• I’ll probably never play tablero.
  
• I met and shot the breeze with an amazing assortment of clever, fun, naughty-minded folk who I wouldn’t mind hanging out and shooting the breeze with again, any time. Not one of them, I tell you, rubbed me the wrong way… nor was I ever under the impression I was somehow unwelcome. That’s just damned cool.
  
• Massive thank-yous are due to Lyse, Dalemar and Vlad, and some others whose names I don’t remember. They took care of me when I was feeling a bit lost or out of sorts, and they took the time every so often to check in on me to make sure I was doing alright. Thank you!
  
• I figured out what my problem is with hanging out around people who are doing an “accomplished” amount of drinking. No, I’m not going to go into it here, but suffice to say it’s an old childhood trauma that I’m probably not going to be able to shake easily. And honestly, I’m not going to try all that hard. I don’t drink, and if you don’t drink there’s not much to do when you’re hanging out with a group that’s composed entirely of drinkers.
  
• I’ve taken great strides in learning to control one of my other longstanding issues; I no longer run to the other end of the field when something buzzes in my ear. Four solid days surrounded by yellowjackets will do amazing things for your ability to relax and tolerate.

I’m not entirely sure I’ll do another SCA event. The answer to that question is going to depend on conversations yet to be had about things I’m not going to go into in this particular venue. But… for all that the nights were bitterly cold, I only accumulated four hours’ sleep between Friday morning and Sunday evening, the bees, and the other issues… I still managed to have a good time now and then. It wasn’t all good, but it wasn’t all bad.

Let me describe a nearly perfect dining day to you.

Morning: Bowl of chocolatey cold cereal, such as Cocoa Puffs. (This is the “nearly” perfect part. Ordinarily I’d prefer a hot cereal, like cream o’ wheat, with milk and brown sugar. Yum!)

Lunchtime: Three-egg bacon and cheese omelette, with hash browns on the side and a couple slices of toast with jam. (Sometimes I’ll have ham instead of bacon. Cheese, however, is non-optional!)

Dinner: French toast with butter, peanut butter and maple syrup. (Bacon and/or sausage links on the side make it that much more perfecter!)

I’ll grant you that a dietician would heartily (pun intended) disagree with this sort of menu. What can I say? I’m all about the comfort foods and there’s nothing more comforting than a nice breakfast.

Thanks to Lyse for treating me to a nifty lunch, and thanks to Wendi for having the bright idea of dining on french toast this evening. Mmmmm.

Two years ago on this date my paternal grandmother, Hjordis Kerezman, passed away. She was a smart, caring, capable woman who survived her husband by two decades… primarily by getting out of New York, I suspect. She never knew what happened that morning in her former city of residence, and I count that as a blessing.

While the rest of America remembers events of greater import, I’ll be over here remembering what a neat lady my Grandma Hjordis was. I leave it to better minds than mine to decide if that makes me unpatriotic or what…

As I write this, Mari should be already done with surgery. There’s nothing quite like remembering that one of your closest, dearest friends just went under the knife to put your whiney, sorry ass firmly in its place.

So for a few minutes I’m going to ignore my pain, instead hoping that hers is extremely short-lived and that she’s back up and kicking butt in no time flat.

Go forth and show the love, folks.

UPDATE: Oh yeah:

Intellectual Orgy

It’s all a blur in my mind today, but I know I had a good time this weekend. I had several good times, really. Let’s set the Way-Back Machine, Sherman, and I’ll try to cover the highlights of the days:

Thursday: (Yes, Thursday. It’s my weekend, I’ll start it whenever I damned well please. So there.) Dinner date with Lilith. Lots of conversation both mundane and meaningful. Teasing, flirting, all that good stuff.

Friday: Work closed down early, so I took off to the Greyhound station to help Hanson-Kun greet Kylanath and ayagi. (Side note – I accidentally blew off Dalemar for this. Bad ducky.) Ended up dining… correction, nibbling fondue and waiting and then dining… at Gustav’s. On Sandy, not the other one. (Another side note – Hanson-Kun and Kylanath both have pretty good write-ups for the weekend.)

Saturday: Up way way too damned early so I could make backup tapes on the AS/400 in time to head downtown to Powell’s and meet up with Lance and Isaac. Completely on a whim I called up Lil’, who coincidentally also had the same destination planned at a convenient time. So I was saved the trouble of waiting for a bus, and granted the boon of a bit of Lilith’s company before the major part of my weekend began. She teased me mercilessly, but she does that anyway. I just keep telling myself it’s part of her charm…

After mistaking the coffee room for the magazine room, I finally met up with Isaac and then Lance. We headed to the gathering place by way of Just Be Toys (because you can’t get too many opportunities to drool over imported toy-like goodness). We learned exactly why Lance owns a Dodge Ram instead of a ground-hugging sedan.

The afternoon and evening were spent eating, drinking (no, not that kind of drinking), talking and playing console games. By which I mean Soul Calibur 2. Exclusively. As always, Raphael is my main man. I successfully defended myself against all comers Saturday, until I finally got tired of stabbing controller buttons with my thumb. Besides, a guy’s gotta sleep some time, right?

Sunday: After getting almost no sleep (so much for that idea), we piled into vehicles to journey coastward in search of a campground suitable for fine picnic dining. We took the straight shot out Hwy 26 and found ourselves at Ecola State Park. (“Eeeee-co-laaaaa!”) We took the left fork and enjoyed the view from the promontory bluff. There’s nothing quite like seeing puffy clouds scudding by mere dozens of feet overhead. It was that kind of day at the Oregon coast, friends.

Pictures were snapped, sandwiches ingested, and a few brave souls adventured down to the (barely) available beach. I wasn’t in the right shoes for such activity, sad to say. So much for getting my feet wet, eh?

My bright idea for getting some beach time for all of us involved taking that right fork. We tried, but in vain. We don’t know why the gentleman with the STOP sign and the bright orange vest was detaining vehicles along that road but we didn’t wait the half-hour it would’ve required to satisfy our collective curiosity. Oh well. We decided to pack it in and head homeward-ish.

Which would’ve been more fun but for the fact that Hwy 101 was being partially detoured through “downtown” Cannon Beach. On a Sunday afternoon. On Labor Day Weekend. Yes, you can imagine the snail’s-pace action. At one point I looked out the right-side passenger window wondering who would be walking alongside our car, only to realize it was Isaac, who’d been riding in Lance’s truck but decided to amuse himself for a minute or two. Hilarity ensued as he then jogged across the street to go grocery shopping and was almost lost to us since traffic started moving faster at the same time.

Once back on the highways I started nodding off again. Stupid lack of sleep. And I can’t really sleep in a moving vehicle or I get dangerously motion-sick. Nodding off was bad enough as it is. The trip back wasn’t all bad, of course, and the detour to Fry’s was quite welcome.

Mind you, not that I should be allowed in that building at any time. I’m very good about only buying games that are at least a year old and have been drastically marked down. No way am I spending upwards of $40 on computer games. For $20 I picked up the Baldur’s Gate 2 set (original and expansion), which oddly enough was placed just down the aisle from a $20 copy of just the original game. Go figure.

That night saw a mild resurgence of Soul Calibur 2 gaming, but generally we just all wanted to go to sleep. Those grandiose plans of being on the road by seven o’clock didn’t pan out very well, though. Heh.

Monday: We all peeled ourselves off the floors and chairs and prepared to give Hanson-Kun his house back, more or less the way we found it. Wendi drove out and brought me home so I could mind the rugrats as she did a gig. I took the opportunity to introduce the kids to Baldur’s Gate 2, which (of course) Erica mastered and surpassed the boys at after a mere hour of watching how I played it. Damn but that girl’s smart. Her big brother’s damned smart too, but sometimes Erica really surprises me. I did train Alex on how to install the game, which he did all by himself on the “little computer” and he’ll be doing for his mom’s computer at some point soon.

One last hurrah for my weekend was a surprise “lunch dinner thing” with Lilith and Dalemar. A couple of hours with those two over the fine dining available at My Father’s Place is the perfect way to wind up a mini-vacation, I’ll tell the world. And I even got some fun reading material out of it. (My thoughts on the Spider Robinson “Callahan’s Place” fare will appear in a later entry, mark my words.)

And that about covers it. I’m sure there are bits and pieces of anecdotal fun that I’m forgetting, and I may just make silly little entries out of them in the days to come.

So, how was your weekend?