been a while since my last post...
My first post in nearly two years, and it's once more full of bad news. I am getting very sick of people dear to me dying. I heard tonight that Huette, Master Hroar's wife has been taken of life support and has passed from cancer. Tom Scheidt died of injuries from a fall earlier this month. He was half of Fannigan's Isle, and the bag-pipper who piped Folly in at our wedding. A friend for 20+ years, gone with no warning. Worst of all may be Mariasa (Sue Ashgrove), my protegee in the SCA.
She died, for reasons that they still don't know, alone in her house while I was at Pennsic. She had not been feeling well Monday August 8th, and had taken a sick day from work, which for her was very rare. She did not go to work or call in Tuesday, virtually un-heard of, so her work, when they
couldn't reach her by phone, called the police. The police found her dead in the house of "natural causes".
I got the word Wednesday that Shamira was trying to reach me at Pennsic, and played telephone tag with her through-out the day, finally connecting just at the end of Baronial Court that evening. To say it put a damper on the baronial pot-luck is puttong it mildly.
On top of this, at least 4 of my co-workers have lost parents in the last few months, including two in the same week. Only 6 people are on my aisle at work, and 3 of them have had deaths in the family this year.
The other news was that not one but two of our cats died . Cody had been sick, so it wasn't a major surprise he died just before Pennsic, but Puck went down fast and died while I was there. Folly was not over loosing Pippin, our Aussie shepard, earlier this year, and took the cats dying especially hard.
In addition, early this year my older brother's wife, Jane, had surgery to remove a massive tumor from inside her skull, that has left her unable to drive and partially deaf. It was in the covering of the brain, not the brain itself, so could have been much worse, but still...!
Fiadnata shattered her heal bone memorial day weekend, at Kingdom A&S, and is only now starting to walk again with a walker and/or crutches, with a plate and 8 surgical screws holding her foot together. She still can't drive, so since she was allowed to return to work - in July - I have been
picking her up in the morning and driving her to Wright-Patterson AFB where she works. Phil picks her up in the evening to get her home. It adds about 45 minutes to my commute, that already was over an hour each way, but it's pleasent to get to see her every day, and this past week she hasn't been needng the wheel-chair, so I haven't had to host it in and out of the chair anymore.
In the way of good news, Folly's health has improved quite a bit - she is able to walk much more than before, and rarely need the wheelchair to get around. We got a rescue Bengal cat, the day he was to be put down, and were fostering him for a while. Folly has fallen in love with him, and I
enjoy him as well, so for her birthday I agreed that we would adopt him. Folly has been in much better mood since then, so I think it was the right choice.
Pennsic itself was a mix of good and bad - I was in charge of the gaming tent, since the guy who normally does it couldn't be there this year. We opened earlier than ever before, and were very busy the first week, which was very good. It slackened off somewhat second week, even though there
are far more people at Pennsic second week. Of course, there is a lot more going on second week, so people didn't have as much time for games.
I was also the co-ordinator for the wood-working day on Artisan's row, that somehow, after Master Avery got involved became 3 days - 2 first week, and the one I had scheduled Wednesday of war week (No war point battles that day). I had been afraid because shortly before Pennsic only one other person had committed to being there definitely, although many had said they might be there if they could. We had more wood-workers than we had space for - we could have filled all 3 tents each day. I learned a lot, and got to know wood-working Laurels from at least 4 kingdoms.
Harvest Days was a Tournament of Chivalry, and I authorized in two new rapier styles - parry (both rigid and soft) and case (two sword). I was given a kumihimo cord that Mariasa had made, and dedicated the day to her memory.
Mariasa was also very much in memory of everyone at the GryphonShawl sheep-to-shawl demo at the annual Wool Gathering demo the week after Harvest Days. She had been a mainstay of the demo, which is the largest in terms of people seeing us of any the Barony does each year. Something over 15,000 people say us this year, and it seems like I talked to at least half of them. I spent a lot of the time there making diz'es from oyster shells, which considering I didn't know what a diz was until the night before the demo started was ...odd. Not sure how many I made, but most of the ones I made I gave away to people attendig the demo. One person I gave one to actually liked it better than the hard-wood diz they had bought from one of the vendors there. They liked it enough, in fact, to look me up the second day and tell me so, which I thought was nice.
This post is rambling and incoherent enough already, so I will stop now and post it. Hopefully, it will be less than 21 months till my next post, and hopefully it will be more cheerful altogether.