hudebnik

Spent a weird weekend at Northern Regional War Camp.

We had both taken a vacation day for Friday to pack for the event. There was yet another smoke plume from Canadian wildfires, and the air quality was getting bad in NYC, and predicted to get bad in the Hudson Valley, so we weren't sure until 10 AM on Friday that we would go at all, but I pointed out that it was an opportunity to test the brand-new pavilion that arrived mail-order from India a few days ago. So we packed things up and left Friday afternoon. Traffic was bad getting out of NYC, but clear thereafter. We reached the site (one of the numerous ugly but flat county-fair grounds the groups in the Hudson Valley tend to use for events) before dark and started setting up the pavilion.

The pavilion appears to be very well-made: solid cotton canvas, with solid machine seams everywhere, hand-sewn reinforced eyelets, steel D-rings (or I guess Delta-rings) at the shoulders to attach guy ropes, which are provided and apparently made of hemp (!). As advertised, it was shipped without poles, but it did come with steel stakes (in two lengths, presumably the longer ones for guys and the shorter ones for walls). There's no hole at the peak, but rather a reinforced pad, which means you don't need (and can't have) a spike from the center pole or a finial on the outside. We might do some surgery to change that, since the finial on the outside provides not only decoration but an attachment point for external storm guys.

First surprise: we thought it had 16 roof segments, and it actually had 10. Which makes it more difficult to lay out initial stakes before raising the roof, but not impossible.

The pavilion was intended to be set up with vertical perimeter poles: each roof seam has an eyelet near the bottom, and each wall seam an eyelet near the top, and the spike in the top of the perimeter pole goes through both to hold them up and together. However, the pavilion was shipped without any poles at all (as advertised), and we didn't want to add vertical perimeter poles for a variety of reasons (more stuff to transport, and we've never seen any evidence of them in any picture of a tent before the 16th century), so we had come up with a mechanism involving eye-bolts, washers, and S-hooks to hang the walls from the roof edge. Which basically worked, except the washers I had bought turned out to be too small, so they occasionally popped through the eyelets and the wall fell down. So that was a second surprise.

On our way to the site, we had stopped at a craft store to buy wooden ball finials to screw onto the aforementioned eye-bolts to (a) hide their obvious modernity, and (b) protect the fabric from the screw tips, so (c) I could pack up the pavilion with them in place rather than re-attaching them every time. The eye-bolts are 3/16" diameter (i.e. #10 gauge), 24 threads per inch, and the holes in the finials are 3/16" as advertised, but slightly too large to screw on: I can put them on but they won't stay unless I also use glue or wood putty or something. Third surprise.

The center pole we re-used from our oval pavilion (two hardwood wheelbarrow-handles held together by a 2' length of plumbing pipe) was too short for this pavilion (not completely a surprise -- I thought it might be the case), so the walls puddled on the ground (even where they weren't falling off the walls). And it seemed to me that if the center were any higher, and we continued not using vertical perimeter poles (so the guy ropes need to be at the same angle as the roof), the ropes supplied with the pavilion wouldn't be long enough.

With all this, the pavilion clearly wasn't habitable for the night, particularly with two hounds who might panic and run away if anything fell down, so we stayed in a motel.

Saturday morning I got up and went to the nearest hardware store for bigger washers, longer pipe, more rope, etc. I found a very nice hardware store with helpful, knowledgeable staff and almost everything on my list... except the pipe. They had the right length of pipe, but too narrow to fit over the wheelbarrow handles, and they had the right diameter of pipe, but only in 5' lengths, and they didn't have the capability to cut that kind of pipe in-house. So I tried another hardware store, and then a Lowe's, and nobody had the pipe. But at least I had better washers, and spare nuts, and more rope, and good scissors for cutting the rope, and tape for binding the ends of the rope. So I replaced the washers, and the roof is no longer falling down. I replaced one rope, as a test of feasibility, and concluded that we could do it, but (a) the manila rope is really nasty, unlike the lovely apparently-hemp rope that came with the pavilion, and (b) even with longer ropes and a longer center pole, the pavilion will take up too much real estate to be usable at Pennsic.

Which leaves us with three choices for Pennsic: (a) use our old oval pavilion, which is over twenty years old and showing its age; (b) use this one with vertical perimeter poles, which we would have to make; or (c) finish the new oval pavilion.

I have today off from work, so I plan to spend a good deal of it on option (c).

So we're going to an in-person SCA event, "Barleycorn", next weekend. It's a camping event, with most of the activities taking place outdoors, so I'm not too worried about plague, but still... as one of shalmestere's T-shirts says, "People -- ew!"

We were approached some months ago about providing music for court, which includes the stepping down of one set of Viceregents and the investiture of another, which means the Royalty have to be there, which means a number of Royal hangers-on have to be there. I asked some questions about what they wanted where and when, and received no reply until after Pennsic, at which point (with 2-1/2 weeks' notice) I learned that we were not only to provide music for court, but provide background music throughout the day (not a problem, as that's usually what we do for our own enjoyment anyway) and "be in charge of music at Barleycorn... coordinate with other musicians to provide music throughout the event."

Gulp. There's only so much we can do (or feel like doing) on 2-1/2 weeks' notice, and we didn't do anything about this last week because Stuff Happened, but if you're a musician who plans to attend Barleycorn and would be interested in performing something, either at the Queen's Tea, at Court, or in the general background, please contact me or Rufina.

Last night after dinner shalmestere brought a couple of pieces of wool into the dining room and asked me to stand up so she could try something on me. The "pieces of wool" are in fact an old, pale-blue GFD that no longer fits her. She cut off the bodice section and the sleeves, put shoulder seams in the skirt where the waist used to be, put arm-holes in the skirt where the hips used to be, and fit the sleeves back into the new arm-holes to make it a Greenlandish-style gown for me. Part of the bodice section is being recycled as upper-arm gores (since I have more muscular upper arms than shalmestere does); the lower arms, with their buttons and buttonholes intact, seem to work as-is. All terribly efficient, appropriate to "a dying colony on the edge of the civilized world". And it's old, new, borrowed, and blue, all in one item.

Before we leave for Pennsic in a few days, I need to do a bunch of narrow-work: one or two new dress-lacing cords for her, and several hose-points for me. I need to finish attaching a new valence to our extremely-old tent. And we need to pre-cook a bunch of meat-pies for lunches, and tartlets for breakfasts. It would be nice to make some wafers, although that's lower priority. We need to write and copy a program for our concert at Pennsic. And make sure we each have enough undergarments, hosen, shoes, and outer garments for the time we're there. And check instruments for strings, reeds, etc. And pack everything we need, and nothing we don't.

177.0 lbs. (!!!)
breakfast: grapefruit, yogurt, cereal, soy milk, dried cranberries
lunch: bacon, chocolate-chip pancakes
dinner: potato latkes, yogurt, cranberry salsa
dessert: raspberry-chocolate crumble bar, ice cream

In bed about midnight; D. came to bed half an hour later. Not enough sleep.

About 5:30 or 6 PM our old SCA friend Katie came over: she was in the neighborhood visiting family, and stopped by our place to chat and "reset" after dealing with family stuff. It was a pleasant and wide-ranging conversation, but as she was talking to our dogs, Archie started peeing on the floor. He had had a lengthy morning walk in the park, but no afternoon walk yet. Anyway, I hustled him out the door while D. and Katie grabbed paper towels and wiped up the mess. He peed on the sublawn, then was perfectly content to come back inside to sleep on a nest while we talked some more. Around 8 or 8:30 Katie left, D. took the dogs out for another walk, and I went to the grocery for a few staples, then started grating potatoes and onions for latkes. We ate dinner around 9:30, which isn't optimal, but the latkes turned out well.

Our Pavilion Mark 3 has been underway for a good number of years, and we're making another push this year in hopes of having it ready for Pennsic. It's an oval tent -- more precisely, two semicircles and a rectangular midsection. The roof consists of a three-piece cap (rectangle and two pie-slices) going down about 18" from the peak, and a second tier made up of two rectangles (front and back) and two truncated pie-slices, each made up of 8 narrow trapezoids, going down another 6 feet and a bit. The cap was sewn together years ago, and looks good. Eight of the roof-end trapezoids were sewn together years ago, and I finished sewing together the other eight yesterday.

And then I measured them. Each round end of the cap is about 25" in perimeter (at the seam, with a fair amount of flexibility in fitting by moving the seam slightly up or down, since it's a sharp curve). One batch of roof-end trapezoids is 27" along the top, which is fine because there's a seam allowance on each end of it. The other batch is... 36-1/2" along the top. I'm not sure whether I cut these pieces wider, or just did consistently narrower seam allowances, but it's way too wide to match the cap.

The right answer, of course, is to rip out the seams and do them again correctly. Seven flat-felled seams (with two or three rows of stitching per seam, of course), over six feet long each. Yuck.

The not-quite-as-right answer is to give some of the flat-felled seams an extra roll, using up an extra 2W of width (where W is the width of a flat-felled seam). This doesn't require ripping out anything, and requires sewing fewer new seams, since I don't think I need to give all of them an extra roll. But it does mean sewing some extra-heavy flat-felled seams, with six rather than the usual four layers of fabric; I hope my machine and needle are heavy enough for the task.

This will also narrow the bottom of this truncated pie-slice, but fortunately, it's too wide by roughly 10" too, so that's fine.

And then I need to attach the two truncated pie-slices to the rectangles for the midsection of the tent (which may get false seams in the middle first to make them look like period fabric widths), and somehow attach this whole second tier to the cap. Which will be fiddly.

I was expecting, by now, to be en route to, if not at, the site for Musicians' Day, an early-music slumber party for thirty friends and acquaintances in a lodge in the woods, with a day of classes, hours of jamming, good food, a roaring fireplace, and all that stuff.

But when the first attendees arrived at the site (several hours before I could get there), they found another group already in the lodge, swearing that they had it reserved through Sunday evening, and had had it reserved since January. (We also were sure we had it reserved since January.) The organizer of the other group works for the Parks Department, and called the Park Superintendent on his private line to see what was up; he says the Superintendent confirms that he has the lodge reserved and we don't. I haven't talked to the Superintendent myself, nor have I been able to get anybody at the park to answer a phone in several days -- I've spent at least an hour wandering through touch-tone phone trees searching in vain for a human being.

Anyway, the event is cancelled on the shortest of notice. A good number of the attendees are probably still on the road driving to the site, and others may arrive tomorrow morning. #^*%^$^&%$*%^&

I've spent part of the week moving boxes from my old office into my new office, unpacking things, finding places for things.... There are several boxes that never got unpacked from the previous office move (in part because I was moving into a smaller office and simply never found good places to put things, and in part because I realistically didn't need that stuff); I've found places for some of this, and thrown out some of it. Realistically, I'm never going to read that conference proceedings from 2004, or all those back issues of professional journals going back to the 1990's. And I probably don't need those photocopies of articles my grad-school professors assigned me to read: even if I did need to re-read those things or assign them to a student, I'm sure they're all on the Web.

Thursday evening I gave a talk to the Long Island Java Users' Group on the subject "Functional Programming in Java: Why and How". The Long Island Java Users' Group has, officially, 28 members, of whom about 7 were in attendance; I'm told this was the most well-attended meeting yet. So it was an intimate, informal affair: the pizza arrived about 2/3 of the way through my talk. At least three of the seven people in the audience had previously been to one of my Program By Design workshops, so they already had some grounding in functional programming, but may not have given much thought to doing it in what's not traditionally considered a "functional language". The last section of the talk was a preview of Java 1.8, which when it comes out in 2014 will have a number of features to make functional programming easier. Anyway, there were some good questions and good comments.

I spent Friday pre-cooking for an SCA business meeting hosted at our house. Hummus b'tahini, pasta with garlic yogurt sauce, olive tapenade, carrot slaw, roasted broccoli salad, larb gai, prosciutto-and-melon, and grilled lamb. (shalmestere was at work, but she did a lot of the house-cleaning Thursday and Friday, made a batch of comfort-food-from-your-childhood lemon cake, and did most of the plating.) There were maybe twenty people, the food went over well, no last-minute disasters, and even the SCA business discussion was tolerable. And we now have leftovers for weeks, and no room in the fridge or the freezer (which is why I'm not at the farmer's market this morning).

For a very thoughtful take on the current issue and how we got here, please read this post, in which cellio refers to the events of 1994. For those of you who weren't around at the time, let me tell you a story....

In 1994, the SCA's Board of Directors announced abruptly that, due to serious financial shortfalls at the Corporation, paid membership would henceforth be required in order to attend any event. There was a firestorm on the Rialto (an on-line discussion group, back when there could be a single on-line discussion group that included most of the Net-enabled members of the SCA). Some people pointed out that, since most of their groups' events were in public parks, they legally could not exclude anybody from attending such an event, nor could they legally charge admission. Others objected that requiring paid membership to attend even a first event would damage the SCA's reputation for openness, and make it look like a money-making cult (which some in the public already feared it was). Some were offended that the Board had issued this edict without even asking its thousands of members for voluntary help in its hour of need. Some pointed out that the Corporation provides services that benefit everybody at an event, so everybody should be expected to pay for those services.

I and others analyzed the Corporation's published financial reports to see why the Corporation was in such bad shape. Several people (including cellio, if I remember right) requested more-detailed financial reports from the Corporation, were refused, and sued the Board to open its books; the Board chose to spend some of its scant assets fighting this lawsuit rather than opening the books to its own members.

Several of us -- I think it was Arval, Cariadoc, and me -- suggested that instead of requiring membership to attend any event, the Corporation institute a "non-member surcharge" to cover what non-members actually cost the corporation -- which we estimated at perhaps 50c for a typical one-day event. The Board eventually decided to do this, but they set the non-member surcharge at $3-5 instead, clearly intending not merely to cover their expenses but to discourage people from participating without being paid members. Because you know, more paid members means more revenue, which is obviously good, right?

Many people (I think this started with Cariadoc, too) observed a distinction between the Society and the Corporation: the Society runs events and dance practices and calligraphy workshops and fighter practices and things like that, while the Corporation prints membership cards and magazines, pays the expenses of its Board of Directors, buys insurance that covers its Board of Directors and its bank account, keeps track of who's a paid member, hires lawyers to protect its Board of Directors and its bank account, etc. The Society runs on massive amounts of volunteer labor; the Corporation runs on dues checks and the volunteer labor of about a dozen people. It seemed that much of the money we paid in membership dues went to either keep track of membership dues or protect the accounts holding those dues. As the old saying goes, "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy."

And many people, most notably Cariadoc, pointed out that the more assets the Corporation held, the more-attractive a target it would present to lawsuits. There have been a number of lawsuits over the years, but I believe the Schragger case is the most damaging and expensive to date. There will be more, of course. Every time we create a new Official Office In Charge of Fnord-Twergling, we have made a legally binding commitment that fnords will be twergled properly, and the next time a fnord is mis-twergled, the Corporation and all the local officers will be liable again. What if fnord-twergling were handled between individuals instead, with no Corporate imprimatur and therefore no Corporate liability?

Once you've imagined that, let's imagine a step farther. What if there were no SCA, Inc. at all? What if there were no such thing as an SCA membership card? What if you could subscribe to a Kingdom newsletter by writing a check to the Kingdom for the cost of the newsletter -- or not, if you didn't want to subscribe to a Kingdom newsletter? How much would this impede our ability to run events, dance practices, calligraphy workshops, fighter practices, etc? If the Corporation ceased to exist, how much effect would it have on the Society?

We spent yesterday at Beowulf: The Event. No fighting, no dancing, no fencing, just food and a tag-team recitation of Beowulf in its entirety (in modern English translations), although a few bits were also done in Old English to give the audience a feel of how that would sound.

The hall had been prepared to feel (if you didn't look too closely) like a Scandinavian mead-hall during a long winter night. Curtains were hung to block out most of the sunlight from the windows, and the overhead lights were off, so the only light was fire-colored (variously from colored electric lights and Sterno flames), and everyone sat on wooden benches around a long central "firepit". A structure of thick "wooden" beams (actually cardboard or plastic tubes, but painted with wood grain, knotholes, cracks, and runic graffiti) appeared to hold up the ceiling.

The poem started around 1:00 PM and continued, with potty breaks and a dinner break, until around 9:00 PM. Each of twenty or thirty different performers from five different Kingdoms took a segment, each in his or her own idiomatic style, so the event also served as a showcase for the storyteller's art. Most declaimed in prose, walking up and down the hall around the firepit, a few chanted or sang, a few accompanied themselves on frame drums or harps. The audience were encouraged to chime in when something especially dramatic happened, so there were sincere sighs and laments when an innocent victim got eaten, hisses when treachery was done, and cheers and foot-stomping when a good guy triumphed.

shalmestere and I weren't among the scheduled performers, although I had been asked to prepare one section as an "understudy". But we brought a Romanesque harp and a Parma-baptistry citole, and noodled around on the earliest repertoire we could summon to memory whenever there was a break between storytellers -- Cantigas de Santa Maria, Carmina Burana, etc. We, like most of the hundred or so people in attendance, abandoned our usual SCA outfits and wore some attempt at pre-1200 clothing -- in our cases, costumes left over from the St. Nicholas play we put on six years ago.

I don't know that this was the most "medieval moment" or the most enjoyable event I've had in thirty years in the SCA, but it was certainly in the top 5%. Once in a while one is reminded that things like this can be done.

Scene 1: night, a street in a residential neighborhood of New York City, lit by the occasional streetlight. A man and a woman are walking their greyhounds, and they notice a large styrofoam cooler left out on the corner for trash pickup. It seems in good condition, and reasonably clean, so they take it home and adopt it.

Scene 2: some years later, they take the styrofoam cooler to Pennsic, pre-loaded with a 22-lb. block of dry ice. It lasts for about five days, and they conclude that a cooler with dry ice is a Good Idea. If only it weren't so ugly and blatantly modern-looking...

Scene 3: on the way home from Pennsic, they stop at a pizzeria to re-enter modern society and make a list of projects for next Pennsic. One of them is building a wooden chest around the styrofoam cooler.

( construction photos and narrative )