We leave for Disney in four days. Wow. It hasn't even sunk into my brain yet. I'm not even anticipating it. It's just not on my radar. Tommy keeps asking me if I'm excited yet, but I have to tell him no, and he gets disappointed. I'll be excited when I'm on the plane; then it will be real. In the meantime, I have to put away a bunch of laundry, clean the house (because I hate nothing more than coming back from vacation to a dirty house), pack, and get cracking on all my garb sewing. I'd like to get as much of it done as possible before we leave.
To-do before Saturday night:
Work another twenty hours.
Sweep, mop and tidy the laundry room.
Vacuum the studio and organize my piles of fabric, putting away what won't be used in my upcoming projects.
Vacuum the fest/dog room.
Vacuum, tidy and dust the front room (a chore complicated by this being where Tommy is "staging" his packing.)
Sweep off and tidy the porch.
Put out food for the hummingbirds.
Clean the trash off the frontage and start raking the path to the offering stream.
Get my windshield replaced (fucking truckers!)
Scrub the bathroom.
Vacuum, dust and tidy the bedroom.
Clean the rat cage, severely.
Clean the mouse cage.
Sweep, mop, dust and tidy the office.
IWG Local #74 meeting.
Laia's Pirate Party.
Put away several loads of laundry.
Do another load of laundry so I can pick what I want to pack from all my clothes.
And oh, yeah, pack.
To-Do before Faire Begins:
The entire above list.
Spend five days at Disney!
Work 71 hours.
More house cleaning.
Sew Lindsay's chemise.
Sew my new shirt.
Sew 2 pirate coats.
Sew two more chemises.
Tommy wants a new shirt.
Mink oil/saddle soap both my leather bodices.
Mink oil/saddle soap Tommy's pirate boots.
Mink oil/saddle soap the currently unknown contents of the bottom drawer in the garb trunk.
Mink oil/saddle soap the currently unknown contents in the other half of the faire trunk.
Mink oil/saddle soap anything else I might have managed to miss.
Put Tommy's hat back together.
Possibly build/ghetto rig an organizer for the fest room closet.
I think I'll send those lists to Tommy and see what he can do about helping with them. I'm sewing for him, least he can do is a bit of mopping!
It is seriously freakin' cold in this building! I stood under the vent for a minute, but that was an exercise in futility; plenty of air coming out, but none of it hot. Despite the thermostat being set as warm as it will go. I'm not sure this building actually has heat. I'm wearing my wool scarf as a shawl and a fleece jacket from lost and found as a lap blanket, which a least makes today more tolerable that yesterday.
Pattern and fabric cutting did not go too horribly yesterday, despite Tommy's incessant whining that he'd rather be shot at. We got both out patterns cut out and all the pieces of interlining. These patterns have a new type of sleeve I've never seen before and some different construction techniques, so this is going to be interesting.
And as promised, pictures! As well as pictures of the pets, since I finally did have my camera out and was home and conscious for more than five minutes. (John Broadfoot, Tommy says, "shut up, now!" In only the most loving way, of course!) Also, my fellow Dr. Who fans can click on the cut at the bottom for an un-retouched photo of the cat with appropriate macro text. I knew what it had to say as soon as I saw it on my camera screen!
Tommy concentrates very hard on his cutting. He really was not terribly pleased by the whole process.
Gabriel's headshot. Gabriel is the shorter, stockier, louder of the two. He also has some aggression issues. No biting or snapping, he just growls at everything. He reminds me of a grumbling old man.
This is Azrael. He sits on the sofa like that all the time. Yes, that's a slightly over-sized sofa he's on. They are that big. He's taller, skinnier and more cowardly than Gabriel. He once ran away from a butterfly that landed on his nose, and another time he fainted when he walked around the corner of the house and saw one of the neighbors horses that had gotten loose and was in our yard.
This is Gabriel's preferred way of sitting on the sofa. I swear, he looks like he should have a beer. Again, yes, they are that big.
I just got back from my (very rare) lunch hour. I walked down to the park with my lunch bag, a book in the pocket of my kilt and my camera in the other pocket. It was a perfect temperature, slightly cool in the shade, slightly warm in the sun and CROWDED! Lost of families biking with kids on training wheels, couples rollerblading, people walking their dogs. I saw one couple on a tandem bike pulling twins in a trailer and two guys with parrots. Lots of skateboarders, and one field was full of about two dozen people doing poi. There were a lot of people with cameras out, too.
I was finishing my walk around the lake, when a familiar sound drifted, oh so faintly, to my ear. It was a tin whistle, or recorder, or flute, and it was coming from the other side of the lake. So, I started another lap around, and found these guys:
In all honesty, they weren't very good together. I think the guitar guy started on his own, and the recorder guy found him and joined in. But they were enthusiastic and having a blast, and that's pretty much all you need to get me to like you. I had a brief chat with them, and the guitar guy asked me to e-mail him the pictures I had taken. That's all I had time for before I had to go back to work.
I almost didn't bother to track down the sound, but I'm glad I did. Live music outside, even of the bad variety, is rare enough to be worth a little trouble to find. Yeah, I was a minute or two late back from my lunch break, but my co-worker didn't mind, and I had a tiny adventure, following my ears to the goal.
So, it was a little while ago, now, but in response to this post Paul asked:
Ok Jess .. I know the Faire is a big part of your life and social community, but I would like to know how/when/why you got involved? And what Faire truly means to you?
Most Rennies I know have unanimously discovered that it is almost impossible to explain faire to those who don't "get it." But, I will endeavor my best.
I attended my first Renaissance Festival when I was nine. My family had just moved to the Minneapolis area, heard about it, and my folks thought it would be a fun and educational outing for the kids. I don't remember much about it, though there is a picture, somewhere out there, of me in a truly regrettable sweater, having a pillow fight, while balanced on a log, with a little black girl of about my age. We're both grinning like idiots.
We went back once a year, every year, until we moved to Charlotte, when I was 14. As I was a little more independent than at age nine, and had friends with cars, I realized, Hey, I really dig this, and it runs for more than one weekend. I can go more than once a year! After that, I would go once a year with my folks and then a few times with my friends from high school and later college. Somewhere in this time period I began my slow metamorphosis from ‘Dane (short for Mundane, for those not in the know) into Rennie. It roughly paralleled my transition from shy introvert to, well, not exuberant extrovert, but at least confidently and pleasantly insane.
I started to make friends with people working at the festival. I started to "play" back. I started to be a remembered and familiar face to acts (Miguel still pouts if he doesn't get his running flinging hugs, and Zilch hates to be reminded that the busty woman he occasionally makes fun of in his act has been seeing him perform since she was nine!) I began to make and wear garb, (it's not a costume, it's garb!) some truly ignorant first attempts, which, thank Goddess, there are very few extant pictures of.
A few months after I turned 18, I joined the International Wenches Guild and suddenly had a whole cadre of fabulous women, Local 96, who shared in and encouraged my growing affection for this strange world and introduced me to new people, places and ideas.
Over the years, my garb and accessories have, thankfully, improved in quality, one friendship has grown into another (six degrees of separation in the Rennie world is more like three degrees) and how I "play" has changed, too. I work occasionally, hawking pottery, making emergency repairs to performers garb, carrying messages or supplies, or filling in at friend's booths so they can take a break, but for the most part, I still just go to play. I flirt with the guys (or the girls, for that matter). I lovingly heckle my favorite performers (I'm looking at you, Dolph, Becky and Rivka!) I window shop. I watch new shows. I say lines along with old shows. I accost or get accosted by characters in the lane. Sometime I plop down in a shady patch of grass and watch people pass by or take a nap. I flirt some more. I gossip. I pose for pictures. I hang out in the pub and enjoy the music and camaraderie. I love being able to play.
So that covers the history. What Faire means to me? It means a ton of things. It means the opportunity to dress up in fun, silly, beautiful clothes. It's a chance to give in and indulge in a little harmless fantasy. It means I can lace up a bodice and ooze undeniable sex appeal but still be loud, silly, flirty, catty, innocent, anything I want to be, and no one tries to deny me the right to be anything and everything I want, not even with a tacit, disapproving look. It's a chance to indulge in my love of history the way I like history, not dates and places, but people's lives. It means a chance to, by being a girl and a pirate, inspire some little girl to be anything she wants to be (true tale). It means freedom to play and have fun in a way children do all the time and most adults have lost. Every unbearably hot day, every time it snows, every superbly beautiful day and every drenching downpour is another shared experience with my friends. We were all there, enduring it together. More important than anything, though, Faire means a place where I know I am loved by dozens of amazing, fabulous, beautiful, breathtakingly talented people of all ages, genders and sizes for precisely who I am, and also who I want to be, and I get to love them back. For at least those eight week, it means a community in the meaning of the word that has mostly been lost in the modern age of internet and interstates. We know each other. If I have an emotional breakdown there are people who will pick me up, let me cry on them, get me a drink, and ask only the right questions. If a friend passes out from heat exhaustion there are people around who will instantly loosen her bodice, cool her face and hands with water and remind each other not to put ice on her neck, because that will put her into shock. Before even calling for the medics.
In the end, Faire means belonging, even with all my eccentricities and idiosyncrasies. Even though it's only 17 days of the year, Faire means Home.
First, the reasons I don't typically discuss politics in my blog: I don't care about politics. I care about issues, events, and people. This amorphous concept we call politics more or less doesn't exist for me. I will act specific events and write representatives about a million and one things, all the time. But I don't worry too much about things that don't affect me or those I love. Let the people it affects worry about it, and I'll worry about my stuff, and, in the end, everything will get covered.
I suppose in that way I'm rather a bit of an anarchist. Ultimate freedom comes with ultimate responsibility, however, and most people aren't willing to take that much responsibility for their own existences or that much responsibility for those they care about and their community. Which really bums out those of us who are willing to. I just want to be left the fuck alone by the government.
So, taking all that into account, I find it VERY difficult to ever pick a representative of my views, because, really, no one does. It's always a compromise, to me. The answer to the compromise, this time around, is Barak Obama, but it's a small margin of difference between him and Hillary Clinton. I don't much care what they tell reporters and voters, I don't care who they're married to, what their religion is, what color they are, what gender, or what part of the country they come from. I can learn everything I need to know by looking at their voting histories.
Looking over their voting histories, they've voted almost identically on most of the issues I care about. Most of the reason I've gone for Obama is that Clinton voted for a few things that piss me the hell off. She voted for the Patriot Act. She voted to go to war (whatever her excuse, she still did it). She keeps voting for that damn stupid Mexico-US fence. And she's voted to give funding to that freaky REAL ID act, which scares the pants off of me.
The only big sticking point I've got with Obama is that he's against gay marriage (though he supports civil unions, so he's not totally on my bad side). Hillary voted against an amendment banning gay marriage, which is a REALLY hot topic for me. But, he also voted against the war, he's voted against raising the ceiling for the national deficit, and he's willing to allow exploration of the medical marijuana issue. He seems to be open to possibilities and flexible solutions and we sure could use that right now.
Oh, and the other reason I don't discuss politics in my blog? Is that I HATE people who get all pissed and attack me (or anyone else for that matter), just because my well informed, thought out opinions are different than theirs. The amount of vile, vicious things that are said by otherwise kind and sane people hurts my heart more than anything Shrub has ever done. *thinks* Well, almost. And that's always what discussing politics leads to. So, I'm gonna don the asbestos suit and hide behind a rock, now.
