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the weekend before last
Aug. 12th, 2021 08:14 pmStarted for me on Monday of that week, ( with trying to solve pre-event car problems )
However, I still had a lot of work to do for the “skattjakt” (treasure-hunt) for the event, so I decided that actually fixing the car was tomorrow’s problem, and went to the computer and, by 21:30 I had finished creating the last of the posters to be printed and put them in the google drive for one of the others on the autocrat team to print Wednesday during the day.
Wednesday morning ( I managed a temporary solution for the car )
Then I did the pre-event grocery shopping, followed by a quick nap, then all of the last-minute pre-event cooking and loaded the car. At 19:00 I picked up my friend Villiam, who had the tent for Phire, the jester group from the university, and we went off to Grundet, our event site (and Frostheim’s “summer home”—were we store our stuff, hold archery and fighter practice, etc.). Baron Egil was already there—he had spent the day setting up the list field, barriers to keep people off the archery range, and much more.
We put the Phire tent into storage, and then Villiam helped me set up my sunshade and pavilion. We finished just Villiam needed to catch the bus home, but just then Kheldor arrived, so I had his help weaving the rope for the rope bed (which is always easier with two people) and other camp-set up chores. Then it was time for evening yoga and a good night’s sleep.
Thursday, I spent the day laminating the posters for the skattjakt (I am so grateful that the Scouts, with whom we share Grundet, had an A3 laminator we could use—so much better results than I would have gotten with the “book plastic” contact paper I had bought. When that was done the rest of the day was spent working on getting the camp set up and ready for Friday’s visitors, and by early evening most of the other pavilions were up, and I was enjoying my first SCA camping event since Skellefteå’s Medeltidsdager in July of 2019. Oh, how I have missed it! The people, the pavilions, the camp fire, everything. It was perfect.
I managed to get to sleep around midnight, and got up bright and early Friday morning to actually set up the posters for the skattjakt I had laminated the day before, and help with other last-minute preparations. Luckily, we still had plenty of scrap wood left from the working weekend where we dismantled part of a damaged building a few weeks before, so it was easy to make frames for the posters. Everything was done by the 10:00 morning meeting.
The weather forecast for the weekend had threatened rain, and, indeed, it was raining a little bit during the morning meeting. However, Baron Egil announced during the meeting that he had made arrangements that it would stop by 11:00 when our gates opened, and not come back for the rest of the weekend. I don’t know how he managed to pull it off, but he was correct. It did, indeed, stop as the gates opened, and the rest of the day we had nice cloud cover keeping it from being too hot, but no rain.
This being a pandemic year we did not do anywhere near as much pre-event advertising as normally goes into our Medeltidsdagarna, because the current restrictions on gathering translate to not more than 600 people on the island at once, so that the density doesn’t get to be too much. Yes, most of us had already received at least our first dose of vaccine, but we still want to take precautions.
Likewise, this year we didn’t let the visitors try the archery or engage in any other activities which would mean everyone touching the same objects. Indeed, we came up with the skattjakt as an excuse to make informational signs about our various activities so that people could read for themselves, rather than gathering close to converse. This seemed to work fairly well.
I did, however, realize that I had made the skattjakt a little more challenging than I had intended. While the main text on the posters was TimesNewRoman (because it is nice and clear and easy to read, like a book), the titles, which contained one red letter per sign that needed to be collected to figure out the sentence, was in an Old English calligraphy font. One of the signs, on soapstone carving (Hugga sten was located in my sunshade (next to my soapstone carving project in progress), and I saw a small child come up on her own, look at the sign, get a very distressed look on her face, look around for her adults, who were far away, and then look at me and say (in Swedish) “what does that say?” I read it out loud to her, she looked relived, said “H!”, wrote on her form, and happily ran off. That was when I realized that the capital H in that font doesn’t really look very much like an H… oops.
For me one of the biggest highlights of the weekend was having musicians on site. I had invited my friends Birger and Siv of the Luleå Nyckelharpa group, and they came and spent Friday in costume with us, playing music on their Nyckelharpas. It was the first time I had seen them, or heard their lovely music, since the last nyckelharpa night at their home before the pandemic, and it was so amazing to see and hear them again! Unfortunately for our event, but good for them, there was another music gathering to which they had been invited for Saturday, so we only got to keep them for the one day, but I am so glad that they came.
I spent the day sometimes carving stone, sometimes working on sewing, sometimes talking to our visitors, and just generally enjoying the demo. We had a steady stream of visitors, but never huge crowds, so it felt perfect. Just before gate closing Kheldor, Fimbul, and I did a bit of acroyoga, which is always fun. We played an acroyoga game wherein the flyer would balance on a base, and then would transition to the other base and a new acroyoga pose. This can be quite challenging, especially if no one has any quick ideas of “where can you go from there”, and thus the flyer might have to stay in a pose for longer than typical while we try to think of something. Needless to say, while we often succeeded in the transfer to a new base and new pose, sometimes we fell, but that was fun, too. I felt quite sorry for Kheldor when Kakwkylla brought her dog into range to come over and lick his face when I was balancing on both his hands and his feet, and he couldn’t do anything to push the dog away. I was also quite impressed that he managed not to drop me, despite laughing through the dog kisses.
My step counting app tells me that on Friday I set a record number of steps (since obtaining the phone in November), and I was glad to soak in the shire hot tub to ease my tired leg muscles. In fact, I did my yoga stretches for the day in the tub!
Saturday morning we got to sleep in a little, since everything was already set up and ready, but morning meeting still wasn’t till 10:00, and the gates still didn’t open to the public till 11:00. We had another wonderful day, without rain (Baron Egil is clearly good with weather), and one family, which I think will be joining Frostheim, came back and spent a second day with us, taking the sword fighting class, watching everything, and getting into conversations with most of our members. I really hope to see them again.
When site closed at 16:00 we had a short meeting to thank everyone for their help and share the results—if I remember correctly, we had around 300 visitors over the course of the weekend, which was a very good number for a late-pandemic demo. Then Baron Egil explained that rain was expected for Sunday morning, and thus he would like it if we could all help and take down the Frostheim pavilion and a few other things already now.
I started by taking down the posters for the skattjakt. By the time I had all of them down the others had already taken down the Frostheim tent, so I decided to drop my sunshade. As I worked on that I thought about how heavy my pavilion is, with its one-piece wall and roof construction, and its heavy cotton canvas. And I thought about how challenging it can be to hang it, wet, in the rafters of the shed to dry. And I thought about the rain Baron Egil had said was coming. And I realised that he had done a great job changing the weather for the event itself, and that it was my turn to do something.
Therefore, I decided I would drop my tent already on Saturday night and sleep at home. This would pretty much guarantee that it wouldn’t rain after all on Sunday morning, and thus everyone else would be able to pack their tents dry the next day. It worked.
I had planned to stay on site for some hours after packing the pavilion and loading the car. However, while I worked on that some gnats found me, and decided to have a bit of a snack on my flesh. I don’t like them, but I can cope with mosquito bites. They itch for 1 to 5 minutes, and then I don’t notice them anymore. Gnats, on the other hand, not only leave a small hole where they removed some flesh, but my body reacts to them by swelling up in that area and itching terribly, and even hurting a little, for several days. The itch and pain are the worst for the first couple of hours, but stays annoying for a really long time. As long as I was busy packing I could kinda ignore the discomfort, but as soon as I tried sitting down and relaxing with people all I could think about was all of those bites, and how much they itched/were uncomfortable.
Therefore, I said goodnight to the small group who had been around that table just then, and went straight home, without even taking the time to say goodbye to any of my other friends on site. I felt bad about that, but, gnat bites! However, the upside to it all was that, to avoid thinking about the bites, I not only unloaded the car, but I also put away almost everything (only the things in the chests waited till the next day, well, except for the ice chest, of course, that went straight into the fridge).
In hindsight I can actually recommend leaving site at 21:00 on Saturday, even though one misses an entire evening of event—you see, at that hour it is still light enough (this far north) to see to unload the car, but it isn’t hot, and the sun, being just below the horizon, doesn’t cause sun burns. Much nicer than getting home at 13:00 on a hot, sunny day.
Ok, who am I kidding? Of course, it would have been even better to not have been bitten by gnats, and to have stayed on site and enjoyed one more night of the event. I am already looking forward to the next one.
PS. On Sunday Kheldor ground down the high points of the corners on the break housing for my front tires, and now my summer tires fit the car, and I can drive it again.
PPS. If you want to read a Swedish summary of the event, and see some amazing photos from it, Kheldor wrote one for the Frostheim web page. Go check it out.
However, I still had a lot of work to do for the “skattjakt” (treasure-hunt) for the event, so I decided that actually fixing the car was tomorrow’s problem, and went to the computer and, by 21:30 I had finished creating the last of the posters to be printed and put them in the google drive for one of the others on the autocrat team to print Wednesday during the day.
Wednesday morning ( I managed a temporary solution for the car )
Then I did the pre-event grocery shopping, followed by a quick nap, then all of the last-minute pre-event cooking and loaded the car. At 19:00 I picked up my friend Villiam, who had the tent for Phire, the jester group from the university, and we went off to Grundet, our event site (and Frostheim’s “summer home”—were we store our stuff, hold archery and fighter practice, etc.). Baron Egil was already there—he had spent the day setting up the list field, barriers to keep people off the archery range, and much more.
We put the Phire tent into storage, and then Villiam helped me set up my sunshade and pavilion. We finished just Villiam needed to catch the bus home, but just then Kheldor arrived, so I had his help weaving the rope for the rope bed (which is always easier with two people) and other camp-set up chores. Then it was time for evening yoga and a good night’s sleep.
Thursday, I spent the day laminating the posters for the skattjakt (I am so grateful that the Scouts, with whom we share Grundet, had an A3 laminator we could use—so much better results than I would have gotten with the “book plastic” contact paper I had bought. When that was done the rest of the day was spent working on getting the camp set up and ready for Friday’s visitors, and by early evening most of the other pavilions were up, and I was enjoying my first SCA camping event since Skellefteå’s Medeltidsdager in July of 2019. Oh, how I have missed it! The people, the pavilions, the camp fire, everything. It was perfect.
I managed to get to sleep around midnight, and got up bright and early Friday morning to actually set up the posters for the skattjakt I had laminated the day before, and help with other last-minute preparations. Luckily, we still had plenty of scrap wood left from the working weekend where we dismantled part of a damaged building a few weeks before, so it was easy to make frames for the posters. Everything was done by the 10:00 morning meeting.
The weather forecast for the weekend had threatened rain, and, indeed, it was raining a little bit during the morning meeting. However, Baron Egil announced during the meeting that he had made arrangements that it would stop by 11:00 when our gates opened, and not come back for the rest of the weekend. I don’t know how he managed to pull it off, but he was correct. It did, indeed, stop as the gates opened, and the rest of the day we had nice cloud cover keeping it from being too hot, but no rain.
This being a pandemic year we did not do anywhere near as much pre-event advertising as normally goes into our Medeltidsdagarna, because the current restrictions on gathering translate to not more than 600 people on the island at once, so that the density doesn’t get to be too much. Yes, most of us had already received at least our first dose of vaccine, but we still want to take precautions.
Likewise, this year we didn’t let the visitors try the archery or engage in any other activities which would mean everyone touching the same objects. Indeed, we came up with the skattjakt as an excuse to make informational signs about our various activities so that people could read for themselves, rather than gathering close to converse. This seemed to work fairly well.
I did, however, realize that I had made the skattjakt a little more challenging than I had intended. While the main text on the posters was TimesNewRoman (because it is nice and clear and easy to read, like a book), the titles, which contained one red letter per sign that needed to be collected to figure out the sentence, was in an Old English calligraphy font. One of the signs, on soapstone carving (Hugga sten was located in my sunshade (next to my soapstone carving project in progress), and I saw a small child come up on her own, look at the sign, get a very distressed look on her face, look around for her adults, who were far away, and then look at me and say (in Swedish) “what does that say?” I read it out loud to her, she looked relived, said “H!”, wrote on her form, and happily ran off. That was when I realized that the capital H in that font doesn’t really look very much like an H… oops.
For me one of the biggest highlights of the weekend was having musicians on site. I had invited my friends Birger and Siv of the Luleå Nyckelharpa group, and they came and spent Friday in costume with us, playing music on their Nyckelharpas. It was the first time I had seen them, or heard their lovely music, since the last nyckelharpa night at their home before the pandemic, and it was so amazing to see and hear them again! Unfortunately for our event, but good for them, there was another music gathering to which they had been invited for Saturday, so we only got to keep them for the one day, but I am so glad that they came.
I spent the day sometimes carving stone, sometimes working on sewing, sometimes talking to our visitors, and just generally enjoying the demo. We had a steady stream of visitors, but never huge crowds, so it felt perfect. Just before gate closing Kheldor, Fimbul, and I did a bit of acroyoga, which is always fun. We played an acroyoga game wherein the flyer would balance on a base, and then would transition to the other base and a new acroyoga pose. This can be quite challenging, especially if no one has any quick ideas of “where can you go from there”, and thus the flyer might have to stay in a pose for longer than typical while we try to think of something. Needless to say, while we often succeeded in the transfer to a new base and new pose, sometimes we fell, but that was fun, too. I felt quite sorry for Kheldor when Kakwkylla brought her dog into range to come over and lick his face when I was balancing on both his hands and his feet, and he couldn’t do anything to push the dog away. I was also quite impressed that he managed not to drop me, despite laughing through the dog kisses.
My step counting app tells me that on Friday I set a record number of steps (since obtaining the phone in November), and I was glad to soak in the shire hot tub to ease my tired leg muscles. In fact, I did my yoga stretches for the day in the tub!
Saturday morning we got to sleep in a little, since everything was already set up and ready, but morning meeting still wasn’t till 10:00, and the gates still didn’t open to the public till 11:00. We had another wonderful day, without rain (Baron Egil is clearly good with weather), and one family, which I think will be joining Frostheim, came back and spent a second day with us, taking the sword fighting class, watching everything, and getting into conversations with most of our members. I really hope to see them again.
When site closed at 16:00 we had a short meeting to thank everyone for their help and share the results—if I remember correctly, we had around 300 visitors over the course of the weekend, which was a very good number for a late-pandemic demo. Then Baron Egil explained that rain was expected for Sunday morning, and thus he would like it if we could all help and take down the Frostheim pavilion and a few other things already now.
I started by taking down the posters for the skattjakt. By the time I had all of them down the others had already taken down the Frostheim tent, so I decided to drop my sunshade. As I worked on that I thought about how heavy my pavilion is, with its one-piece wall and roof construction, and its heavy cotton canvas. And I thought about how challenging it can be to hang it, wet, in the rafters of the shed to dry. And I thought about the rain Baron Egil had said was coming. And I realised that he had done a great job changing the weather for the event itself, and that it was my turn to do something.
Therefore, I decided I would drop my tent already on Saturday night and sleep at home. This would pretty much guarantee that it wouldn’t rain after all on Sunday morning, and thus everyone else would be able to pack their tents dry the next day. It worked.
I had planned to stay on site for some hours after packing the pavilion and loading the car. However, while I worked on that some gnats found me, and decided to have a bit of a snack on my flesh. I don’t like them, but I can cope with mosquito bites. They itch for 1 to 5 minutes, and then I don’t notice them anymore. Gnats, on the other hand, not only leave a small hole where they removed some flesh, but my body reacts to them by swelling up in that area and itching terribly, and even hurting a little, for several days. The itch and pain are the worst for the first couple of hours, but stays annoying for a really long time. As long as I was busy packing I could kinda ignore the discomfort, but as soon as I tried sitting down and relaxing with people all I could think about was all of those bites, and how much they itched/were uncomfortable.
Therefore, I said goodnight to the small group who had been around that table just then, and went straight home, without even taking the time to say goodbye to any of my other friends on site. I felt bad about that, but, gnat bites! However, the upside to it all was that, to avoid thinking about the bites, I not only unloaded the car, but I also put away almost everything (only the things in the chests waited till the next day, well, except for the ice chest, of course, that went straight into the fridge).
In hindsight I can actually recommend leaving site at 21:00 on Saturday, even though one misses an entire evening of event—you see, at that hour it is still light enough (this far north) to see to unload the car, but it isn’t hot, and the sun, being just below the horizon, doesn’t cause sun burns. Much nicer than getting home at 13:00 on a hot, sunny day.
Ok, who am I kidding? Of course, it would have been even better to not have been bitten by gnats, and to have stayed on site and enjoyed one more night of the event. I am already looking forward to the next one.
PS. On Sunday Kheldor ground down the high points of the corners on the break housing for my front tires, and now my summer tires fit the car, and I can drive it again.
PPS. If you want to read a Swedish summary of the event, and see some amazing photos from it, Kheldor wrote one for the Frostheim web page. Go check it out.