kareina

I am just back from the Norsken Gaming Con in Skellefteå. This was a spur of the moment trip on my part. I vaguely recall some of my SCA friends in the shire of Rengaarda (not quite two hours south of here) mentioning in a FB group weeks ago that they were planing on doing an SCA display at that event, but at the time I just saw the name "Norsken", and didn't notice what it was, and didn't have the energy to look it up, and kinda forgot. More recently O. said that he was thinking of heading down for it, but I still didn't really pay much attention to what it was or why he wanted to go (other than knowing that one factor was that he would get to spend time with P., his girlfriend there).

Wednesday evening was Frostheim social night, the first one that lord_kjar has managed to attend all this calendar year (he gets home from work about the time to go, and lately he would rather stay home and have time to relax after work and get some dinner, than rush right out the door). But this week he has just finished carving a bow for archery out of an ash-wood broomstick handel, and he wanted to make the string. Twining a bow string is a perfect sort of hand-work to take to the meeting, so he joined us. Sadly, none of the students made it this week, so there were only four of us in attendance for most of the evening, and O. arrived late in the evening, but just on time to get a quick lesson from my senior apprentice on the tablet weaving project that she helped him thread on cards last week, and for which she has worked the first few repeats of the project and written up a "recipe" for him.

After the meeting he followed us home, and he and I wound up talking till 02:00 before going to sleep (but never mentioned the Norsken con during all of that time). I got up early the next morning, Thursday, which was a holiday in Sweden, and did my "day 3" workout from my personal trainer before breakfast. It felt good to do it, since I was rather low energy much of the last week, and didn't manage to do the program workouts every day, and on one day I did start it, but quit after only a few minutes and went home for a nap instead.

After the workout and a shower I went back downstairs and asked O. what his play for the day was, and he replied that he wanted to catch the bus down to Skellefteå in about an hour to attend Norsken. He wound up not catching that bus, but started working on his Viking trousers in progress instead, thinking that perhaps the 13:00 bus would be better. When it was nearly 13:00 we decided that instead of his taking the bus, I would go with him, and we would take my new car. However, that car hasn't had its tires changed yet (and we haven't been driving it as a result). Since C. was coming home this weekend I couldn't just take the blue car, since that would leave lord_kjar nothing to drive to pick her up from the train station on Friday.

Therefore the boys changed from winter to summer tires on Styx (the car's licence plate number starts out with the letter STX, so the name for the car was kind of obvious), even though the plan is to take the car in for service on Monday morning and purchase new summer tires for it, since the old ones are getting very worn down, and, as they noticed when they changed them, one of them has obviously had a puncture repaired by injection of (something rubbery) at some point. That took long enough for me to pack SCA costumes and other things for the weekend, and we finally hit the road at 16:00.

This got us to the event a bit before 18:00, which is when the open to the public part of the con ends, but we still spent about an hour and a half on site checking it out and visiting with friends of mine from the SCA, larp, and gaming circles, and friends of his from the SCA (same folk as above) and theater and other university friends. Then we headed over to P.'s place, where our friend A. and her two kids were also staying. They were in the middle of baking some bread for when we arrived, and I happily ate some of the rolls hot out of the oven, despite the fact that it was later in the day than I am normally hungry.

We chatted for a while, but we were all kind of tired, and I went to bed at 21:00 that night, and the others weren't up much later. We returned to the con about 10:00 the next morning, after enjoying a leisurely breakfast. The event turned out to be much fun--we got to talk up our Medieval Days at Hägnan event to many people, including a geologist from the Swedish Geological Survey who worked on the "better geology" mod for Minecraft. He had a booth where people could test the mod, and he also had a bunch of rocks and some label cards with Minecraft photos of rocks that people could match. Even though the labels were written in Swedish I managed to match 100% of the rocks and names on my first try (though it is lucky that "pimpsten" was the only Swedish rock name he had on the list that I hadn't seen before, so I could get that one by the process of elimination). I have him convinced to ask his boss if the Geological Survey can do a "mining through the ages" display at our Medieval Days event. I hope the boss says yes.

We did fighting demos both days (O. participated, wearing my armour), and I was the MC one of the days. I don't know if it works to past a link to a video on FB in here the same way one would do any other url link, but if it does, here is the film one of our members did of that first demo.

Other event highlights include R2D2 running around on his own (never mind the other StarWars guy following him while holding a remote-control sort of contraption), meeting the lovely British gentleman who played BobbaFet (or however one would spell that), borrowing a huge (~2 meter long cos-play sword for use as a straight edge to mark the quilting lines on my gambeson in progress, seeing Tinkerbell adjusting the scarf on one of those green aliens with the pair of large snake like things growing out of the back of her head (what are they called, and where have I seen them? I know I have seen them often over the years, which kinda points to either star wars or star trek)--both the alien's skin and Tinkerbell's tunic were the exact same shade of green. It was also lovely to see so many friends I haven't seen in a long time and to meet new people.

However, attending that event meant that I haven't had time to do the computer-related Hägnan tasks I had intended to do on Thursday-Saturday. Therefore O. and I have decided not to attend fighter practice tomorrow morning, which gives him time to complete the last of the paperwork that he needs to do before handing over the economy for Phire to the person who is taking over that job, and I will be able to start the Hägnan computer tasks that got bumped on account of the trip. In theory, I will not have any problems continuing with progress on that stuff over the next few weeks, now that I finally have access to, and know the existence of, the email address for the event.