making our own fun

Last weekend I helped build a clay oven, in hopes of using it during our upcoming Living History Week. We've had ovens from time to time, the first being built of broken bricks on site, covered over with clay and straw then disassembled with a hammer at event's end, the later one being built of clay over a tall basket and fired by burning the basket inside it. That one lasted a couple of years but was a bit delicate for moving back and forth to the site. Eventually its makers smashed it up cathartically.
After that we did without. But an oven is such a handy thing to have, and opens so many possibilities, that the idea was never quite given up. At last Joan bought clay and offered her patio as an assembly site, and Ina, fresh from a course on cob-building, offered her expertise.
I brought the basket.


Here Ina directs her two lovely assistants in preparing the sand-and-clay cob mix.


After the base has been covered in clay, the inner frame of the oven is established. Rowan is eagerly squishing clay into a sheet to begin covering it.


Halfway up with the first layer. Ina works up more clay and sand. We covered the frame with an inch-and-a-bit of cob mixture, then left it overnight. The next day we painted it with slip, then added a thinner layer of cob mixed with short-cut straw.


Some decoration to the top, as with some of the English examples, in a rope-twist pattern, and the youngsters could not be deterred from painting it over with slip once more.
It has to dry for a couple of weeks before we even think about firing it. We'd like to be able to put on a hand-cart and wheel it around, but we might have to settle for standing it on a couple of trestles.

fruit stand capital of Canada

Which is how Keremeos bills itself, and where I spent the weekend. Or rather, I spent it outside Keremeos, at the Ashnola campground beside the Ashnola River. The campground is a pleasant small one, flat shelving land on a riverbed between tall steep mountains that seemed to be composed largely of scree and unstable rock. It can be unnerving to drive through the Similkameen Valley because of this, unless you are able to completely ignore the possibility of landslides or floods.
My natural tendency towards fatalism / resignation helps somewhat. I'm old enough to remember the Hope Slide--which we drove by on the way to the event--and I can't help but speculate on what, if anything, one would be able to do, seeing another slide? There's nowhere to go. The rocks would cover the narrow valley floor and splash up the other side. Make one's peace with God, I suppose.
And aren't we cheerful? Well, there's a pleasure in melancholy, and another pleasure in morbid thoughts, or one wouldn't engage in them.
The landscape is striking, in quite a different way from the rocky coast and islands that I'm used to. My family travelled through it any number of times in the summer, and nostalgia tugged at me, especially when I walked among the tents and smelled musty canvas, the smell of summer in my memories. Ponderosa pine with fat cones and needles as long as my hand; the ground a mix of smoothed river-rocks and brown sand (a real challenge to set tent-pegs into); some sort of cricket that opened up yellow-and-black wings when it leapt, looking like a tiny bird; a mottled beetle with immensely long antennae that perched on my sweater like a brooch; a shallow fast river seething between rocks and rippling smoothly where its passage widened; mountains so tall the sun was only visible between 10 am and 5:30 pm, but the valley well-lit by reflected sunlight from 5:30 am to 9 pm, lighting one mountain up with green and shadow in the morning, and the next lit gold and brown in the evening.
The sky was clear until Sunday afternoon, and the night sky was black and thick with stars. I saw the Milky Way more clearly than I have since we lived in Sooke, and constellations I'd nearly forgotten (their names I have forgotten). I was reading Privilege of the Sword during the day, and became immensely jealous of Ellen Kushner for her description therein of the stars 'like spilled salt'. Because, yes.
The occasion of my being there was the Coronet Tourney of the Principality of Tir Righ, or rather, the Laurels meeting scheduled during, and the chance to spend time with two of my far-flung apprentices--one of whom will soon be my peer. Other socialising occurred, but it was a bonus and not planned.
Other than that, I had no commitments (did some gate early Sunday, since I'd be awake anyways) and spent several hours sitting beside the river, reading Kushner or the Memoirs of the Princess Lamballe, or staring at the moving water, sometimes wandering up and down looking at interesting rocks. I wish I knew more about rocks, specifically what the crumpled-looking ones were, and whether the red stains on some of the sedimentary rocks were part of them or left by the water more recently. I found a cracked stone that looked like quartz (and what Stephen identified as feldspar), and a smallish egg-shaped stone, pale grey and speckled with dark grey and small holes. (In June, at FRH, I found another holed stone, so thoroughly eaten through it looked like a petrified sponge.) Something pale and flapping, stuck under a rock and branch in the river, turned out to be part of a hide, probably deer from the bit I scraped out. I thought briefly of trying to salvage it for treating, but the small scrap already smelt bad, and I couldn't feature bringing it home through 4 hours drive and a ferry trip.

Saturday afternoon I was stung by a wasp, which had crawled under my hand where I was holding my mug of water. An odd sort of karma, since an hour or so earlier I'd rescued two wasps drowning in a mug of orange juice (more for the sake of an unwary drinker than for theirs, I admit). This happened to me once before, when I rescued a wasp from a spider's nest, and the same day was stung on the finger by a hornet(?) resting on the newspaper page I was turning. The hornet sting was dramatic, since there's not much room on the fingertip for swelling, so my hand swelled up past my wrist and hurt like blazes until I went to Emergency and had a shot in my rear.
The wasp sting was on my palm, between the forefinger and the second finger, and swelled up in the base joint of both fingers, then on the back of my hand, first over the knuckles, then down most of the way to the wrist. It's a measure, I think, of my adjustment to the arthritis that I watched this with considerably more interest than alarm. Hand swelling up, joints swollen and stiff, yeah, done that, hmm, blue mark on the side of the finger, what's that?
I'd probably have felt less equanimity if it had hurt anything like the hornet sting. MC convinced me to take a benadryl that night, when the swelling hadn't gone away, but it didn't go right down until Monday.
But definitely the last time I rescue a wasp.

So I wrote nothing. Monday wasn't very productive, because I was feeling vaguely sick and achey. However, I did read about the French court of the 18th c., and practiced knots, and knocked a couple of books off my to-be-read pile.

fame, how fleeting, how bittersweet

So, that interview I posted about last month? It was in the Times-Colonist yesterday, rating two separate pages. People I work with have read it.
Mark's business name: Gaukler Medieval Wares, was spelt incorrectly and his url was not provided, perhaps because the story had mutated from a Business section story to a Life section story. The PARMA website was given, which is something, and Mark's already had a phone call from a hopeful novelist researching the latter part of the 14th c.
All in all, I'm relieved. The facts are mostly correct (I'm pretty sure I didn't say 'transporting' because it's not a word in my vocab. but that's minor) and the photograph chosen does not show us gazing moonily into each other's eyes. That would have amused our friends mightily. MC has already said that she'd frame one like that, and point to it as evidence that we really do love each other.
Posed, all posed, a put-up job if ever was.
The photo of Beth and Sarah is much cuter. I'm sure Sarah was fun to interview. She certainly provided some fine quotes.

But today's fame is tomorrow's fish&chip wrapper, and what a life lesson is there, eh?
I could do with some fish&chips, come to think of it.

The relentless spotlight of public scrutiny

Here I am still recovering from 3 days drive back from Pennsylvania (left Pittsburgh 6pmish Aug 12, arrived Victoria 7pmish Aug 15) and what does life demand of me? Being photographed in medieval costume gazing adoringly into my husband's eyes and hoicking up my skirts to show off my shoes and pattens (not simultaneously - it could be a timeline, though).
Mark was interviewed for (in theory) the Business section of the Victoria Times-Colonist, as a small businessman with the more-photogenic-than-staring-into-a-monitor angle of being inspired by medieval art and doing Living History. Which in itself is a fine thing and I approve and support. I just wish it hadn't been scheduled so soon after our return. Consider that Chris had been occupying alone for 3 weeks, followed by our return and the explosion of unpacking over every available horizontal surface. Start with the untidiness of the packing process, left unreconciled, and the remnants of making desperately-needed-linen-clothing, also unfinished, which formed the base level, and well, the kerosene and a match solution had some appeal.
Anyway, Mark and I brought the ground floor at least into a semi-presentable state, with several items getting upstairs and out of sight, though not quite into the attic yet.

The photographer arrived first, and took several photos of Mark's buckles and brooches and knives, some being held and some on the table. Most of the time he took two photos in rapid succession, flash-Flash, reminding me of that handgun-training thing of always shooting twice, to make sure. After a bit of that, we went out to the backyard, where he took several shots that Mark referred to later as 'romance novel covers', with me leaning on him or him leaning down so as to be able to look into my eyes. (He did suggest that I stand on a box, but there didn't seem to be time for me to go and find one.) It differed from the typical romance cover in that neither of us had difficulty keeping the shoulders or chest covered, and flowing locks were not available (mine were under the wimple, and his aren't flowing). We were also directed to look at each other, and some substantial number of romance covers have the lovers staring off in the same direction, as if at some threat or hope of escape.
I tried to pose once as the adoring and vinelike wife from that Gothic German sculpture (if I can find a photo I'll post it) twined about her husband with a rather frightening smile on her face, like a Greek comedy mask, but received no encouragement.
The photographer departed to cover an Incubus concert, protected by his military-strength earplugs, which allow him to not hear the music at all. The reporter came inside, wrote lots of shorthand notes and communicated enthusiasm about this being a more interesting assignment than most. Which is probably true, Victoria not being a hotbed of excitement usually (though allegedly a hotbed of satanism, according to Michelle Remembers).

And after that I was exhausted, and went to bed. It was pretty much as tiring as getting the retinal scan, even though the bright lights were mostly directed at other places than my eyes.
Good thing I'm not likely to be interviewed much, if it's that wearing when I'm not even the subject.

Writing-related: I've become annoyingly paranoid about wordcount. I've got to stop checking wordcount while in process, because it makes me hesitant to spend any words on the latter part of the story, like, say, the climax. Oh no, I think, I'm just under 4k! I'd better scamp the denouement, or else I can't submit to Clarkesworld!
Given that what everyone seems to like about Willow Knot is the kinda-lush (I call it 'drenched') sensory detail, if I keep hesitating to include description and tactile stuff in the last 3d of the book (court and city) because I'm afraid of bumping the wordcount higher, I'm seriously working against myself.
I need to stop looking at the wordcount. It is for me what Amazon numbers are for those who've actually completed books and have them on the market.
Is there another way to measure progress and assure myself that I've actually done something?

off to the past

To be absent from the keyboard for the next week, for our annual Living History demo at Fort Rodd Hill. (The photos at the link are from several years back, and the encampment is considerably more elaborate now. But the current photos are on my laptop, and the laptop and the desktop are not speaking to each other. Sigh.)
For the next week, I will be Linot Fitton, painter of the Peynter-Stayners Company of London, one of several artisans gathered for a fair in the year 1371. I will sleep on a featherbed over a straw tick, eat meals cooked over an open fire or in a clay oven, wear linen and wool, and stick my nose right up to whatever I'm working on, because I don't have 14th c. eyeglasses.
Fortunately, the strict interpretation is only required while the park is open to visitors. Once it closes, we can break our roles, and the Norse encampment or Cavalier encampment can mingle with the Plantagenet encampment. And those who wear eyeglasses can see clearly again.
Canada Day is the big day, and for that I expect to be writing children's names--Your Name Written With a Feather--for several hours. Harry Potter has been good for the business of writing with a quill. If it slows down (and during the week, when traffic is less anyways) there may be time to show how to cut a quill and for interested children to get ink on their hands trying one out.
Which pales before the thrill of seeing the guys working with wooden waster swords. That draws a crowd, always. As does the weaver (not the same crowd) and the cooks. "Is that real food? Are you going to eat it?"

The only accessible electricity is a plug in the women's washroom, so the laptop stays home. I will rediscover the joys of writing in a notebook (not tm) with a pen. I won't know what anyone is doing online until July 3d. Try not to get into trouble while I'm gone, okay?