Back from May Crown, a terrific weekend at the Daisy May Campground near Fort Macleod. I visited with my kick-butt apprentice Alis and her lady Asha; former but still kick-butt apprentice Sina and her cute-beyond-bearing children; amazingly talented friend Nan (with detour to see her new yarn shop); about-to-be-married Meg; stunningly gorgeous Kate, and others that I'm too silly to adjectivise just now: Klaus, Nessa, Elaine and Malcolm, Freydis, ....
So yes, I was very social. And dutiful. I did about an hour of folding event handouts, two hours of gate, attended the (mercifully brief) Laurels meeting, the 'Show & Shine' (all of one person displaying work, possibly because the name is not indicative of anything specific), and the Laurel Q&A (where I ended up being Mistress Bossy-Boots because no one was in charge).
The site is a former or occasional swamp off the Oldman River. Once off the flattened campground, you can clearly see the channels and humpy islands, even without water to delineate. Doing a bit of a wander, I found two half-sunk squashed cars, with scrubby trees growing through the windows and hood in approved post-disaster movie fashion.
The full-grown trees were mostly leafless, making for a somewhat artificial, stage-setting look. Trinity thought it looked like the set for a Harry Potter film.
Where the swamp wasn't, the ground was strewn with river stones, some remarkably large. We found an impressive lump of quartz, black basalt, granite, lots of blobby sedimentary and others that Freydis identified for us (yay Freydis!). I found a little square striated stone that turned out to be petrified (?) bone - a bit of buffalo rib, maybe.
Yes, I brought back rocks. Because rocks are cool.
The first day was clear and still, the stars that night thick and swarming, the night bloody cold. I didn't properly warm up (having done the 10-midnight shift) until near light. The next two days were windy, gusting erratically and continually, and my canvas tent luffed all night. Every time I dozed off, I dreamt of sailing and woke trying to duck under the boom as we swung about to catch the breeze. Since I haven't sailed for, oh, thirty-five years, this seemed unfair.
I'm a bit wonky from lack of sleep, although I did sleep until 11 Monday morning.
After take-down, I discovered that the methotrexate warnings aren't kidding about photosensitivity. I'd managed to keep my head covered almost the whole time, but apparently not enough, and not my nose. Not only did about 15-20 minutes of sun toast the back of my neck, but my nose was blistered.
The backs of my hands burnt! The most weather-exposed, toughened parts of my body burnt, from being out in full sun for part of a day. You can see where my cuffs fell partway across the knuckles.
It makes me want to do leaf-prints on myself. If I stuck some ivy leaves on my bare pallid arms, it would probably only take about 10 minutes to establish a temporary sun-tattoo. Sure, it might hurt some, but so do tattoos.
In other health-related musings, you'd think that a test involving the words 'occult' and 'blood' would be creepy and cool, possibly admitting one to membership in an order of mystic assassins.
But this is not the case.
4 comments:
It's a pain when meds have side effects like that.
I had to laugh at the mystic assassins. If only it was anything that cool.
And mammogram! Doesn't that sound all cuddly and cheery, like a singing & dancing greeting for Mother's Day?
What a cheat.
In my work for an insurance company dealing with health benefits, I often encounter the term "transvaginal ultrasound", which, to me, sounds like an Eastern European train route.
I have a little pamphlet titled The origin and development of the blood island of Hyla Regilla, which I keep thinking I should turn into a slipstream story along the lines of Harlan Ellison's Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54’ N, Longitude 77° 00’ 13" W (only not as brilliant, of course).
Post a Comment