labours of the months, 1371

Our Living History Week is over for this year. A new campsite, just down from our previous one which is now becoming a Garry Oak meadow. I was a bit apprehensive, but it worked out nicely. So, a few pictures of everyday life in the 14th century, below.

 Isabeau at the churn. Behind her you can see information booths for some modern enterprises. She's actually quite close to the kitchen, which is just out of the shot.

I love this medieval style iron-shod spade. Unfortunately we aren't allowed to do any real digging onsite, but I got Mark to pose with it as a model for a potential calendar of the labours of the months. 

Ditto with Havise, performing one of the labours for November (rather ahead of time)--baking bread. This is a labour for every day, to be accurate. Yes, we had fresh-baked bread from the oven and fresh-churned butter. Life in the Middle Ages was nasty, brutish and short, and everyone was starving and clad in rags, don't you know?

Alicia card-weaving. Ingeniously, she is able to adjust tension by turning the tent-pole her work is fastened to. I have a video as well, but given my past lack of success at posting them, I'll wait to attempt it this time. 

My studio this year. I found the big easel at a consignment shop and snapped it up right away. I managed to finish off the two paintings on it, and begin a new one. The smaller one in front is, yes, baking bread as the Labour for November. 

A final picture of the oven, with two loaves of bread successfully produced. Beside them you can see the ashes of the fire that heated the oven and was pulled and swept out so that the loaves could be put in for baking.

how to write a bestseller

I really need to be packing for Living History Week at Fort Rodd Hill, but so selfless am I that I pause to drink tea and share a revelation with you.
Whenever there's an unexpectedly huge bestseller--The Da Vinci Code, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey--people who enjoy reading or take pride in writing graceful prose, tight plotting and thorough characterisation tend to have their heads meet their desks in a painful and repeated fashion. Why, they ask, why this book, of all the thousands published?

So here's my theory. Which is only about novels, because I don't care about nonfiction bestsellers.

First, the trick of becoming a bestseller is that a book needs to appeal to non-readers. Because the novel-reading public is just not numerous (or uniform) enough to make a breakout bestseller.
 How do you manage to appeal to the non-novel-reading public? By speaking in a voice that is not like a novel, but like something more familiar and comfortable, so they're not startled away.

The Da Vinci Code is famously written in the style of bad journalese, with its 'renowned curator So-and-so', and its flat clunky sentences that cram too much in. It's like reading a second-rate Newsweek article, but that's the key point:  it is not like reading fiction, because reading fiction is scary and uncomfortable.

Twilight and 50 Shades I can consider together, what with one being a fanfic of the other, and thus having a very similar voice (though frankly E.L. James makes Stephenie Meyer look pretty good as a stylist). That voice is not a literary voice at all. It's the voice of your flaky neighbour, or your drama-queen BFF, the one with the complicated love life and massive angst. She's sitting across from you at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and crumbling a muffin into bits because she is too upset to eat. She's telling you about this guy she's involved with, and you are listening in horror and fascination because you would never get into that sort of situation (and if you did you'd handle it better but you can't tell her that). Sometimes you want to shake her and other times you're a little jealous and now and then you think she's got to be kidding. But you keep listening.
And the best part is that she's a book, and so you can shut her up and go have dinner or go to bed. You don't have to keep pouring her coffee until neither of you can sleep, or make up the bed in the spare room because she's too upset to go home or her parents have kicked her out until she stops seeing this guy.  The experience is much better when controllable by the listener.

There's my theory, kids. I'll have to finish Cost of Silver before I can write my blockbuster bestseller, so you can probably get a good head start on me.

making an oven again

 More extensive photos of this are on Facebook, but here's a summary of what I helped make last weekend. You may recall that our last year's Living History week's oven fell apart over the winter (sounds of weeping offstage). So we are learning from that experience and doing it better, with the help of Build Your Own Earth Oven, 3d edition. Reportedly in the 4th edition he says that making a portable oven is a bad idea, but that's what we need to make.

So! In a wooden frame that allows the oven to be moved (since we can't have a permanent oven at Fort Rodd Hill) on a layer of insulating fill, a firebrick and cob base is laid.

A sand form patted into place to be the core. This will be removed after the oven is built around it.

A layer of newspaper to make it easy to tell which is the sand form and which is the cob wall.

A layer of cob is the innermost wall of the oven. 

And here's the crew watching the door being opened up at the end of the first day.

 The second day. The cob layer has dried somewhat. Cracks have been covered with more cob.

Adding a doorway that the wooden door (leaning against the platform) can rest against. The doorway is built of straw ropes rolled in slip. 

An insulating layer of slip and wood shavings is patted on.  The sand core was pulled out at this point to allow the interior to dry more easily.

An outer layer of cob mixed with chopped straw comes next. This is where any modelling and decoration is applied. We limited ourselves to two 'ropes', similar to the decoration of last year's oven.

And here it is, smoking away with the first drying fire. Quite expressive, don't you think?

mostly pictorial

Mark is away to Pennsylvania for the Pennsic War, and I am home with two big bowls of Transparent apples that need processing and dehydrating, a freezer that needs defrosting, a garden that needs weeding and watering, a cat that needs attention and comfort, and a novel that needs finishing.
Oh, and a knee that still needs physiotherapy exercises.

So I'm going to ignore all that  and show you some pictures of roses.

Well, that one's a rose hip, on the rugosa, a full-figured lady to be sure. 

The Bright Jewel miniature is blooming happily. That's my hand, again for size reference.

The Dortmund that blooms forever and ever.

One of the front yard gallicas. It's much redder than it looks here, but none of my photos show it properly. 

Apples! This is the Golden Delicious, which goes through a reddish (bronze?) stage before it gets fat and yellow. Fortunately it doesn't ripen until October, and lasts into December.

mermaids, stranded and rescued

 I promised you some pictures, didn't I?
 Well, my progress once out of the immobilizer has been pretty good. I got down to one crutch and to no crutch while indoors. Still can't manage kneeling other than on the bed to do my stretches, and getting up from anything lower than a regular chair requires something I can haul myself up by. I haven't tried driving yet. I think it would be okay for short distances, but road trips are out until I build back muscle in my leg.
 So I didn't think a camping event was going to work, until my wonderful former apprentice Elisa offered to drive up to Powell River for the Stranded Mermaid event, and to share her tent. (I should mention that I also had a tent offer from another wonderful former apprentice, Alicia--I have the best apprentices).  I knew I wouldn't have to cook in any case, because the Sugar Fairy would be on site, with a great full-weekend deal graded to your appetite.

 

I did well by the bacon and sausages and grilled cheese sandwiches and pound cake and ... You get the idea. Behind the camp kitchen you can see something of the site. It slopes away, first gently and then precipitately into a ravine, which has cool little stone stairways and trails down to the stream at the bottom. I was sad that I wouldn't be able to clamber down, as I've done previously at that site. But I was hanging on to at least one crutch for uneven ground.

 It was pleasant drive up, though we stuck to the highway route to make sure we'd arrive in time to catch the early ferry rather than the afternoon one. Because Comox was having a music festival and a bike tour and what all, we were a little concerned that the ferry might fill up, but we got on with plenty of room, then met Joan and her Amazing Twins in the cafeteria. So it was a lively trip. 

On the drive back we diverted briefly to the Scenic Seaside Route to check out Qualicum Beach. The sun was out and the sands stretched out invitingly, but alas! in between was an expanse of kelp-and-barnacle-encrusted rocks. More sadness, but we ate apples and walked along the promenade. 

The best thing about arriving in good time is the chance to set up by daylight and not in a rush--though I should note that Powell River is northerly enough to allow rather more daylight time. In fact it stayed light well past my bedtime. 

I wasn't much help with setting up the tent and furniture, other than holding one of the perimeter poles while pegs were hammered in, but it didn't take long, since Elisa has planned her camping so that she can do most of it herself (as I have with my little tent). 

Then we drove out to the Granada restaurant for their Greek platters. We ended up there last year mostly by accident, and loved the good Greek food and the kitschy decor, reminiscent of the old Romeo's restaurant in Victoria--though the Granada has its fountain outdoors on the patio, rather than in the foyer. This is my platter, and I managed to eat everything on it. I guess watching other people set up tents is a good way to work up an appetite. 

 

 Stranded Mermaid is a fairly low-key event. There's archery, and combat if enough heavy fighters and rapier fighters show up. The standout activity is the children's equestrian event, an obstacle course for kids riding hobby-horses. This year a new item:  besides riding through the Forest of Peril and the Row of Enemies, the kids had to rescue the Mermaid Baby Princess from a tower.
 Below, a tower rescue in action. Some of the rescuers were rather more cavalier with the princess, carrying her by her hair or tossing her in the air as they galloped.

The Tribute to the Mermaid contest this year was won by Dr. Carus, with his shadow-puppet play of the tale of the mermaid and the axe, a reference to the arms of False Isle, showing a mermaid holding an axe. The great challenge for this presentation was making a shadow play work on a bright sunny site, with few dark hours. Below is the improvised theatre behind the bandstand.

going walkies, eventually bikies

If I can get my EEE working again, I'll post photos of the event I was at this weekend, Stranded Mermaid in Powell River. I was able to go with my friend Elisa in her still-shiny-new van, and took my crutches as backup for walking on uneven ground (though the site is really well landscaped).

But for now, the big news is that I had my first physiotherapy session, at Shelbourne Physical Therapy, where Ian moved my knee around and gave his opinion that there was no ligament damage. He also measured the amount of bend and straight in my right knee (100 and -8 I think), and of course took me through a series of exercises that I'll have to do three times a day.
Then I rode a stationary bike for probably 10 minutes. The seat was up pretty high, making it possible for me to keep my feet in the stirrups for a complete cycle. I have the go-ahead to go back to weight training at the campus gym as well as riding the stationary bikes there. So I'll just have to psych myself up for the walk over to the gym from the library.
The business with my foot swelling up he says is an after-effect from the immobilizer, because my calf could not do its job of pumping fluid back and forth with the thigh muscles, and has to get that action established again. He went over the signs of deep-vein thrombosis and my leg isn't bright red, hot, or painful, so I'm less worried about the puffiness, though it's still annoying. 

This morning I had a shower with due care (like not standing on one foot at any point). It was lovely to rinse my hair out properly. I have been upstairs and downstairs several times today without any nasty flashes, though still going downstairs one step at a time because it really pulls my knee if I try two steps. (By this I mean toddler-style one-step, one foot down then the other foot to the same step)

So that's my health bulletin. 

less immobilized

Out of the immobilizer, able to walk (slowly) without crutches. However the knee still doesn't bend to 90 degrees, and sometimes not even to 45 degrees. It's like one of those folktales where witches turn part of someone to stone or wood.
Also yesterday my calf and foot swelled up like a pork sausage in the frying pan (though without the pleasing brown colour). Today it's better, though I had to take an NSAID which my doctor doesn't want me to do because, kidneys. But he couldn't figure out why it was happening, so I feel some justification in choosing my own treatment for it.
The hardest part is not pain (which isn't that bad) or awkwardness. It's the irrational flashes of terror that my leg will fold sideways if I put all my weight on it, as one does going up stairs etc. Even though I've been putting my weight on it up and down the front steps and just walking, and it has not folded. That vivid memory of my knee bending in the wrong direction as Mark helped me to the van after my fall, it just keeps popping up randomly. The first time I tried going upstairs to the bedroom, I had to sit down on the third step and cry for a while, because I could not find the courage to step up with one leg. Then of course I despise myself for being a coward, which doesn't get me on my feet either. 
But! I have a physio referral, so I just have to find a physiotherapist reasonably close to home or to work, and see if I can get in.

On the writing front, I've been twining Storyline Two into Storyline One, and tightening Storyline One. I'm pleased to see some resonances developing between the two, though I'll try not to get too attached, because there's bound to be revision and scene-shifting to come.
A tricky aspect of this blending is that I don't have a clear-cut system for how the two intersect. It's not the good old structure where each time something odd happens in the present day, someone digs out a plot-relevant ancient document that explains it or adds on to it. It's more like the 'zipper narrative', where you have two concurrent storylines with characters who are going to come together in the last part of the book.
On the good side, I'm seeing how to fix the episodic nature of Storyline One because with Scrivener I can pull scenes and fit them in earlier, so the beginnings of a later plot thread will have already been laid in, rather than waiting for the first one to be done before being introduced.

Now I will go away and research physiotherapists.