Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

2005-08-15 19:55

<whine>I'm sick. Being sick at Pennsic sucks. All I hope is that I start feeling better while there's still some of Pennsic left to enjoy. Yesterday I decided I was feeling crappy enough that I'd better skip morning classes and hang out down in the (officially uncampable) section of camp where the sky chairs and hammocks are. Then I decided to skip afternoon classes. Then I realized I really needed to Go Lie Down, and punted the idea of any evening activities as well. Today I've mostly stayed in bed playing with my PDA, sleeping, and coughing in a way that makes my ribs hurt something awful. I've got anniemal's laptop in front of me now, which is a lot more conducive to composing LJ entries than my PDA, especially since the Clié has stopped responding to its touch screen and I can only write anything on the Visor that I almost didn't bother to bring ... and for which I did not bring a cradle. Fortunately I had beamed a few useful and/or entertaining things over to the Visor before the Clié became completely unusable (well, I can still look up addresses and read existing memos, but I can't go anywhere that requires using anything other than the buttons and the scroll wheel). Unfortunately the version of MobiPocket (an e-book reader) that I had on there is not compatible with the Visor, so I can't even read the novels I'd brought. And SmallBASIC will compile and execute a program, but the editor crashes the Visor, so that's rather inefficient. I've been poking at LispMe (other than poking at it briefly when I downloaded it for the PDA, I haven't really looked at Lisp since I learned enough of it to help the-ex-I'm-not-supposed-to-name pass a class in it) and Quartus Forth (which I'd never got around to learning at all, other than knowing it's a stack-based language). So far I've managed to write a program in Lisp that solves a geometry problem that had been nagging me for a few days, and failed to work out (by trial and error) how one writes a conditional in Forth. I can't do much in Lisp before the heap overflows on the tiny Visor, so I was hoping to port my ABC project to Forth while I'm stuck in bed. (OnBoard C wants to do things in the PalmOS UI framework instead of using stdio, so there's a "don't have the docs with me" problem there as well.) Despite fretting about me and trying to look after me and keep me fed (which I appreciate), anniemal has gotten out of camp to attend classes and do other stuff on her own and with syntonic_comma, so fortunately my illness isn't keeping her from enjoying Pennsic. I just hope this passes in the next day or so, so that I can go shopping, catch a few more classes, shoot some photos, attend a party or two, and visit the folks I haven't seen yet this year. Wish me luck.</whine>

So far I've made it to five classes here, one of which had actually been replaced with an impromptu sight-reading session ("greatest hits of the 15th Century) instead of what had been scheduled ... One more that I would have gone to got similarly replaced at the last minute with something less interesting to me. If I'd not caught this nastybadevil cold, I would've been to about twice that many by now ... and there are ten times that number that look interesting, but which would make for too long a day even if I felt well, or which all conflict with each other on the schedule. You really could spend 90 hours in classes, lectures, and workshops at Pennsic if so inclined, and still complain about the huge number of interesting topics you'd missed. So I'm looking at my PDA and grumbling about the classes I'm missing being sick, and wondering how I'll find any time and energy for all the other things that Make Pennsic Pennsic for me ... and I really need to remind myself that for the first, uh, fifteen(?) years I came here, I never attended a class. I don't need to attend every class I can, right? Nobody's going to go "tsk tsk" at me for treating this as the huge, multifaceted event that it is, instead of acting as though it's an expensive technical conference that I need to get my money's worth out of. The problem is that once I noticed what sorts of classes are taught here, Fear Of Missing Something kicked in. I've got to convince myself that it's okay for interesting things to go unobserved by me.

... But come on, how can I look at a day that includes classes on Period Mustards, The Medieval Trumpet, The Golden Age of Heresy, The History of Arabic Music, Talk Like a Viking, The Role of the Bard in Celtic Society, History of Bagpipes, Sephardic Music Overview, Legal Institutions of Saga Period Iceland, Rise of Imperial Religions, Fealty & Homage Ceremonies, Baba Yaga, Women in Islamm During the Time of Muhammad, and a class about medieval ideas about death and dying, plus an atlatl battle and a fools parade, and not feel like I'm missing out by not going to all of those? (Note that I'd need a time machine to go to all of them, as several are scheduled opposite one another.) And those are just the few tomorrow that I'm at all interested in.

There are a couple of time slots in which seven classes I'm interested in are all scheduled at once. Not fair! And then the 8:00 or 9:00 AM classes ... Ah, but best that I find a way to remind myself that five classes counts as being virtuously education-oriented and spend whatever other healthy time I've got browsing the merchants, playing music, and catching up with friends. As soon as I convince myself I'm really not that interested in Norse Music, Period Chocolat, Medieval Engineering, or Unsolved Mysteries of the Middle Ages. Gotta find a way, 'cause there's so very much more that's fun to do here than attend classes!

But first, gotta get over (or at least mostly over) this cold. Yeah, it's that bad. A little case of the sniffles wouldn't keep me in bed all day at Pennsic.

The platform for my tent is mostly working out well, though I've noticed a few things I should have done differently. I'm getting compliments on the idea (which I swiped from folks who camp along Great Eastern Highway) and the construction (heavily influenced by all the Carpentry Clue borrowed from campmates and neighbours). Yes, I do deserve credit for getting the elusive Round Tuit and putting it together (with labour assistance and borrowed tools), and yes I am rather pleased with it, but I find it interesting to note how even those who helped seem to think of it as "the thing that Glenn built".

Next time, in addition to making it three sections that bolt together instead of a single twelve-foot unit, I'm going to make it only almost level. When we finally got some rain (into every War some rain must fall ... but it was not a deluge) I was too slow in covering the door of my tent with a tarp. And the water that came in just slowly spread across the floor, instead of running out the (usually pointed downhill) door. Whoops. And oddly enough, I still got a puddle between the floor and groundcloth at the bed end, which leaked in through a spot on the floor where the waterproofing never took. So there's a puddle under the air mattress which I'll have to try to dry out if it's sunny tomorrow and I'm feeling well enough to get up. It does make me all the more glad that I'm using an air mattress, not just a bundle of blankets piled directly on the floor! (Rainwater wicked up into one's bedding sucks mightily. BTDT.)

During a town run, fiberglass windowscreen caught my eye and I decided to replace the screens in my tent. I may have been overly abitious. I cut out the worse of the two windows and started sewing a new section of screen in place, but it's slow going. I also cut out the tatters of the door screen, but that was already useless so if I take a year or two to get the replacement put in, no biggie. I haven't decided whether to sew it to the old zipper in halves (which I left hanging from the top of the doorway just in case) or make a single large flap much like the canvas outer doorflap. At the rate I sew, replacing the door screen in its original configuration could be an extremely long-term project.

Yes, I'm still using the probably-older-than-I-am green canvas Army tent with holes in it. I'm thinking that instead of replacing it with a new tent, I should just add a wall to my platform each year until I have a whole house. (I'm sure 8'x12' will feel larger when I can stand up in all of it, not just the middle.) Being able to afford to store the pieces on-site would make that a lot easier though.

I hear drums. Cheering. Laughter. Conversation. Last night I heard music from a couple different directions as I drifted off to sleep. Perhaps tomorrow night I'll be participating. Thing is, even lying here feeling ill, these auditory reminders reassure me that I'm still in a magical place; my home town that only exists two weeks out of the year. There's something much more welcoming about the waves of cheering rolling across the lake over the drumming than there is in the impersonal traffic of trucks and buses and too-loud car stereos on on Lombard St.

Oddly enough, there is a parallel here to those car stereos, but it's not the thump-thump-thump of distant drums. In fact, the examples that come to mind are a capella vocal performances. I think it has to do with the reason for loud volume more than the volume itself.