AncienTrails

Play Time

Lughnasa                                        Waning Artemis Moon

Whew.  After 4 hours wandering around the precincts of the Renaissance Fair Kate and I threw ourselves on the bed and took a two-hour nap.  Geez.  Feels like I worked hard all day.

The Renaissance Festival has a large role playing contingent.  Some get paid to enact certain character types from a real or imagined medieval period, others volunteer by showing up in costume and reveling along with the others.  One guy played the fool, running, smirking, smacking the tree leaves and pointing up at them as if they represented great wisdom.  Another, in a kilt, stood on a bench and preached the virtues of drinking beer in the morning while remarking to the passing women:  You’re sooo beautiful.  You’re mother’s beautiful (to a kid in a stroller).  One of the more remarkable roles I witnessed outside the potter’s shop where we bought some new pieces.

“A place to sit!  A place to sit!”  A man in his late twenties, perhaps early thirties, had a board attached to his back, a hat in the dirt with a few dollars in it and put his back in the air while on all fours, offering all comers a place to sit down.  “Show off your wife!”

A rope walker and fire-juggler had the crowds attention at one spot; while in another, folks lined up to be put in the stocks.  Later in the day, just as we were leaving, there was to be a royal wedding. “Is this a big deal?” I asked Kevin Caufield, the potter.  “We’ve never had one before.” he said.

Several shops sold swords, daggers and knives.   Real swords, daggers and knives.  In one place’s case $2,200 and up real swords!  Not to mention halberds, pikes, spears, broad axes, maces and other hand to hand combat paraphernalia.

The pottery shops’s  quality varied dramatically. They were the only ones I examined with care. It looked like mugs and cups sold the best, mugs with dragons, flagons embossed with all manner of symbols, including, improbably to me, the logo of the brotherhood of international electrical workers.  Many of the ceramics suffered from overly cute decoration, flowers and vines and such.  Some were poorly crafted.  There were, though, many fine pieces, too, most often not in the particular things we sought:  salad plates and bowls.

Food was plentiful: barons of beef, turkey drumsticks, ears of corn, gyros, pop-overs, candy on a stick, beer, wine, lemonade, cream puffs and gourmet pizza to mention only a few.

Shop keepers invariably greeted us as m’lady and m’lord.

As I imagine there is among re-enactors of various kinds from the civil war to the society for creative anachronism, there is a yearning here to leave, for a while, the confines of 3rd millennial civilization for a time when men wore codpieces and women were wenches, when disputes got settled without guns and bombs and when social roles had more constraints.

When I work in the fantasy genres in which I write, the same yearning comes over me, a desire to inhabit another world, another place and time for a while.  Only the most dogged or the most neurotic or the most blinkered hunker down in the day-to-day and never leave it.  We all need an escape hatch, a place to let this world go for awhile.  I believe religion serves that  purpose for many, fiction for others, movies, too and then there are these fairs, throwbacks to the celebrations of rural people gathering in one locale to exchange goods and services, to hear a few stories, drink a little, perhaps sing a bit and laugh.  Does it sound like the state fair?  You bet it does.

Renaissance Fair

Lughnasa                                 Waning Artemis Moon

The Renaissance Fair.  Kate and I left home around 8:15 this morning, arriving at the Renaissance Fair ground around 9.  Traffic, at that time, was not a problem.  We wandered the grounds watching fools, knaves, long-bowmen, merchants, lords and ladies plying their wares and their trades.  The atmosphere was casual bawdy with buttons that said:  Ready To Be Mounted, Nay, Nay, Never and Let’s Be Bad Guys.  A bumper sticker on the way out, a black ribbon like the ones you see on many cars in yellow, read:  Support Bondage. That sort of thing.

Kate found a pop-over, her favorite.  We also located some ceramic salad plates and bowls, all different designs, but from the same potter, a high quality guy from St. Paul.  Our main purpose though was to stop by Courtesans and Costumes, the Renaissance clothing boutique owned, operated and provisioned by our neighbor Lydia Perlich and her S.O. Chad.  When we first went past around 9 they were busy upstairs sewing, trying to replace inventory sold the day before.  They have a room with a bed and electricity above their stall, which is very near the entrance.

They bought the stall and paid it off over the last year and intend to do the same thing in several other Renaissance Fairs across the country.  They travel to North Carolina, Louisiana and, they hope, Texas when the Minnesota fair closes.  Over time they want to purchase stalls in other fairs, for now they camp after setting up in the other states.  Lydia tells me Texas has more square feet, but Minnesota always has the largest attendance of any Renaissance Fair in the country.

More to say, but I’m tired.  Ready to go to bed.

Eating

Lughnasa                                    Waning Artemis Moon

A wonderful lunch with chicken/leek pie, a tomato, onion and feta salad and a fruit tart for dessert.  I didn’t make it to dessert, having had two pieces of the chicken/leek pie. The number of ingredients from our own garden: leeks, onion, carrot, tomato, raspberries made the meal that much more special.

The MIA has training tonight for the 3rd Thursday evenings, a sort of hip young single crowd draw.  I decided I’d go just for fun, see what it was like.  One Thursday a month wouldn’t be a lot. Of course, I’d have to keep track with our sheepshead night.

This and That

Lughnasa                                       Waning Artemis Moon

An inside day. E-mails, sorting out tasks ahead.  Doing online stuff like ordering pink daffodils for granddaughter Ruth, same for us plus some fall blooming bulbs and more daffodils for naturalizing.  Also bought a honey cake bundt pan (Nordicware!) and an Armenian Honey Pot with Good Year written on it in Hebrew from the source for all things Jewish.  That kind of thing.  Domesticity.  Kate’s sewing and I’m doing this sort of thing.

Going up now to reheat and brown the chicken leek pie for lunch.

Another Quayle.

Lughnasa                              Waxing Artemis Moon

Personal note:  Dan was at Depauw when I was at Wabash.  We never met.  The parent seems to have bred true.

On apples not falling from the tree:

Republican congressional candidate Ben Quayle Friday night lashed out at his political foes and the media for what he described as their “coordinated effort to assassinate my character.”

The 33-year-old son of former Vice President Dan Quayle was besieged by controversy this week after Nik Richie, the founder of the now-defunct DirtyScottsdale.com, outed Quayle as one of the original creators of the raunchy, sex-themed website lampooning Scottsdale’s trashy nightclub scene.

The Morning in Brief

Lughnasa                                           Waning Grandchildren Moon

Up.  Out.  In.  Worked out.

New Schedule for Ancient Trails

Summer                                            Waning Grandchildren Moon

Just to let you know, I’m on a new work schedule now and posts will probably come later in the day.

Ouch, Stick Me Again.

Summer                                         Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Picked young green beans, old parsnips, a middle-aged onion and one adolescent pepper.  All for supper tonite.  Life in the slow lane.  Yeah.

Sister Mary gets her Ph.D. conferred next Tuesday.  Looking at the website for the graduation ceremony I realized Mary will be one of the few caucasians getting a sheepskin.  Another example of geo-diversity, globalization.

Brother Mark sojourns now in north-eastern Thailand which he reports as peaceful.

“I am in Ubon Ratchatani now. I have been to Beung Kan, between Nakhon Phanom and Nong Khai. I stayed in Nakhon-Phanom a couple of days, daytripping to That Phanom. It is a  very old Isan temple, modeled on That Luang in Vientiene, Laos. Ubon is having this candle festival next week. I saw one big float at a temple. It is made from this orange wax. It is a sight to see. I also went to this temple here in Ubon, modeled on a major temple in India. It had all this gold leaf everywhere.”

Joseph called Monday night.  He wants to get a few more tattoos.  His plan is to use his right arm for India.  He has his name in Bengali on it already.  Now he wants to add Jag Deep, the nickname given to him in the orphanage in Calcutta.  On the left arm he wants to have an Ellis family crest and a Latin phrase of some kind.  I didn’t understand it so well over the phone.

Here’s the other part.  He wants me to get an Ellis crest, too.  Hmmm.  Still, the purpose seems solid, so, in spite of my dislike of needles, I’ll do it.  When I told Kate, she reminded me she wanted us to get a tattoo together.  Geez.

It looks like this.  More or less.

Bee Diary: Supplemental

Summer                                Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Ah.  Today I discovered a way to harvest/extract honey.  It’s called the cut comb method and the particular information that was most helpful came from Linda’s Bees.  If the general notion of bee-keeping interests you, there is this local website, Nature’s Nectary, that focuses on northern beekeeping.

The comb honey process made it easy to create small aluminum foil gift packages of honey from Artemis Hives.  Fun to have a homemade treat to give away to friends.  Homemade in the parent colony, that is.  I just collected it, cut it and packaged it. Damned retailers get all the profit, the producers get stiffed every time.

In a shopworn phrase this lifted my bee-keeping to a new level.  The usual bee work, building woodenware (Kate), installing foundations (me) and doing the hive inspections (me) plus hiving packages and doing the divides and reverses (me) has an intrinsic fascination.  This superorganism performs its work in an astonishingly graceful way, choreographed by millions of years of evolution and attended to by me, but only in the most superficial way.  I don’t fly out to the flowers, lay the eggs, take care of the nursery, remove dead bees, store pollen and honey or flap wings to cool the hive.

A magic exists in the natural world that requires no mystics, no spell books or grimoires.

Como Zoo. Wow.

Summer                                  Waxing Grandchildren Moon

I gotta get out more often.  They’ve added a whole new wing plus more conservatory at Como Zoo.  The whole place looks all grown up.  It’s now a long ways from the big cats strolling back and forth back and forth in the small iron barred prison cells.

A new polar bear exhibit allows for the possibility of a family unit, a mama bear, a little bear and a daddy bear kept over in his own enclosure so he won’t have to say, “Oops, honey.  I ate the kid.”  It’s a great display and the two males there now wandered around looking uncomfortable in the heat like we were.

The dew point has hit 81.  81.  I mean.  81.  I don’t know whether this is global warming, but it is certainly Andover warming.