Spring Training Continues

Gryphon is fattening up. Here's a photo of him from yesterday with "Lady Devon" getting ready for a run down the list. Compare this to one month ago. The photo angles are different, and you can't see it in this shot but his ribs are not longer painfully visible. More at the Rittmeister's blog...

This coming weekend is the local SCA chapter's June Fair, mundanely known as the Pt. Gamble Medieval Fair. We'll be doing some horsey demos in conjunction with the Madrone Equestrian Guild (SCA). Good folks. Easy commute. Yay! Weekend before last we had the good folks, hellish commute situation: not "yay". Six hours each way to Toppenish in Eastern WA and dirt and foxtails. Ugh.

Memorial Day

Take some time today to remember those who have gone before us, fighting to preserve our peace and security. Yes, peace and security suffer entropy just like anything else in this fallen world: if you don't put energy in, it degrades.

Side note: You know how Google almost always modifies its logo to reflect the holiday or historical happening of the day, no matter how obscure? Events like, say Leonardo da Vinci's birthday or compost awareness day are cleverly noted, so what's the deal with there being no clever logo for Memorial Day?! Exceedingly, embarassingly lame, folks.

Period Authenticity Rant

The other day I was link hopping from the fabulous website of Drea Leed (who has inspired my efforts to dress like a Flemish fishwife), and I found a nifty article on cassocks. Of course I shot it right over to the Rittmaster, for whom I made a cassock last year, to see what he thought of the essay. Next thing I know he's going on about this person's web site and how he's been there before and how great it is. The thing I had already noted was that this woman did her hair up right. No Farrah Fawcet or Betty Page bangs, no rock-n-roll shag hanging out all over the place: just fab Elizabethan hair.

This morning he's sitting at his computer chuckling away, still navigating this stranger's site. "Read this one!" he says. OK, it's a rant on the increase in "farbiness" (innapropriate beyond mere anachronism) of the SCA. This woman is a goddess. That she remains in the SCA confuses me a bit, because there are better organizations out there for people of her calibre, but then maybe she's one of those sainted ones who attempts to lead by example. Anyway, her essay pretty much sums up why I let my membership in the SCA lapse many years ago, and why we only go to the occasional event as non-member participants IF it has horse activities. If the SCA were less beauracracy and drama and more re-enacting, it might hold an attraction. At its present level of "all-inclusive, non-judgemental, history-be-damned" mediocrity: forget it. It's not that I want to attend activities where people rush up to me to compliment my hand-sewn clothing or ultra-period camp furniture, I do those things to my own (and my husband's) standards. I just couldn't bear to be lamer than I was last year, it's all about constant improvement. No, it's that I don't want to go to the effort of putting together a pretty decent kit...and then have to pay money to go to hang out with people who, as the Extreme Costumer puts it, can't even make the minimum effort.

June Faire, the local SCA's stab at a "Medieval Fair", is coming up quickly. We (Warhorse Guild) will be doing the horse thing there again. It's a nice event for us, because, although it's held on a historic site with buildings that only date back to mid-19th century (the disadvantage of being West Coast USA...sigh), it's a whopping ten minute commute from Tilbury Camp. Last year the local SCA poobahs decided to make a kind of "gypsy caravan camp" about 100' from the horse field. I thought, "Hey, no problem! Pavilions for a backdrop." Imagine my chagrin (but really not surprise) when I drove over to check things out on Friday night and saw a giant cluster of glowing R-flipping-Vs!!! Light's ablazing, awnings deployed, nasty aluminum chairs dotted about the landscape, sparkling in the light of the Coleman lanterns. The cherry on the cake was the humans in this diorama of modernity, proudly wearing their cotton-poly T-tunics, capes, and fake fur hats, sipping sodas and and talking on their cell-phones. Aaaaaagh! This is not a hardship camping site. We're talking manicured lawns, running water, portapotties every 100 feet or so. Come...on...people! This is Western Washington, for crying out loud. There are no scorpions, chiggers, fire ants, deer flies, or anything else. You can throw down a bed roll and be cozy, ok?

Hey, now I'm ranting. I guess it's contagious.

Joust Training: Day 1

My first video experiment. Don't be too critical, I shot it on my mom's little still cam:
The DP needs to learn to keep mouth shut when filming, and the editor needs to get better at sound engineering.

Meet Gryphon

He's our new horse, an "appendix Quarterhorse", whatever that is. All I know is he's smaller and dainty-er than the drafts and half-drafts we already have wandering around. He seems entirely less spooky than Jaran, who is now for sale (need a big, sporty Percheron?). Unfortunately, he came from an unhappy home and was being, shall we say, underfed. We'll cure that in a hurry. They don't call our place the "fat farm" for nothing.

Tomorrow we try him out with quintiain, etc. Stay tuned.

Reality Check

So, the other day my friend Bev (see blonde girl in armor in earlier entry) was at the stables where her new horse is being trained. She took a dufflebag of armor to "sack out" ye horse (his name is Darshan). "Sacking out" a horse basically means getting them used to terrifying, horse-mauling predatory things like, say, crinkly paper blowing by in the wind, mud puddles, umbrellas that loom up at you (which I find scary, too), pieces of string lying in the road, etc. For those of you who don't work with horses, I am totally serious. The most unlikely things appear as DANGEROUS PREDATORS to the average horse. Seriously, my husband's current horse, Woody, a huge half-draft behemoth, once jumped about ten feet sideways when one of my cats came trotting down the fence rail toward him. Luckily he jumped away from Gordo, who was bent over adjusting the saddle girth, and not right on to his head. Yes, a cat is a predator, and horses are prey animals, but it's kind of irrational in my mind to shy away from a predator who's, say, smaller than your nose... but that's just me.

Anyway.... armor can be really really scary! It's shiny and it clanks and clacks and it's a NEW THING and oh my! So, what you do is things like, say, tie some clanky armor bits to the saddle and lunge the horse around a bit until that clanky noise every time their toes hit the ground becomes old news. Then, you graduate to wearing the armor and sitting on the horse. With a horse like Darshan, you get the "Why are you dressed like a trash can? Can I have a cookie?" response. Other horses are pretty sure you are from outer space and have come to perform vivisection.

Anyway again.... there was some guy there at the stables, who asked Bev what was in the clanky bag. When she told him, he said, "Oh, but it's not real armor, is it?"

"Actually, it is." She replied. "We do jousting."

"Yeah, " he aceded, "but it's not real armor, like they had back then."

"Well, actually, it is." she repeated. Which is true. This is not plastic, fiberglass, tin, or otherwise cobbled together prop armor. It's real armor made on real olde patterns by real armorers using the same types of tools used centuries ago for people to wear as protection so they won't kill each other playing dangerous horse games.

Mr. Ferrous Craneous continued to bleat, "Yeah, but it's not real." At this point I might have been tempted to hit him over the head with a vambrace or something. "Does that feel real to ya?" Whack! "How about this?!" (Bonking him with a close helmet). I think the idea of somebody reviving a Medieval or Renaissance equestrian sport like jousting is just so outside of some people's personal reality that they just can't believe it really happens. Excuse me: what's the state sport of Maryland? Hm?

Jousting, real jousting of various types, is going on pretty much around the globe these days. There was a recent episode on some kind of infotainment show (we saw this on tape, since we don't have cable or watch TV since Fox cancelled Firefly, harumph) with a "warrior" theme where they took their hand-picked "average people" and trained them as jousters. The bombastic host of the show, a stunt-coordinator in real life, I believe, was blathering and blustering about how "This is the first time real jousting has been done in over 500 YEARS!!!!!!!!!" Um, I repeat: what's the state sport of Maryland? Yes, there are people all over the world who "joust" on bicycles with nerf bats or whatever, but there is also a lot of real jousting going on, and pretty much has been continuously for hundreds of years. There were tournaments in the 19th century using antique, refurbished armours from "back then", even. Now, if you know the right people, you can have brand new armor made to order that's every bit as nice and "real". So there.