gulf wars, partial review

[thanate]

my camera card is downloading from the trip up, so some day there will be pictures. But it may be a while... (almost 500 pictures @ 5mp each... I'm not sure how big that averages yet in terms of file size, but larger than 3.2mp from my old camera, and they have to download the slow way, since I wasn't thinking about this when I got the PC card reader, instead of a USB reader that can go through the USB 2.0 PC card, thus allowing the external hard drive to do so as well. Silly laptop being too old for faster USB ports)

Right, so there was travel, which was good. Pretty mountains, with trees and elk on them, museum in Knoxville with some really cool lithics and a travelling armor exhibit, aquarium in Chattanooga with normal aquarium stuff plus butterflies (just downhill of the coolest sculpture ever, which will likely be the first picture initiative) and rock city, which was pretty and very not-crowded while I was there (yay first thing in the morning) and then ended with disturbing black-lit gnomes and nursery rhyme sculpture for no apparent reason. And then the Parthenon, about which brief commentary is in one of the comments to the entry before last, if you care. (here)

Didn't do as much of the fencing as I might have, there being other priorities, and despite troyfish's assurances I think I ought to have been fighting a little better than I was. Although this may partly have been that I was doing extremely well at bloodbath, and only about as well as I normally do these days for the war, which threw me off. Was only in the Ladies of the Rose tourney, where I got knocked out the first round. No surprise, but it was by a newbie, and I *ought* to do better than that... still haven't got a tournament mentality that'll work for me yet. Did ok in the battles-- after refusing to let people kill me off while legged at the end of the ravine battle, I did get one of the last kills, and then the guy I'd just killed because he was ignoring me wanted to come up and shake my hand, preventing me from killing his neighbor. Phoey. Overall, I was still feeling less effective than I should have been, although that may be more that I'm seeing more than I used to and understanding what ought to be going on, rather than actually doing less. Got a few good pick-ups (I finally got to fight Vortigern with his longsword, which was excellent) and noticed a couple details of the things troyfish keeps telling me people do that they actually did. Kind of cool. Not too bad on the whole, could have done more, but as I said there was other stuff more important.

And there was boy, and I like him rather a lot. He's nice and stuff. And keeps offering to beat people up for me. And gave me a little plastic pin that's a dead cat. He's so sweet! :) Er, pardon the moment of drippiness...

There were other boys who were entertaining in their various ways, too, and dominyk did not in fact fall over dead, or even cough up a lung, which we were all quite pleased by, although he did feel the need to name the rocks under his tent, which seemed slightly odd to me... And Ragnar (the not king one) got accused of kidnapping me, although that was by Janos, so I'm not sure if it counts... although a case could be made that dragging a fencer to Calontir's camp to listen to people sing is almost like kidnapping. And I spent various brief amounts of time hanging out with celts and fraternising with the enemy (mostly Alessandro and Angeline, but I'm sure there were others) and stuff like that. And lots of time ignoring my own camp-- I swear, I have no idea who half the other Atlantians there were. Oh well.

Anyway, having returned, all the work continues to be "upcoming" (there are lots of projects in the semi-near future, but we don't exactly know how near that is) so if any of you local people want to hang out in the next week or so, I might have time to do lunches or whatnot.

And the camera downloaded, so here is picture #1 of me, with the coolest sculpture ever:


(sculpture "Boreal" by Deborah Butterfield, cast bronzed with patina; apparently she does lots of bronze horses that look like they're wood.)

Comments

[stanci.livejournal.com]

Nuh uh - being drug to the Calontiri camp to listening to the singing does NOT count as kidnapping. Especially since those folks throw a good party and there is good singing.
And like Janos has any room to talk.... :)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I don't think anybody said he did. :) It was mainly a problem that other people set up tents where I had thought grauwulf was going to get to, and so we both ended up blocked in in such a way that it was much easier to walk around the back of camp to get in, and so no one saw us at all. Hence when we showed up for court, Janos said he'd last seen me several days earlier in company with Ragnar, and was starting to wonder.

It was more of a roving party that settled on Calontir anyway. And I feel that a kidnapper would most likely not have accompanied me back to my camp and stuck around to help Mel set up his tent.

[stanci.livejournal.com]

That boy is good at helping out like that :) It's one of his better traits.
Although your use of the word likely is probably true enough. Heaven knows there might be other stranger kidnappers out there than Rags.