Nik's Saga

The following things are complete:

• My SCA heraldry submission, printed, filled in, felt-tipped and posted to Finland.
  
• A reference for a former student, written, printed on university paper, signed, sealed and posted.
  
• A trawl through the websites of the 65 companies which are listed in the Dow Jones Composite Average. Until today I had no idea that Caterpillar US, makers of very big yellow toys for boys (and girls) have 26 RSS feeds. Okay, that's nothing compared to IBM's 300+ but my mind is still somewhat boggled by it all.
  
• The waste of time that is involved in posting junk mail in my letter box. Every day this week I've had at least three glossy advertising brochures that have travelled directly from my letterbox to my paper recycling bag without being opened. In this country that has to import all of its paper there seems to be a terrible waste of the stuff.
  
• The Eric Clapton Collection. I bought it to cheer myself up.
  
• The working week. Thank goodness.
  

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This was the preferred technique for learning a dance tonight.

Yes, it's the last Thursday of the month, which means dance practice. I haven't had anywhere near enough practice with the tarota to accompany the dancers with it so it was back to the alto recorder, same as last month. Oh yes, and I still hate B flat... although possibly not as much as I hate E flat.

We've pretty much got the Double, Single, Burgundian and Pease Bransles, Nouvelle Amour and Petit Vriens sorted, and we've started work on Danse de Cleves, Amoroso, the Quadran Pavane and Ly Bens Dysonis. This final one ended up with us singing the steps as we went along, which made it a lot easier for the musically-inclined amongst us. I think I may have to annotate my music so that I've got bar numbers and the steps under the individual bars so that they're a bit easier to follow for the less musical.

One of the fun things about dance practice is that we do it in garb. I'm not sure which surprises the other gym users more - a bunch of maniacs with swords but currently in modern clothing, or a bunch of weirdos in period garb dancing to the accompaniment of an occasionally shaky recorder (also played by a weirdo in garb). I suspect that the dancers are currently top of the weirdos chart, but that this will change come the new year once all of the fencers are in garb too.

And thinking of garb and weirdos... like weirdos who wear things that would normally be considered garb in the 'danelaw (I do love that term - from mundane-law, in Fallen Angels by Larry Niven - it applies just as well to non-SCAdom as it does to non-SF-fandom)... here, as requested, is the photo of the snood:



I thought that the red one would show up the structure better than the blue or the black. Besides, red goes better with the dress. :)
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I've always had a thing about snoods.

I suspect I saw one on television at a very early age - most likely in an Errol Flynn movie or something similar - and then wished for one for many years. It didn't help that for a while in the early eighties there was a fashion for things which were known locally as snoods but which were actually long tubular scarves which you could wrap around your head a couple of times to make a sort of soft hood. Everyone called them 'snoods' but I knew that this wasn't really what I wanted.

What I actually wanted was the net/crochet bag with the elasticated edge that holds long hair out of the way and under control at the back of your head. Not the invisible hairnet style, commonly seen attached to hats on assistants at the Asda deli counter, but the string ones in rich colours and, preferably, covered in beads or jewels while you're at it.

Okay, so maybe jewelled ones wouldn't be suitable for work but I'm sure I could make exceptions for faculty general meetings and other big occasions. Unadorned ones, on the other hand, are perfectly servicable on a day-to-day basis - I have proved this today. I recently ordered some pewter online from the extremely useful Fettered Cock Pewters and took the opportunity to order some snoods while I was at it. (I can crochet them myself and even wrote down my pattern for them somewhere but right now I suspect that it'd take me half a year to complete one.) They arrived yesterday and so I tested one out at fencing last night, discovering that it was a lot more effective than my scrunchie combs and with the added advantage that it doesn't catch in the back of my mask. It was sufficiently successful that I wore a different one to work today and I haven't had to reset it all day - unlike my scrunchie combs which seem to slip every hour or so.

The temptation is to keep a plain one for work and to embellish the other two. The three I've got are red, black and blue, but I'm very tempted next time I buy something from FCP to pick up a couple more including the purple one. Maybe after Christmas.
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Tuesday is fencing day.

Well, strictly speaking alternate Tuesdays are fencing days but you get the idea. :) It's a good thing that everyone has ordered their own fencing equipment because we've got to the point where they really need to be able to armour up and practice thrusts, which is a bit tricky when there isn't enough kit to go around. For now, then, I'm running mini-tourneys to let them get the feel for calibration and so forth rather than continue with new stuff. Not that anyone seems to be complaining about the opportunity to kill each other, mind.

What I do need, though, are some more interesting tournaments for evenly-matched combatants. We've done round robins so far, but this is making it tricky to identify a winner because they're all pretty much on the same level. I ran a first-blood tourney which did produce an outright winner... by a single point. We also talked a bit about melee combat and I suspect that's going to end up taking up quite a lot of time once we get all of the kit. One huge advantage of having a large group of fencers is that we can do this sort of thing and assume that we're going to have 6-8 fencers on a regular basis. Maybe I can create a book of assorted scenarios for various locations and occasions. Hmm... I must give that some thought.
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Today I marked sixty courseworks.

I had hoped to get all of them done today, but by the time I'd got this far my brain was dribbling out of my ears and I was completely incapable of focussing on them any more. In fact I'd hoped to get then done quite a while ago but more and more things kept needing to be done - recording lectures, writing quizes and exams, that sort of thing. I found my mind wandering all over the place just to avoid what I was supposed to be doing.

So east was I to distract that I even spent a few minutes, challenged by a post written by L in her blog, to write a poem about my favourite socks:

My socks are wooly rainbows - they're really rather sweet.
Hand-knitted here in Iceland, they fit over my feet.

Like I said, my brains were dribbling out of my ears by that point. And then I marked some more. I've now only got twelve left to do so I'll be able to get them sorted in the morning. Once that's over I'm hoping to get a few more research hours in. Before, that is, I have to start learning java for next semester's module.

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I haven't really done much today.

I was planning to do some embroidery but ended up snoozing through most of the afternoon.I always feel a bit guilty doing that - I think that I really should be doing something more worthwhile.

One thing was worthwhile though - I've completed the scroll I was working on yesterday. Thanks to the magic of texture cloning this photo doesn't have the name on it, just in case. I don't think that the person for whom I've done it is likely to see it here but...



The hand is basically gothic textura quadrata with a gold versal inspired by Ricketts MS 240, all courtesy of Medieval Calligraphy - Its History and Technique. The lines are actually straight; the slight curve is due to the way I propped it up to photograph it.
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Lots of A&S stuff today, although not necessarily in the normal order.

Today has been pretty much equally split between sorting out the submission forms for my SCA heraldic device and starting work on a scroll from the ID backlog. The submission forms were a case of tracing over the vector graphic of my device using my MacLightBox then inking in the outlne. At this point I had a bit of a problem - I do have coloured pencils but they're watercolour pencils and therefore not really ideal for doing something like this. Instead I ended up doing a bit of Googling to discover if felt tip pens are allowed - they appear to be acceptable - and have just finished colouring in the necessary three copies.

Yes, I know it doesn't take a whole day to draw and colour in three pieces of paper. :) In my defence I was also providing moral and occasionally technical support to M who was drafting out the pattern for her fencing armour. Earlier this morning I'd remembered that thanks to F I do have something to wear to see Beowulf so I didn't have to worry about making something after all. Instead, then, I started the ID A&S company of merit scroll that I'm working on as part of the drive to deal with the backlog.

This has a lot of text on it. I did a rough sketch of the capital to play about with a couple of ideas and then added the text, at which point I realised that it would make much more sense to do this back to front; to do the calligraphy first and then do the illuminated capital once I knew exactly how much space I had to fill down the side. So far I've got the text done on the real thing, which means that I should be able to get the capital done tomorrow and then send it off later this week.
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These three things have been the major highlights of the day.

A while ago I decided to try out the vector graphics stuff in Adobe Fireworks. I have it on my machine at work and as Dreamweaver is one of those things that comes in useful occasionally I thought I'd give Fireworks a try as well. The intention was to trace my putative device so that I'd have a nice scalable version of it for use on the web.

I started with the pegasus rampant and, eventually, managed to create a vector version of the rather nice plain one from the 628th Support Battalion. So far so good. Next I had to do the raven to go with it. Hmm. Yes. I've spent the past six years trying and failing to draw ravens so I decided to give up and will be resubmitting the new design rather than the old one. Much easier to draw and, as far as I and the heralds mailing list can see, conflict-free. In the end I didn't build this one in Fireworks but in Pixelmator, a Mac graphics package which costs considerably less than any of Adobe's graphics packages.

So that's the userpic. There were also two parcels which arrived not long after I got home. The first is from my sister who recently went off to Las Vegas on holiday and returned with this for me:


I have a suspicion that he's supposed to be a bear but he does look more like an Alsatian to me so it's obvious that I'm going to have to call my vulcan dog Spot irrespective of his colouring. :) He is terribly sweet and I accept that I'm a sad geek to think this. Oh - and there was also chocolate. One of the Wispa bars has already been munched.

The second box is also Trek-related (how apt). My second gaming order arrived containing my copy of Federation Commander (Romulan Border version) and Formula Dé. It's been quite a while since I played FD and I know that I'm going to end up buying at least a couple more of the circuits from their French manufacturer. It comes with Monaco and Zandvoort 1 but I really want Silverstone and Monza. *Sigh* I really must wait until after Christmas for those.

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This evening's A&S meeting turned into a retail planning meeting.

The Shire is about to put an order to 8 (yes, that is an eight, not a typo) epees, masks and pairs of gloves, plus bags and chest protectors to go with them. On Saturday M and I will be sitting at the sewing machine; she'll be making her fencing armour, I'll finally be putting some of my silk stash to use to make a Carolingian gown. This, at any rate, is the plan. Whether it survives contact with the enemy will bw seen.

It sounds as if our heavy fighters are getting organised too. Actually our heavy fighters are our light fighters minus two plus a couple in strange non-local places. More supplies of rattan are, I believe, on order and there is talk of making gambesons and ordering things like gauntlets and helms. Not only that but there seems to be this curious interest in slings. Normal combat archery was considered until various folks saw the golf-tube arrows and decided that they would make it a pointless exercise both literally and figuratively. Instead, then, there is this dream of fielding a cohort of Klakavirki slingers casting tennis balls thither and yon. I think it's a rather fun idea myself, and I'll almost certainly have a go at learning the basic techniques.

Come to think of it, until they get their armour sorted I can treat it as a target sport just like archery. Okay, so it's strictly speaking a thrown weapon, but I'm paranoid enough to believe that having a target archery marshal keeping an eye on things is better than having no-one keeping watch. Sounds like I'm going to have to talk to the appropriate people to see about getting a thrown weapons marshalling qualification.
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It's nearly Christmas.

I know this in part because I've just bought the first third of the necessary Christmas presents online. I hope it's the most expensive third; my credit card is so going to hurt at the end of the month, but what do you buy the father and sister who have everything? That's one reason, but it's also because I've finished the main teaching for the semester.

Okay, so I've still got a pile of courseworks to mark, a set of exam solutions to complete, half a lecture to record and a revision tutorial to give, but everything else is complete. Maybe, just maybe, I can get another couple of research hours in again next week before I have to learn the java module ready to teach it next semester.
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Is it really only Tuesday?

I think that perhaps yesterday's cinema trip has skewed my sense of the week - if I'm hanging out with the folks from the Shire it's normally Tuesday or Thursday, not Monday. Whatever it is, it feels as if it should be much later in the week. Some of this might be down to the fact that it's going to be a very heavy workload week. Today I (eventually) completed the online test for the two business courses. Tomorrow I've got to finish the solutions to the database exam. Oh yes, and while I'm doing all of this I've still got about 75 courseworks left to mark - preferably before Friday. If anything else gets dumped on me I may have to let that deadline slip a little until early next week.

The snow has gone again, which is good. It seems to warm up quite nicely during the day and we're even getting quite warm clear nights. Mars, in particular, is quite impressive in the eastern skies in the evenings. It's astoundingly bright - so much so that I had to check its colour to make sure it wasn't Jupiter (which, it turns out, sets a lot earlier in the afternoon at present). The colour did give it away somewhat.

No more impressive aurorae yet, though.
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So where was William Cecil? And Robert Dudley?

Tonight a group from the Shire went to the cinema in garb to see Elizabeth - The Golden Age. Okay, so it's visually quite impressive... but it does leave a lot to be desired in terms of historical accuracy. Fortunately my companions, being Icelanders. could appreciate it without worrying about the inaccuracies. I, on the other hand, did get a bit frustrated and have threatened to give the Tilbury speech at an A&S (or some similar) meeting just to show what they missed.

The cinema attendant thought we were wonderful and that people should do things like this more often. As a result we've decided to 'dress down' and do something similar for Beowulf in a couple of weeks time. Thankfully t-tunics are a bit more comfortable for sitting in a cinema seat for almost two hours. My ruff, for instance, is now definitely the worse for wear which is why I removed it for the photos below:



Also shown are B, A and M. After the cinema we returned to M's place to eat soup and play Zombie Fluxx. It's very good. The new 'Creepers' - the zombie cards - add a whole new dynamic to the game. There are just as many rules changes as before but far fewer of them require a change in the number of cards drawn, played or held in hand; instead they affect things like how you fight the zombies. Until this point original Fluxx had become a fun but in many ways conquered game. This new version has certainly added a bit of spice... and the opportunity to be truly vicious to your opponents.
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45 minutes is the difference between the theoretical and actual sunset here at present.

I've wondered for a while what difference the mountains make to the sunrise/sunset times but I just haven't got around to doing the actual calculations. The fjörd runs practically north-south here but in the south it begins to twist and turn into the highlands so the entire southern horizon is blocked by some sort of mountainous terrain - generally either an arète (a knife-like ridge between two glacial valleys) or a tuya (a table mountain formed when a volcano errupts underneath a glacier).

Today it was bright and clear, and the fresh snow that had fallen on the Hliðarfjall reflected the sun quite brilliantly until just after three o'clock when the sun dipped below the southern local horizon. I checked what time sunset was due to occur and found that it wasn't for another three quarters of an hour. Now by my back-of-an-envelope calculations (aided and abetted by the US Naval Observatory's Astronomical Applications Department and the knowledge that I'm at 66° north) that means that at midwinter it's going to be above the local horizon for about an hour of the 2h42m it is above the absolute horizon. Interestingly enough, calculations on the same site led me to do some more investigation of day length. While the length of day at midwinter is 2h42, at midsummer it is 23h30m. Ah, the joys of an elliptical orbit. :)

The snow that indirectly prompted this fell yesterday. For almost all of the day we had a fall of powdery snow which seems to be light enough to blow away in the moderate winds. Nevertheless, the mountains are white once more after having been dark/white/dark/white several times over the last few weeks when we've had snow and then had it blown off by a bit of wind overnight. Every time I find myself wondering is this going to be the snowfall that settles in for the winter? And, to be honest, hoping that it'll hold off for just another week. And then another. And maybe another. Admittedly the snow is quite effective at reflecting any light that hits it and emeliorates the long dark nights a little, but right now I think I'd rather just be able to drive without the stress that the icy ground induces.
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It turns out that the curling tongs aren't quite long enough to starch the ruff.

Nor, as it turns out, hot enough. So after several attempts I opted to cheat and wire the edge. So for so good. Then I tried with the the supportasse I'd spent the morning soldering and discovered that this was considerably too short. So far I've extended it up by 50%, which has improved it somewhat but I think I may have to extend it again once I've got some more wire. I have gold-coloured wire but as the rest is silver-coloured I think it might look a little strange. On the other hand, it's going to be hidden by a bloody great ruff so who's going to see it? :)

I've also managed to finish the pearl and bead girdle I started at A&S night the other week. It is very long, to the extent that I'll have to pin it up to the skirt. I've just got the little decorative thing to do for the end, which shouldn't take too long. Hmm... except that I've used up all of my plain wire making the supportasse. Ah. I suppose I'll just have to get a bit creative then.
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Remember that old fencing injury of mine?

The one I got from sleeping on a cold floor in Lincoln Castle while there for Rent-A-Don - it was acquired at a sporting event so it's a sporting injury, right? :) Well, it's not playing up but last year's car accident did do something unpleasant to my biceps, which is terribly frustrating now that I've got the fencers in the shire to the point where they are crossing swords with each other and occasionally me. It's quite possible that it just wasn't warmed up enough on Tuesday so I'm going to have to be a bit more vigourous in my warmups in future.

I'm at the point where lifting my arm above the horizonal is becoming quite painful even when I can do it and half of the time I can't. :( Particularly when I'm generally using my left hand moving my computer about and doing a lot of general stuff.

On a more positive note, though, the first edition of my subscription to New Scientist arrived today. When I realised that they've now set Iceland in the Europe cost bracket rather than the Rest of World bracket, and that you pay quarterly rather than annually, I gave in and subscribed. This means that my monthly bathroom reading now has four New Scientists, Scientific American and four different IEEE/ACM publications.

A number of years ago I remember reading that 50% of scientists read nothing but technical publications and the others read technical publications and science fiction. At the time I was horrified that there were people who read nothing other than technical stuff. Now I can understand how it happens - with a monthly reading pile like that it's difficult to make time for anything else. Fortunately I manage somehow.
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Okay, that is a silly wiki name, but it's still quite tempting.

Today I was finishing up the final practical computing lecture when I came across a reference to a GuerillaWIki. Now this was not a term I recognised, so I applied my GoogleFu and proceded to discover a rather nifty widget, the TiddlyWiki. This is basically a personal wiki implemented in javascript as a single file.

I proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon setting up a workwiki as a management tool to help me keep track of the assorted stuff that I need to handle on the admin side of my job. The nice thing is that it doesn't need to have any extra applications which get lost when someone changes all of your network settings. I suspect that this will be far more useful than the previous tool I used for a while, which was effectively a list-making application.

TiddlyWiki proved sufficiently easy to set up and use that I've set one up for my new RPG campaign. We had the first session tonight just to do character creation. Well, it can take an evening to generate characters for MegaTraveller if you've never done it before (and two of my three players hadn't, while the third had done it once before). What was interesting was the response from the players that the career history was a great idea because it meant that you didn't have to work out your entire past but could concentrate on how this list of events would have influenced the character.

I was a bit disappointed to find that the CD version of the MT:Player's Manual has two very important pages missing - the first two pages of the skill list. Fortunately I have it in another form but it's rather annoying all the same. Nevertheless, it's very useful to have everything on the computer where I can access everything together. Ahhhh... it feels so good to be getting back into gaming, especially getting back into Traveller.

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Today I had meetings and labs and didn't kill anyone. I think that's quite an achievement. :)

I also wrote most of a lecture on e-business and e-commerce, had ten out of seventy people attend my lab and... well, not a lot else really. I'm trying not to care about the course but I feel as if those remaining sixty people have stolen three and a half hours of my time. And they'll steal another two hours from me on Monday by not turning up to the lecture, not including the time it takes to write the lectures and the labs. The folks who do turn up are great, but sometimes I do wish that I could fail people for non-attendance.

On a more cheerful note, another parcel arrived today, this time the games I ordered recently. I'd forgotten that I'd also ordered Chrononauts so I got quite a pleasant surprise when I opened the box. Naturally, though, there is balance in all things, and I realised that I'd ordered Romulan Space, not Romulan Border. Ah well, it just means that I'll have more dreadnoughts than the average fleet, that's all.

This meant that I had to re-order and make sure that I selected Romulan Border. And while I was at it I added Formula De to the order, which should make Martha bounce with anticipation. I think I'm going to have to have a few more games nights over the coming weeks.

Oh - and Zombie Fluxx looks really rather interesting. I've already accepted that this will make the perfect Christmas gift for a friend of mine, and I'm hoping that we might get to playtest it tomorrow evening post-character-creation. Yes, I'm running an RPG again. After much thought I'm going to run Traveller. Or rather, I'll do my usual trick and use the MT system to run a different setting. :)

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I've found my other role at fencing practice - that of tiebreaker

This evening was our bi-weekly fencing practice, which has now started to take the form of drills in the first half of the evening and a round robin tournament in the second half. This is proving quite popular, if a bit time-consuming as there's a lot of swapping of armour between bouts. This week I think that pretty much everyone will wake up bruised, which is probably a good thing.

This week's tournament was a much closer-run thing than the last one. This time folks were ready for B's handsniping and managed to defend against it much more successfully. We had a round robin for 6 fencers which ended up with four of them tying on three wins each. As it was getting late I armoured up and faced each of them twice, with the aim that whoever got the highest number of kills against me would win. Eventually A managed to get a double kill to win the competition, which was good.

We also discovered that letting M watch The Princess Bride was a bad idea - she's developing a habit of swapping hands mid-bout... just like me. :)
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Forget the dog ate my homework - I've heard a far better excuse than that.

I recently received an email from one of my Practical Computing students apologising that he wasn't going to be in my classes this week. The reason was, he told me, that he had to be down in Reykjavík for the week as he's a finalist in this year's Herra Ísland competition.

As excuses go, I have to admit that's a good one. It's certainly not one I've ever come across before. I've had the usual set of personal/parental/filial illnesses and other misfortunes, but I'm going to remember this one for many years. I hope that he wins - it would be quite amusing to be able to say that Mr Iceland 2007 skipped class in order to win his title. :)
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I now have a ruff that requires starching to within an inch of its life.

My suspicion is that I'm going to have to invest in yet another piece of SCA-related hardware, this time a pair of electric curling tongs, in order to actually set the folds in place. That and a very large can of spray starch. Once it's starched it should look quite impressive though - it must be about 8-9 inches wide from collar to lace edging. Hmm... I don't know that flying with something like that will be easy; I might have to travel with the ruff and the curling tongs and buy extra starch once I arrive.

This morning, of course, the ruff-making ceased for the duration of the ceremony at the cenotaph. Having the cable tv meant that I could watch it on Sky News this year, which is a big improvement on the lack of coverage I've been able to get even online in previous years while I've been over here. I am very fortunate in that all of my extended family managed to survive the wars of the twentieth century in spite of having been in almost every theatre of war going, serving both in the military and the merchant navy.

It doesn't seem to be particularly fashionable to support the armed forces. I don't care about fashion. As for those who lost their lives in all of the conflicts, or who returned from them, or who are serving now... I will remember them.
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The dress and farthingale are now complete. The ruff is underway.

Strictly speaking I finished the dress this morning, but that's only because I left the fray-stop on the ribbons to dry overnight. The last thing to do was to overstitch the eyelets so that I don't have nasty metal eyelets visible and also that I can believe that said metal eyelets won't fall out when I wear it. This morning, then, once the ribbons were dry I tied the sleeves to the body of the gown and tried it on (sans corset and sans farthingale) just to see how the sleeves felt. I've never tried detatchable sleeves before so I've always been a bit concerned that they'd gape all over the place. Fortunately this doesn't seem to be the case as far as I can see, and they're surprisingly comfortable.

That was one large item completed, the next one was to make the farthingale to go underneath it. My initial farthingale, the one I made for Kate's wedding, I gave to Martha to go under her Tudor dress. I must admit that this one is rather better than the first one, in that it's made from considerably less fabric so the fabric sits flat between the rings and isn't gathered the way the original is. I have cheated in that I've elasticated the waistband, but that's because I don't have any suitable cord right now and I wanted to finish it to try it on.

It fits rather nicely and, in spite of the fact that I ran out of metal boning on the last hoop and had to join some recycled boning together to finish it, the hoops are far more circular than the original one. I'm going to have to visit my supplier of metal boning at Christmas to see if they've got any left as I'm now completely out of the stuff.

All that's left to do now is the ruff and its supportasse, which shouldn't take too much time. I may even manage to complete it this evening or, failing that, certainly tomorrow. Then I can put the sewing machine away and get on with some calligraphy that's awaiting my attention. Now all I need is an appropriate occasion to wear my new ensemble. No-one has any idea when the cinema will show the film so it might yet be Rent-A-Don before this sees light. Whatever happens, I'll get some photos somehow.
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It is...

... Frustrating to note that you're now down to approximately one-third of the registered number of students turning up to your Monday morning lecture and that there's nothing you can do about it. It's doubly-frustrating when the same thing happens in the labs. Interestingly, it's only the business students who have stopped coming to lectures - the science students still turn up regularly. Maybe business students are never going to have to use a computer again once they've graduated?

... Satisfying to be able to tell one of your staff that a project he's been working on all semester, and that he's been worrying about for rather longer than that, is showing some very definite positive results.

... Gratifying to realise that it's almost the end of the semester. And that you have more fingers than remaining lectures. Even if you do have a pile of coursework to mark and an exam paper to write. :)

... Annoying when you realise that some of your textbooks have gone missing. Particularly when you're going to need two of them in the near future. I don't remember lending them to anyone and I really don't fancy having to shell out for textbooks at Icelandic prices. Worse, I have to write a couple of new lectures for one of the next semester's modules and I'd like to do it with reference to one of the books so that the students only need to buy one textbook.

... Disconcerting to realise that you're the last person leaving your floor of the building on a Friday evening. I'd spent the afternoon recording narrations for powerpoint presentations (the equivalent of two double-lectures' worth so that I could upload them to WebCT before the weekend for the distance students) and by the time I'd finished the place was deserted.

... Refreshing to realise that you can now relax for a couple of days and forget the office. Apart from the lecture you need to start organising and the white paper you have to write over the weekend. Ah well, at least I can relax tonight.
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Tonight was A&S night, complete with nibbles.

Instead of my normal chocolaty sweet stuff of some sort, tonight I decided that cheesy biscuits were the order of the day. They went down sufficiently well that I've had to promise to provide the recipe, so here it is:

Cheesy biscuits (makes about 48)
125g butter
125g self-raising flour
75g cheddar (or other hard cheese)
50g parmesan cheese

Heat oven to 190°/gas mark 5. Cover a baking tray with greaseproof paper. Put all ingredients into the food processor and process for about 20 seconds until a dough forms. Chill this dough in the fridge for 30 minutes, then remove from fridge and shape into sausages about 1" (2.5cm) in diameter. Slice thinly (about 1/5" or 5mm) and place on the baking tray. Bake for about 10 minutes until golden.

You can sprinkle poppy or sesame seeds on the top of the slices before baking if desired.

No photo, I'm afraid, as the biscuits disappeared rather rapidly. :)

For the first time in a while I actually had a very productive A&S session making a pearl and bead girdle to go with the new gown. It turns out that the local cinema won't be showing Elizabeth - The Golden Age this week after all. It'll be sometime before the new year but they've no idea when, it seems. Pah. Still, it means that I don't have to panic about finishing everything by tomorrow or Saturday. The girdle is about 2/3 complete but I still have to make an appropriate dangly thing to go on the end. I haven't designed that yet but I suspect it'll involve more of the long gold bugle beads and the pearls I'm using for the main length of the girdle. It may also include some of my red cut glass beads, I suspect. I'll do some sketches and see how they look
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Last night was a swimming, pizza and gaming evening.

K, one of my previous students, is over here in Iceland doing the jobhunt thing and had come up to Akureyri to stay with M for a couple of days. This was, of course, and excellent excuse for pizza and games.

Before this we went swimming. It's a bit sad, really - over the summer I was managing to go swimming three times a week; now my teaching load is such that I've managed to go swimming precisely twice. Admittedly I was ill for the first three weeks of the semester but that had so many knock-on effects that I've had little time to do anything sporty. Þelamörk was quite impressive in an oh my it's cold! sort of way. The wind was positively screaming up the dale and was doing an excellent job of sucking the heat form the water so it was a bit cooler than usual. For most of the hour and a half we were there we had the pool to ourselves, which was pleasant.

I had been planning to cook something vaguely healty for the three of us but just didn't have time. It's amazing just how much tidying I managed to do in 1 hour between coming home a bit early from work and leaving for the pool (I more than made up for the time today - it's been one of the bi-weekly Wednesdays from hell). Instead we ordered pizza and cinnamon dougnuts with icing and settled down to play Frag (which I won). It's nominally a game for 2-6 players but I'm sure it would be deliciously bloody with 8-12 players, and as I happen to have an interesting stock of cardboard hero files I can print in various sizes it'll be no problem generating the playing pieces.

Later I indulged in a bit more retail therapy online. I really must stop this. :( There is now another new parcel on it's way to me, this one containing Zombie Fluxx, the En Garde! boardgame and (sigh - I managed to resist for soooo long) the Romulan Border version of Federation Commander. I've decided that it would be a bit too much effort to a) bring SFB over from the UK and b) teach people up here how to play it, so instead I'm going for the re-focussed version of the game. If it works (on the gamer front) then I'll buy the expansion. If it really, really works then I might even buy the Klingon Border version. Maybe.
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After last month's SCA-inspired food processor, today I was SCA-inspired to buy two more strange things.

The first is a soldering iron. Yes, I know, how can a computer person exist without a soldering iron, but I didn't bring mine to Iceland with me and I've survived until now. The reason I now need one is that I need to build a supportasse and don't trust the damned thing not to fall apart unless I solder it together. A supportasse is not something upon which you sit, rather it's something upon which your large and unwieldy ruff sits. I don't actually have the ruff yet but I do have the fabric (and two more days) to make it and the farthingale.

The second thing is a folding stick of inches - in other words a 2m rule that folds up into a rather thick 30cm rule. This is going to be particularly useful as I'll be able to extend it to the necessary length then draw (or cut) along its edge in order to get some straight lines when I'm drafting out the skirt. Actually, that's just a good excuse for buying one. When I was exceedingly small one of my favourite toys was Dad's old folding stick of inches - a beautiful pale wood with brass hinges at each end. I got it because Dad noticed that it fascinated me when he used it, so when it snapped one day he sanded off the broken edge and gave it to me.

My new stick of inches is plastic, yellow, and held together at the ends with little plastic knobs and grooves which allow it to be stable at 90 and 180 degrees, so it's a long way from the artistry of the original, but that's not the point. The point is that I now have a new folding stick of inches.
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Another person corrupted. :)

Tonight I went over to the flat of two of our newer shire members for dinner and an A&S session. Specifically, U was interesting in this strange tablet-weaving thing. Fortunately this is one of the things I can teach at a basic level, so over I went with four big skeins of thick crochet cotton, a set of pre-drilled playing card tablets and the instruction sheet for tablet weaving from Phiala's String Pages.

After an excellent dinner we had fun and games unravelling the cotton. I have a suspicion that cotton thread has a mind of its own - either that or there is some strange force at work which tangles up any thread left sitting on its own for more than fifteen minutes. It's probably something to do with string theory. Nevertheless, we eventually managed to unwind enough to warp up eight cards around an upturned wooden stool (I suspect that we'll be seeing the stool at this week's A&S meeting) ready to start weaving.

I must say that U's first attempt is a lot more even than mine was. :) If I wasn't already so snowed under with things to do then I'd quite possibly been inspired to warp up the other legwrap for Gonz. Unfortunately I don't think that's going to happend this side of Christmas. Ah well - at least I should be able to get it done in time for Rent-A-Don.
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So much for a productive day.

didn't get quite as much done today as I'd hoped - mainly because while I have a stock of narrow green, rose, black and russet ribbon I don't have any red. And I don't have enough wide red to do all of the casings for the boning of the farthingale either, although I have now worked out the geometry of the pattern. This, then, calls for a trip to R&uactute;mfatalagerin tomorrow for red ribbon for the lacings and the casings and white cotton and lace to make the ruff. I'm still undecided on how full to make the ruff - if I was making a french fathingale then I'd make a ludicrously big one just for the fun of it but as I'm making a spanish farthingale I think that something a little bit more restrained would be more appropriate.

All of this just for a movie. :) You know that you've definitely lost the plot a little when your first thought when folks decide to go to see a movie in garb is but I've not got any < insert appropriate timeperiod here > garb! and you promptly go out and make it. Yes, I know I can do early Tudor and middle Tudor but I was completely lacking in late Tudor garb. The two consolations I'm taking from this are 1) I can finally show Kate what I've done with the bridesmaid dress, and 2) it's a much lighter fabric than the blue gown I took to Raglan so I could do something crazy like take it to Rent-A-Don in February.

As it happens, 'bethans were not on my garb to-do list. I've got the fabric for a cotehardie (originally planned for Álfadans but, as usual, the plan didn't survive contact with the enemy. The more I look at the fabric, though, the less I like it. It's a very dark grey-green and I think it's a bit dull. The shop from which I bought it now has new colours (it was in the sale) so I may go and get something a bit more cheerful. I quite fancy a basic cotehardie so that I can then finally use my black and gold brocade to do a sideless surcoat to go with it. I've also got a strange urge to do something early, maybe some more Saxon garb. And, now that I've bought the turtle brooches I've really got no excuse to put off making the viking garb any longer.

All of this when I make it to at most 2 events off the Rock in a year. What I really need is more general daywear, as I now seem to have an abundance of court garb and not a lot to wear during the day. On the other hand, most of the day when I'm at events abroad I'm wandering around in my fencing gear anyway.

In spite of not having got as much done as I originally planned, I have completed one item. I now have a Nursie-hat. It's from the pattern in The Tudor Tailor and I suspect that my head needs a brim about an inch wider than they suggest, but it works. I've taken a couple of photos but they're all too hideous so here are a couple of the coif on its own:

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I now have a new pair of sleeves.

After a lot of snoozing this afternoon (I'm coughing and sneezing again and suspect I've got another cold - drat) I finally pulled myself from the pit of my sofa, the fabric from the box under the table and the sewing machine from the other side of the room (actually 'lugged' would be a more accurate description of anything involving moving the sewing machine) and started work on the dress alterations.

I've eventually decided to go for the split skirt with underskirt (I checked my brocade stock and I do have enough to make the skirt as well as the sleeves), detatchable sleeves (so that I can replace them with blackworked linen ones eventually) and an open ruff and supportasse. I've extracted the old sleeves and will replace them with wings to hide the lacing of the sleeves. There was much thought about whether to do revers around the stomacher but I think I'll go for a plain stomacher front instead. I'm also going to need a new 'Nursie-style' heart-shaped coif (but that's relatively easy) and a new farthingale (slightly less easy but still manageable).

The supportasse will, I suspect, require a trip to Biko for a soldering iron. I'm sure that's going to be the easiest way of keeping it in shape. Fortunately I not only have tomorrow, but also several free evenings next week. We've now gone to the original plan for alternating heavy and light fighter practices which means that I'm only needed one week in two.

Tomorrow's plan, then, is to get the dress completed and maybe the farthingale to go with it. I still haven't decided on whether I'll attach the ruff to the dress or to the chemise. The chemise is tempting right now but I might yet change my mind.
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Today I got done about half of what I wanted to get done.

But the most important one, Monday's lecture, is complete and uploaded in case the network drive still isn't working on Monday morning. I'm not holding my breath on the assumption that it will be... come to think of it, I think I'll copy it onto my USB stick just in case.

Eventually I came home and have started transferring the music from the Inns of Court into Finale so that I can print it out with the requisite number of repeats ready to go into my music folder... which is definitely going to need a fabric cover to hide the green plastic one it has at present. For ease of use I'm going to keep the music in there because it's a pocketed folder which means that the music isn't going to blow away or fall off the music stand.

It turns out that Elizabeth - The Golden Age isn't due up here until next week so I have time to turn the red dress into a late Tudor gown. I hope. :) I'm not convinced that I have enough of the brocade to do sleeves, stomacher and a large skirt panel so I may have to fake the underdress but I'm sure that I can work something out. The necessary trim arrived last week from Calontir so I'm ready to get started with the sewing machine.

I've also just received a scroll commission for a Company of Merit for the Arts and Sciences, so all being well I'll get that started over the weekend as well. Oh yes, and I want to do a bit of tidying up while I'm at it. I really must make an effort to do that first.
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Evening post is so useful.

I do like the fact that Posturinn delivers packages to your door after 17:30. The assumption is that everyone in the household will be either at school or at work during the day sp there'll be no-one there to take delivery (and pay any necessary import duties). This was particularly useful this evening because about a quarter of an hour before I left for dance practice the postman arrived with my copies of Western Dance 1450-1650 (Compleat Anachronist #101) and The Old Measures 1570-1675 - both by Janelle and Peter Durham - and the CDs to go with them.

Nice though this was, it did mean that I didn't have a chance to read them/listen to them before the practice but I did take them with me all the same as I thought we might be able to try one of the simpler dances from one of them. As it turned out this wasn't to be as the CD player which I thought was a permanent fixture in the gym had disappeared. This didn't stop the dancing mind, as I'd packed not only the CDs but also my recorder, music and even my foldaway music stand.

Can I point out (again!) how much I hate F major? No, that's unfair; I don't hate F major, I hate B-flat. B-flat is not one of my favourite notes on the recorder, and although I can wing it with a partial fingering there is a definite difference in tone.

There was dancing and there was sitting around planning Troll Hunt. By next month I should have a shiny new tarota instead of the recorder and will (hopefully) not only have worked out how to play the tunes I already know but will also have written out the music for some of the dances in the new book (The Old Measures includes music as well as choreography, which is useful.

While I was out shopping today I also bought a small tambourine in Tiger. I didn't take this along with me tonight (I have this strange urge to bedeck it with black and gold ribbons apart from anything else) but I might well do so next time. I have a horrible suspicion that this music business might be about to become a minor obsession. But at least it gives me a good excuse not to dance all of those terribly energetic dances - after all, I can't dance and play at the same time, can I?

Well, actually I suppose I could for simple things like branles if I learn the music. Hmm... leading a string of dancers about, pied-piper-like... that's actually quite a fun idea. I might have to give that a try.
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