Sunday, June 07, 2009
Catching up
I'm having a quiet Sunday morning after a busy couple of days.
On Wednesday after work I drove down to Reykjavík to stay overnight with M before collecting our visitors for Revel in the Midnight Sun IV this weekend. Although I'm not actually attending the event it made much more sense for me to do this because a) flights are expensive and it's expensive enough for visitors to get onto the Rock, never mind then handle internal flights as well; b) I've got a job that's flexible enough for me to be able to take a few days off at present; and c) I have access to the largest car in the shire. I was sufficiently organised to have brought the iPod but insufficiently organised to remember the radio adapter for it. As 250 miles with no music (I can't handle Icelandic radio) did not appeal I ended up sitting the MacBook on the passenger seat and running iTunes. I was quite impressed at its battery, in that it had no problem lasting the whole 5-hour journey (max speed limit here is 55).
As I mentioned in the previous post, I then spent much of the evening making a heap of sheep. The 'tournament story' is based upon the Icelandic tradition of the réttir where all of the sheep that have been wandering the hills for the summer are brought down for the winter. Once they're down off the hills they're placed into a sorting pen and then split up between the different farmers. For the Klakavirki Sheep Raid tournament it is assumed that the raiders have stolen some sheep and are now deciding how to divide their spoils. There are a fixed number of sheep (about 250 in this case) and each fighter is trying to bring as many as possible home to their partner/inspiration. A fighter can challenge any other fighter and the winner gets a sheep. The overall victor is the one with the most sheep once all have been claimed. This becomes a tournament of skill, speed and stamina, in that the large number of sheep mean that it can go on for quite a long time, similar to the 9 Lives tournament at Raglan.
On Thursday morning I made up the corral for the sheep, then put together one of the Klakavirki kneeling cushions. It makes sense for us to have our own set of cushions (and of many other things) in order to minimise the amount of stuff that any visiting Royals/Viceregals need to carry in their luggage. Besides - they're a great way of displaying the group's heraldry. I'd drawn the original designs on the canvas then M and E had done the actual embroidery, so it was just a case of making up the cushions and putting the covers together. M had got a couple of quite large cushions so instead we decided to open up one of these and use the filling to stuff two much smaller kneeling cushions. The only problem was that the filling was feathers, not foam, which led me to a rather unpleasant asthma attack on my part. Still, I got them done and managed to make up one of the covers so we now have one cushion complete and another just to have its cover made up.
M and I then headed out to the airport to collect D, C & C, and actually managed to get all but one suitcase into the back of the yeti. This was a Good Thing, although it made me realise that it's not realistic for me to drive them back down on Monday and then head straight back up as M will never get all of the luggage plus passengers into her car to return them to the airport on Tuesday. It's a good thing I don't have any work meetings until Wednesday as it looks like it'll be Tuesday evening before I get back up north. :)
The journey up north seemed shorter thanks to having good company for it, although even so it was past 23:00 before we got home. We stopped on the way for dinner, which slowed things down, but normal people need to eat more often than I do. One highlight, though, was that we saw an arctic fox up on one of the heaths.
Friday was tourist day. We started off with Akureyri itself and wandered from gift shop to gift shop, with my visitors picking up an assortment of treasures and generally taking advantage of the exchange rate. Then, after a fuel-and-ice-cream stop at the Big Bridge Burger Bar (it's actually called Laerunesti, but I didn't discover that until I'd already given it a personal reference name) we headed off to do the tour of the north - Ljósavatn, Goðafoss (where C got wet feet trying to cross a set of rocks so as to get a better view of the top of the waterfall), Mývatn and Námafjall. We were finally heading up to site when I got a phone call to say that M wouldn't be there for an hour, so we also went up to Húsavík for a while (and another gift shop). When we finally arrived on site I was a bit surprised to discover that we could have gone straight there as the cook had been there all day.
I left our visitors at the event and came back home. As well as my lack of energy to handle an event, it turned out that there had been a bit of a cock-up with some scrolls that had been made up using the mundane names of the recipients. Fortunately they were on parchment (and are absolutely gorgeous) so I could scrape the names out and correct them. Unfortunately I didn't have fine enough glass paper to smoothe the surface properly so the names look rough compared to the rest of the scroll text but at least the names are now correct. It was very fortunate that I was the herald for Court and so this came to light in time to fix it. I suspect that part of the reason for the problem is that modern Icelandic names look just the same as Norse names of the SCA period, so it's very easy to get them confused. Still, we managed to get it fixed before Court.
Court was supposed to be at 18:00, but I got a phone call at 14:00 to say that things were running late (no surprise there) and that it wouldn't be until 20:00. I duly drove over to site for 19:30 to allow myself time to get changed and discuss any last-minute matters with C&D... and Court finally started at 21:00. Had things been running to time I'd planned to stay for the feast, but with the feast not starting until after 22:00 I didn't bother and got back home at about 23:30. Court itself went quite well, with A being made a companion of the Order of Ffraid, while two other members of the shire got their AoAs. I was, however, annoyed that one of the engraved wine goblets I'd done as gifts for our visitors didn't survive the journey to site in spite of the careful packaging. I shall just have to do a replacement for C and get it to him at Battle of Brothers or Raglan. At least it was a C that broke and not the D, or we couldn't have presented them to the V&V.
I've been taking it easy this morning, doing a bit of tidying up and watching the Grand Prix. I'm expecting a phone call at some point telling me when I should head out to collect our visitors, at which point I'll take them out to Jarðböðin at Mývatn for a post-event soak before coming back here overnight. Once I get the timing I can pop into town on the way out to get a little shopping, as I'm almost out of milk and could do with a few more things for breakfast tomorrow.
On Wednesday after work I drove down to Reykjavík to stay overnight with M before collecting our visitors for Revel in the Midnight Sun IV this weekend. Although I'm not actually attending the event it made much more sense for me to do this because a) flights are expensive and it's expensive enough for visitors to get onto the Rock, never mind then handle internal flights as well; b) I've got a job that's flexible enough for me to be able to take a few days off at present; and c) I have access to the largest car in the shire. I was sufficiently organised to have brought the iPod but insufficiently organised to remember the radio adapter for it. As 250 miles with no music (I can't handle Icelandic radio) did not appeal I ended up sitting the MacBook on the passenger seat and running iTunes. I was quite impressed at its battery, in that it had no problem lasting the whole 5-hour journey (max speed limit here is 55).
As I mentioned in the previous post, I then spent much of the evening making a heap of sheep. The 'tournament story' is based upon the Icelandic tradition of the réttir where all of the sheep that have been wandering the hills for the summer are brought down for the winter. Once they're down off the hills they're placed into a sorting pen and then split up between the different farmers. For the Klakavirki Sheep Raid tournament it is assumed that the raiders have stolen some sheep and are now deciding how to divide their spoils. There are a fixed number of sheep (about 250 in this case) and each fighter is trying to bring as many as possible home to their partner/inspiration. A fighter can challenge any other fighter and the winner gets a sheep. The overall victor is the one with the most sheep once all have been claimed. This becomes a tournament of skill, speed and stamina, in that the large number of sheep mean that it can go on for quite a long time, similar to the 9 Lives tournament at Raglan.
On Thursday morning I made up the corral for the sheep, then put together one of the Klakavirki kneeling cushions. It makes sense for us to have our own set of cushions (and of many other things) in order to minimise the amount of stuff that any visiting Royals/Viceregals need to carry in their luggage. Besides - they're a great way of displaying the group's heraldry. I'd drawn the original designs on the canvas then M and E had done the actual embroidery, so it was just a case of making up the cushions and putting the covers together. M had got a couple of quite large cushions so instead we decided to open up one of these and use the filling to stuff two much smaller kneeling cushions. The only problem was that the filling was feathers, not foam, which led me to a rather unpleasant asthma attack on my part. Still, I got them done and managed to make up one of the covers so we now have one cushion complete and another just to have its cover made up.
M and I then headed out to the airport to collect D, C & C, and actually managed to get all but one suitcase into the back of the yeti. This was a Good Thing, although it made me realise that it's not realistic for me to drive them back down on Monday and then head straight back up as M will never get all of the luggage plus passengers into her car to return them to the airport on Tuesday. It's a good thing I don't have any work meetings until Wednesday as it looks like it'll be Tuesday evening before I get back up north. :)
The journey up north seemed shorter thanks to having good company for it, although even so it was past 23:00 before we got home. We stopped on the way for dinner, which slowed things down, but normal people need to eat more often than I do. One highlight, though, was that we saw an arctic fox up on one of the heaths.
Friday was tourist day. We started off with Akureyri itself and wandered from gift shop to gift shop, with my visitors picking up an assortment of treasures and generally taking advantage of the exchange rate. Then, after a fuel-and-ice-cream stop at the Big Bridge Burger Bar (it's actually called Laerunesti, but I didn't discover that until I'd already given it a personal reference name) we headed off to do the tour of the north - Ljósavatn, Goðafoss (where C got wet feet trying to cross a set of rocks so as to get a better view of the top of the waterfall), Mývatn and Námafjall. We were finally heading up to site when I got a phone call to say that M wouldn't be there for an hour, so we also went up to Húsavík for a while (and another gift shop). When we finally arrived on site I was a bit surprised to discover that we could have gone straight there as the cook had been there all day.
I left our visitors at the event and came back home. As well as my lack of energy to handle an event, it turned out that there had been a bit of a cock-up with some scrolls that had been made up using the mundane names of the recipients. Fortunately they were on parchment (and are absolutely gorgeous) so I could scrape the names out and correct them. Unfortunately I didn't have fine enough glass paper to smoothe the surface properly so the names look rough compared to the rest of the scroll text but at least the names are now correct. It was very fortunate that I was the herald for Court and so this came to light in time to fix it. I suspect that part of the reason for the problem is that modern Icelandic names look just the same as Norse names of the SCA period, so it's very easy to get them confused. Still, we managed to get it fixed before Court.
Court was supposed to be at 18:00, but I got a phone call at 14:00 to say that things were running late (no surprise there) and that it wouldn't be until 20:00. I duly drove over to site for 19:30 to allow myself time to get changed and discuss any last-minute matters with C&D... and Court finally started at 21:00. Had things been running to time I'd planned to stay for the feast, but with the feast not starting until after 22:00 I didn't bother and got back home at about 23:30. Court itself went quite well, with A being made a companion of the Order of Ffraid, while two other members of the shire got their AoAs. I was, however, annoyed that one of the engraved wine goblets I'd done as gifts for our visitors didn't survive the journey to site in spite of the careful packaging. I shall just have to do a replacement for C and get it to him at Battle of Brothers or Raglan. At least it was a C that broke and not the D, or we couldn't have presented them to the V&V.
I've been taking it easy this morning, doing a bit of tidying up and watching the Grand Prix. I'm expecting a phone call at some point telling me when I should head out to collect our visitors, at which point I'll take them out to Jarðböðin at Mývatn for a post-event soak before coming back here overnight. Once I get the timing I can pop into town on the way out to get a little shopping, as I'm almost out of milk and could do with a few more things for breakfast tomorrow.