Today’s Fun Family Time included a two-hour drive to an apple orchard up in Michigan; my wife’s side of the family has apparently been doing it as a yearly thing for forever and just decided to invite the out-of-towners this year.
I don’t know if you’ve ever used an apple cannon. I can tell you that after firing $10 worth of apples out of one, I’m going to find a way to build one in our back yard. The apple cannons were absolutely the highlight of the trip; I discovered to my consternation that despite apples generally being among my favorite fruits, when rotting apples is the only thing I can smell in a given location, it’s going to leave me feeling a bit ill, so I was fighting off a shitty mood for most of the afternoon and just mostly trying to keep a smile plastered on my face. The apple cannons totally fixed that problem.
(Also, Christ, there’s nothing that can reduce people to ‘splosion- and cannon-loving Americans faster than seeing someone hit a target with an apple at 50 yards. Wow.)
There was also a large corn maze. Despite having grown up in and spending most of my life living in Indiana, I have never been in a corn maze, and I still haven’t, because the three of us figured we were going to get lost and decided not to make the time investment. I figure you want to do a corn maze when you have time to get hopelessly lost and not when you want to be home before it’s dark.
Then once we got home, in accordance with our most ancient traditions, all three of us retired to separate rooms to recharge and not speak to each other any more, and I fell asleep under a pile of cats, which is why this post is just going up at 9:00 PM.
Tomorrow is not a day off officially, but I took one anyway. I’ve been pretty good about attendance this year and upon realizing that the wife and child would both be home, had a “fuck it” moment and called in a personal day. Hail Columbia, or whatever.
I’m pleased to announce that the sense of impending dread that most teachers associate with Sundays is not currently afflicting me. I’ve been sickish all day again, as has been typical of Sundays for a while now, but beyond that, we’re prepped for class tomorrow and we’re all good. I actually got a major (sort of) task done today; our mailbox has only been tenuously attached to its base since we installed it after buying the house in 2011 and I finally bought a piece of wood of an appropriate side to attach the thing properly today. Fourteen and a half years, y’all, but the mailbox no longer wiggles when you open it. I am amazed that in all this time we’ve never had a complaint from a mail carrier; I am sure that he will notice the difference when the mail gets delivered tomorrow. Maybe there will be a thank-you note in there! It would be nice.
I also sent out the first of my roughly-biweekly parent newsletters and got a barrage of responses in rapid succession, which I suppose I should see as a good thing but which might actually have the effect of decreasing how often I send such things out. Or maybe in the future I’ll just make sure I’m somewhere where I can instantly reply to a ton of emails if necessary.
That means that it’s 7:12 PM and, since this blog post is written and my Duolingo obligations are fulfilled, I’m free to spend the rest of the night reading or playing video games. Huzzah!
Let’s see: I spent a couple of hours hunting down bosses in Black Myth Wukong’s final level, which inexplicably transitions into an open world map but doesn’t actually provide you with a map, meaning such concerns as “north” and “south” become way more complicated than they ought to be. We went out to dinner at a local Italian place, the one with the really good bread, although I’m starting to suspect that they’re using genuinely stellar bread to cover up for mediocre entrees. We finally took down the utterly terrible curtains that have been hanging in our dining room since we bought the house and replaced them, and the hardware, with something not filthy and disgusting, and we went and bought paint for the entryway to the house, a decision that I think we’re going to live to regret, but my wife thinks otherwise, and she’s usually right about these things.
I don’t feel like that gets me to 9:00 PM, and I’m not sure where the several other hours of the day have gone, and I’m rather disturbed by my inability to account for, like, half the day. The boy is at a lock-in at school right now (I have done one of these during my career, and I will never do another) and you would think having the house to ourselves would lead to something exciting, but instead we’re going to watch one (1) episode of Great British Baking Show and then go to bed.
… okay, that picture doesn’t have anything to do with the Ren Faire, but … holy cow, y’all, Duolingo gets me all the sudden. I really want to use this as a cover pic somewhere, but it’s completely the wrong aspect ratio for everything and that’s very disappointing.
So the Ren Faire (Ren, autocorrect, you bastard, not red! Ren!!!) was an absolute blast even though I almost died, and the only question is whether we’re going to make this an annual event or something we do every couple of years. We are definitely going to pick a weekend where the weather is better, and if I had any influence over the organizers I would be screaming at them that they need to make this a September-October event and not an August-September event.
After making a huge deal about my outfit here and elsewhere for several days, I ended up going with the kilt, hose, sporran, and … that’s it. Why? I spent four seconds outside in that shirt and discovered that it didn’t breathe at all and if I wore it I was going to die. I ended up just throwing on a regular cotton t-shirt, and … it was fine. One way Ren Faires are different from cons is that nobody’s really making a big deal about taking pictures of each other, or at least they aren’t at this one, possibly because there were thirty thousand fucking people there. I posted this picture already, but look at all the nerds:
Everyone in this picture looks comfortably dressed and there are only a couple of people right up near the camera who are clearly in garb (and I’m not sure the woman in the grey dress, dead center, counts) but there were people walking around this thing in full suits of metal armor. People dressed like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, wearing armor and fur clothing designed for winter. Ren Faire people are a different fucking breed, y’all. These motherfuckers are warriors. They are also crazy, and I cannot believe that I didn’t see a single person passed out from heat exhaustion all day. I couldn’t handle a shirt and there were people walking around in plate armor.
The Michigan festival is particularly cool because it is a permanent installment. I’m not sure how many of these things are fly-by-night operations and how many have permanent buildings like this, but we were there for about five hours and I’m certain we didn’t see everything. There was a mermaid apparently? No idea where she was. We watched a magician and a few jugglers and I kinda wanted the boy to try his hand at throwing spears at things but he declined, and the horses for the joust were probably the largest I’ve ever seen (did we watch the joust? We did not. Too many damn people too close together and no shade.) and the shops were amazing if perhaps crazily overpriced in certain ways and other than the nearly dying and the half-mile walk on a mud path through overgrown foliage from the parking lot, we all had a hell of a lot of fun.
And, oh, Christ, did I spend a lot of money, to the point where I’m not even going to tell you what this fuckawesome quarterstaff and this fuckamazing war hammer cost:
Let me put it this way: I first had my eye on something they were calling a Dwarven Axe, until I discovered they wanted two thousand five hundred dollars for it.
I did not spend two thousand five hundred dollars. I spent a larger fraction of that than I probably should have, though.
The staff is 6′ tall and the war hammer is 36″ or so and … I dunno, maybe twelve-fifteen pounds? Which is a lot more than it might sound, especially if, when you buy it, they wrap it up in cardboard and bubble wrap, making it hard to carry, and you are a mile from your car, and you don’t know that you’re going to buy a quarterstaff at a different booth in a few minutes. That fucking thing will cave in skulls. It’s a murder weapon. It’s functional art! And I had to carry both of them back to the car in million-degree heat and the next time I go back I’m buying daggers!
(I have my next several weapon purchases planned out.)
Go ahead, ask me what I’m gonna do with those. No fucking idea. But I’m really hoping someone breaks into my house soon.
So yeah. We had a great time, I nearly died, and I don’t know that I’m going to make a big deal about dressing up for the next one, or at least not dressing up for this one again, just because I didn’t feel like it made a difference in the way, say, a carefully-constructed cosplay might. If you show up at C2E2 in a full suit of armor people are going to be asking you for pictures all day. I saw some amazing costumes, easily the equal of anything I’ve seen at a con (or close, at least) and … they were just kinda being ignored by everyone. Like, I wasn’t expecting my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination to attract that kind of attention, but I also wasn’t expecting the best costumes to be attracting the same amount of attention as my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination, either. If I do dress up for another Ren Faire, it’s going to be something more … wizardy, I think. Although I do need to find an excuse to wear the kilt somewhere else. I have been resisting being a Kilt Guy for a while now, and I gotta admit, the things are damn comfortable. I’m thinking of showing up in mine for Picture Day this year just to see what happens.
Any other Midwesterners want to recommend any other nearby festivals?
I don’t mind the weight loss, but being sick the whole day after each injection is starting to get real old. Today featured a five hour nap and not much else, although I’m about to watch Godzilla Minus One, so hopefully that will be good.
The highlight of my day involved replacing a malfunctioning switch on my sectional, a feat that I was able to accomplish without swearing even once. We are not going to mention that this is a task that could be performed by a talented child. Just be proud of me, dammit.
Other than that, I’ve been reading and playing games. You?
Friday night I took an Emergency Brain Pill. I wasn’t necessarily having a mental health emergency or anything really close to it, but I basically use these pills when I can’t get my brain to shut off and let me sleep, and what with the God-tier sleep apnea I apparently also have, and having survived my first week in the new building, I figured I was owed a decent night’s sleep. The pill kicked my ass, rendering me a useless, sluggish mess all day Saturday and requiring a three-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon. Then today my son had his Lego Robotics competition, which somehow went from 8:15 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, and by the end of it the boy was so bored he was in tears.
I have … some issues with how this competition was organized. Nothing I can really yell at anybody about, because there’s only one competition, and they didn’t place high enough to advance to the state-level competition in December, but from what I can tell most of the people involved are okay with that. Regardless, we got home around five and all of us died. I had grading planned for tonight, and fuck that. They can wait a little longer, they’ll be okay.
Sometime in the next couple of days I need to do a book review– the short version is that Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is magnificent– and think out loud a bit about how grading needs to work in my new building. But this is all I’ve got for tonight, I think.
I woke up at 10 or so, which is a good hour and a half later than I normally sleep on Saturdays, and it was probably 4:00 before I felt human. Dad was going to come over for dinner and I had to push it back to tomorrow because I couldn’t motivate myself to shower, much less clean anything or, God forbid, cook.
Since then it’s been all sitting and staring. I managed to vacuum my office and our bedroom and that’s as close as I’ve gotten to accomplishing anything today. For most of it I felt like I’d taken too many sleeping pills last night. Actual number of sleeping pills taken last night: zero.
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be more human. I need to figure out what I’m doing with the last two in-person days of school (there will be no 8th grade students in the building on Monday or Tuesday, watch) and I suspect that will be more difficult than usual if my brain is leaking out of my ear.
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