Norway National Guard Show

Back when I was doing the marchy-marchy, bangy-bangy thing with cannon and musket, my favorite part (besides the "blammo") was the drill and ceremony.



Who knew The Ecstasy of Gold and When Johnny Comes Marching Home worked so well together?

Happy Saint Barbara’s Day

My living history experience began (crap, has it been 18 years??) as a Royal Artillery gunner on a Rev War reproduction 3-lb. field piece. Today is the feast day of St. Barbara, patron saint of those who deal with things that go “blammo”. I no longer have the youth, vigor and figure that allowed me to masquerade as a young man and serve on a gun, but I do miss it.

St. Barbara was removed from the Calendar of Saints in 1969, but I have a St. Barbara’s medallion that lives in my range bag. Some time, when I’ve got enough people to help me drink it, I’d like to try the punch outlined here.

Cthulhu’s own Christmas Tree

Once upon a time, the R. family used to go select and cut down a fresh Christmas tree each December. Somewhere, there are pictures of Sweet Daughter at 3 months old sitting in her car carrier next to our intended victim harvest.

The first year she became mobile, all I had time to do was cut it down, put it up where it wasn’t accessible and throw a single strand of lights around the top 2 feet of it. We no longer had the leisure time to go hunt down and harvest the tree, and then actually get it home and decorated. So I came up with the great idea of getting a pre-lit artificial one. We’d save time! We’d save money in the long run! Shorter Half wouldn’t be allergic to the fake one! No needles to vacuum up for the next 6 months! The risk of fire would go way down! We couldn’t forget to water it! We could get one with those new-fangled LED lights and save money on our electric bill!

So I did my research, and waited for them to go on sale. I selected a lovely tree. It had realistic artificial tips. It was pre-lit in a rainbow of colors. It had those dam#ed LED lights. I got it home, put it up and found out the lights didn’t twinkle, they seethed. There was something about the blue ones (and to some extent the green and purple ones) that sucked the very soul from my body. Looking directly at them was like being in the presence of my dementor. Even the red and gold ones seemed bitter. Nothing warm and cozy and joyous about this tree – you could almost hear it hiss at you as you walked by. If Cthulhu had a Christmas tree, this was it.

So while Shorter Half is marching in a Christmas Parade tomorrow with his WWII unit, Sweet Daughter and I will be looking for a reasonably inexpensive, bright, warm and twinkly pre-lit tree. And Cthulhu’s tree can sit in storage and seethe. The only question now is all white, or multi-color?

Stuck in neutral

I had a lovely Thanksgiving. Four days of (relative) relaxation on a 150 acre farm just outside of Annapolis. (And if anyone is interested in buying it, let me know and I'll arrange for an introduction. It's on the mainland side of the Bay Bridge. Includes a 200-year-old recently renovated farm house and several new outbuildings. One of a kind property on the water.) I don’t know what it is, but since my return to the real world, I just can’t motivate to blog or anything else. Maybe it’s the short days – although I can’t complain – my office faces south and has a huge window. More likely it’s the cold. I HATE the cold. I had to spend 13 years and two weeks (not that I’m counting, or anything) in Minnesota, and I did not acclimate well. Christmas is only 3 weeks away, and my house looks like it threw up on itself, and that’s without having pulled out the decorations yet. Next weekend Sweet Daughter and I are heading to Williamsburg to meet up with a handful of people both for me to do some fittings, and to get a muslin fit (for me!) for my riding habit.

I’m thinking a hot buttered rum and turning in early tonight might not be a bad idea.

Could you repeat that, please?

So, I’m running around this morning packing for a trip to visit family this weekend when I hear Shorter Half in another part of the house yelp “What??”

Apparently he was listening to the radio which was prattling on about the TSA. He stepped out of the room for a moment only to return to a voice saying “… after you finish checking the body cavity you can return the legs to their tucked position.”

I really, really hope they were talking about turkey at that point.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Family Fun

It being up near 60 degrees this afternoon, we decided to go outside and shoot the pellet guns.

There was a lot of this:

And then this:

With the Big, Bad Wolf properly perforated, it was time to move onto a more traditional target.

SD was not happy with her results. It didn't matter to her that she hit the center line, because she didn't hit the center of the target. She aimed for the center, but hit high, not once, but twice, and was quite frustrated. And when she hit outside of the circle, she insisted it wasn't her fault, she wasn't aiming there!


Here SD is earnestly explaining that she was aiming at the center and so the shot that hit outside the black must have been caused by a problem with the pistol. We explained that the pistol is a tool, and doesn't arbitrarily do that. She wasn't buying it.



You can see that SD is utterly dejected by her inability to hit dead center of the target. To try to illustrate how well she did, Shorter Half and I each took a shot at the target behind her head. Well, not while she was standing there, of course. But to show her that we can't always hit the center either. She refused to be consoled, even when we told her Miss Breda would have been impressed.

She was frustrated, and not having fun, so we decided to switch it up and gave her the option of firing my pellet rifle using a rest.

She liked it. A lot.

Still a bit high, but the important thing is that she had a good time, and stopped only because she was getting cold and it was getting dark.

Fun was had by all, and plans have been made to do it again tomorrow.

Monkey see, monkey do

Sweet Daughter has strep throat, but was finally feeling well enough tonight to eat something other than ice cream. She wanted pizza from a local restaurant, but I told her we couldn’t eat in as she was still technically contagious, but we could phone the order in, run in and pick it up and eat it at home. But she had to promise not to touch anything. So far, so good.

I phoned the order in, threw on my shoulder rig, reminded SD to put shoes and socks on, and I put on my barn coat. I checked in the mirror to make sure I wasn’t printing, and SD asked what I was doing. I explained and ask if she noticed anything. I then grabed my purse and my keys and turned to find SD asking me if I could see the note paper under her jacket. She had carefully placed a folded up piece of note paper under her jacket in the same vicinity that I carry my pistol. Darned if she didn’t keep it tucked away the whole trip to pick up the pizza and back without dropping it or calling attention to it, taking it out only after we got back in the house.