2004-03-08 - 3:50 p.m.

Okay, almost all of y�all are rat bastards�and I love you to death.

The weekend was a rollercoaster to put anything Kings Dominion has to shame. Let�s roll the tape�

Friday was *supposed* to be a) Rhiannon and I�s 6th anniversary, and b) a relatively quiet evening gabbing, exchanging Christmas and Birthday presents with our friend Elizabeth, who was coming down to go to KASF with us.

Well, it started out with me being sick instead. I blame the home-cooked hamburgers I didn�t quite cook to a fine medium. Nothing major, just nothing pleasant either. So I shipped Rhi off to the tender mercies of work while I worshipped at the Temple of the Porcelain God for a bit.

Fortunately, as it always does, the Porcelain God graces his Worshippers with stronger feeling tummies after a sufficient tribute, so I was able, eventually, to get some house cleaning done. Nothing major, but the house was at least just a wreck as opposed to a disaster area.

So Rhiannon comes home at about 5:30, picks me up, and we go to the Wal-Mart to get event supplies and food for the weekend. She is kinda slow and draggy and making noises about not feeling all that hot. I blame it on undercooked ground beef and the stress of the workday, and we get home.

Then she has the chest pain. Lovely things, chest pains�NOT!

Rhi�s vital signs seemed okay�not perfect, but not �I�m having an imminent heart attack here� level either, and the pain passes�long enough for Beth to arrive and us to shovel into her car to drive to SRMC�s emergency room.

It�s amazing how quickly your wife gets treated when she puts �Chest Pains� on the �Why are you at the emergency room?� line on the admittance form�not 30 seconds later she was in the back, and Beth and I were sitting in the waiting room waiting.

After about 45 minutes or so, I am able to get back to her, and we discover that the doctor thinks her EKG is textbook perfect, chest x-rays are negative, it appears to be indigestion or something of that sort�3 weeks of prescription anti-acid and gas stuff and orders to reduce her internal stress level, and we�re back out of there by 10:30 PM.

Of course, none of the garb for the event was washed, my armor wasn�t assembled, etc,etc, etc. those fiddly tasks took until Midnight, when we all crashed to sleep in preparation for the 7:30 departure for KASF.

KASF itself�wow. First off, there is an amazing amount of artistic and technological brilliance in the Kingdom. The guy with the laithe, the person who had done the Danask (sp?) weaving, tons of great stuff.

Of course me, I was being Gorm, the destroyer of men, out at the War College (although many folks seemed to not like the combination of the two, I kinda did). The goal was to be at the first Queen�s Spear�s muster, and maybe learn a thing or two.

Well, because of the wet and muck (and the fact that it was KASF after all), there weren�t a lot of rapier fighters-turned-spear-jockeys there, so the 11 or 12 of us playing with spears were all lumped into one class.

Learned a ton. That was excellent. Need practice. Fortunately, practice opportunities sound like they are going to be relatively available over the next several months. I didn�t think I was doing all that well, but Aradd and Susannah and Daemon picked me out as the 2nd best spearman there in the early day�which was cool and unexpected�and really makes me wonder a lot of things�because I didn�t think I was doing all that well�I felt like I wasn�t doing a good job�but maybe I was�I don�t know.

I do know the new armor worked. Had one issue early in the day because I had my left thigh armor on my right leg and vice-versa, but once that was fixed, there weren�t any issues the rest of the day. I�m told it looked pretty decent too�which is cool.

Got to lead a triad with myself, Aradd, and Auric in a bearpit thing, and we won three in a row at one point. That was also cool. Didn�t do so well commanding in the full scale melees, but I know what I was doing wrong there�pretty much the �Wow, look at them all crashing together like that� forgetting to manage the line bit. Comes with practice, I guess�will I get any? Who knows? I�m nowhere near good enough to be leading troops. I just wanna be a good fighter. This year will show if I have a shot or not.

Then, eventually, I ran outta steam and had to quit. Made it through about 90% of the day though, only collapsing a little bit. My arms feel like I was powerlifting all day, though. And my cardio endurance isn�t anywhere near up to a full day yet�but hey, that�s why we�re going to the gym, right? Gotta spend more time on that thing that tortures the arms as efficiently as the legs, I guess.

Anyhow, then there was Court. After a lovely Laurelling and a few other awards, I get called into Court with Manus O�Keene (sp?)

There�s about a million things we have in common, we�re both larger, we�re both male, we�re both from Caer Mear, we both have brown hair�but none of those explained why we were being called up together.

Well�add in one additional commonality now, we�re both Golden Dolphins.

I knew he was getting his at that event (and apparently, he knew I was getting mine)� but the pure sneakiness of all of y�all not letting the cat out of the bag just makes y�all rat bastards.

The play by my darling wife �Well, I don�t know what�s going on, but my Laurel told me that I needed to go to KASF and be presentably dressed, and �my escort� should be presentable as well�, which immediately put me on the �Okay, Rhiannon�s in line for her AoA level A&S award, or recognition as Caer Mear�s baronial Champion, or something like that�cool� was quite effective. I had suspicions something more was up, but only because Rhiannon *never* stresses over an event like she was stressing about this one�and I just figured she was reacting to representing Caer Mear in the Artisan competition (where she did very well, in my humble and somewhat biased opinion, particularly given the loss of the last evening�s opportunity for final presentation preparation).

And Thejora is now a Peer Squared, that�s even cooler.

After Court, we came home (Feast smelled great, but we had prime rib waiting at home�), and crashed for the evening. I resisted the urge to sleep with my medallion (gifted to me by Baron Aedan, it has a longer lineage than that, but he couldn�t recall it�something to investigate, I imagine), and woke up Sunday.

Sunday, after breakfast and seeing Beth onto the road back to Aethelmarc, was a day spent prioritizing our spring, and then going to what turned out to be a cool and nifty A&S gather. A bit of lighthearted joking and doing artsie things with no expectations of anything was just what the doctor ordered.

Sunday night we were going to put the capstone on a pretty good weekend, when the lights went out because of the storm, and all we could think of was Isobel (the hurricane, not the Gluttonish Laurel from Lochmere�you had to be there), especially when the Power Company phone rep said �this is a major outage, we can�t even begin to assess damage until the morning because there are reports of tornadoes in the area�.

And we hadn�t even gotten our storm kit out of the attic (we knew it was going to rain�not major thunderstorm).

So, after a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth and sobbing, we went back to sleep, hoping all would be well.

The lights came back on sometime during the middle of the night, thankfully.

So, from low to high to really high to low to Monday�I�m just about exhausted�but I have a secret handshake to learn now, so I guess I should wrap this up. To all of those who pushed, wrote, cajoled in the hallways, talked up in the bathroom (that would be Her Majesties words, not mine) , and to all of those who kept me in the dark�thanks. I can�t really say more. Hopefully I�ll live up to it.

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