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I just found this lurking in a notebook. It's about the new-this-year Rowany Festival site at Glenworth Baths Swamp Valley Baths, and it's to the tune of the theme from Red Dwarf:

It's damp outside,
Rain kind of everywhere
Everything
To excess
Fungus grows
In between my toes
Mud, mud, mud
In my blood, blood, blood

I'd rather not
Drown on the tourney field
Breastplate, helm
And water wings.
Give me dust —
Sunburn, if you must:
Mud, mud, mud
Is a dud, dud, dud...

So very tired...

The Elder Daughter of DOOOM's habit of ignoring lunch in favour of her twin hobbies of Flirting With Lads and Running Around Like A Mad Aleck led to a major sugar crash and borderline hypothermia, leaving her puking and shivering on Saturday evening as we were due to leave. The medical marvels of Agaricus got her sorted with careful sips of water and plenty of warmth, so we took a chance and headed home, and she was fine. Gods willing she'll remember this next time she decides to leave her dinner and lunch half-eaten over a period of days... but I doubt it. There's evidence that the day they were handing out self-preservation she was hiding behind the door.

She was lovely at Festival itself, by the way: quite pleasant and considerate all the time. Since we returned she's been the entitlement queen from hell, but that's probably the usual social dynamic we always get. When I stop feeling sick and headachey, maybe I'll do something about that. Or lobotomise her with a spoon; one or the other.

I mentioned to Taryn, one of the duty stewards, that I think the EDoD won't be the only one to let cold feet and lack of nutrition lead to a health crash. Hypoglycaemia and hypothermia may turn out to be the officially sanctioned Plague for this year's Festival. That would be interesting.

Discussions with assorted people lead me to believe that next year's Festival won't be at Glenworth. While the site itself is gorgeous, it really doesn't work for any more than the half-sized Festival we had this year. I think the barony of Rowany will reason thus:

• If we have small Festivals over a few days, the problems of all-pervading damp and the swampish campsite will be bearable.
• But the response to this year's Festival will be such that next year's will probably be back up around the thousand people mark again, so the "Plan B" area of the site will be too small and any future Festivals would need to be held at the "Plan A" area.
• The Plan A area is a flood plain with leeches and a tendency to be knee-deep in water if the weather isn't utterly ideal.
• Silverdale was good.

In other news: I caught up with a few people, including bar_barra and alpha_angel, but didn't get to meet mayela_delarue, which is a shame. anthraxia invited all of us to Adelaide in April for her and evildrakey's disbaronment, but I don't know if that's going to be even remotely possible. Still, it'd be nice; maybe we'll try. And the picture here shows Llewen with a fellow camper; the caption is a very old running gag.

The Circle almost didn't happen.

The rain had been coming and going all day: no actual downpours, but a range of sprinkles, showers and blatters. After negotiating a shovel, I started a fire pit in the proper place, helped (see photo) by Willem from Ynys Fawr. (Which is to say: despite my feeble protests, he dug the entire thing.) Around 7.30, a dozen or more people had asked about the Circle, but the rain hadn't stopped since sunset. I was about to in ask an autocrat it there was a pavilion we could use, when...

... The rain stopped.
... Hanbal volunteered to start a fire.
... People showed up en masse to listen and sing.

The circle went from 7.30 to 2am. There were as many as forty people warming themselves, listening and singing at any one time, and well over 200 over the night. Llewen agreed it was one of the best he'd seen in a long time. And the rain stayed away.

Fri 21/03/2008 16:57 21032008010

We arrived about 1.30 and immediately had help carting our stuff all the way up the far end of the site to Blue Feather, whereupon Styvyn and some others helped me pitch the tent. It's been raining lightly, on and off, but BoM willing we should be able to manage the Circle tonight. Early verdict on the site: better than I'd feared.

Fri 21/03/2008 14:12 21032008009

A quick picnic just before the great carpark of the F1. Making good time so far, but that may change. Weather is moist without being rainy, so I'm hoping we'll be able to pitch the tent.

To be continued...

Fri 21/03/2008 11:42 21032008006

The Batmobile, aka The Fruit Machine, packed to the roof. We're on our way...

Fri 21/03/2008 08:39 21032008005

Thursday night of Festival, you'd kind of expect the stewarding team would have a booklet available to tell people where to go, what to expect and what not to do.  The one they do have is now three months old, and is unofficial.  Oy vey.

Ah well; benefit of the doubt.  We'll see how this goes, I think.  Stay tuned for some on-the-road photoblogging over the next couple of days, live from the swamp...  

Things I want to do at Festival:

• Meet astemudfoot, bendsinister, bookweevil, catsidhe, cthulu_for_pm, kaedhlin, keg_sca, mayela_delarue, pepperbeast and persephane, if they're there.  My LJ friending policy is: if I've met you in real life, or at least had conversations with you, I'll friend you.  About the only exception to this is barmaidblog, who nobody's met.  And the aforementioned LJers are the only ones I've yet to add to my f-list; once I meet them, provided they don't turn out to be evil or something, I shall.
• Give hot cross buns to teffania.
• Run a bardic circle - from sunset or so, Friday night.  It might be interesting, competing with the other events on Friday night, but ultimately we didn't have any choice, so It Will Do.
• Sell enough song books to pay for the trip.
• Spend time with the Elder Daughter of DOOOM.
• Find out if the site is viable or if it's going to be the shortest-lived "new site" in the history of Rowany Festival.  Magic Eight Ball says... don't build any permanent structures.
• Put faces to names and also see as many old friends as possible in the twenty-four-or-so hours I'm there.  Are you coming along?  Comment here and let me know!

Things I don't want to do at Festival:

• Drown.
• Get rained out.
• Miss my Beloved and my babies (but I will anyway).

In other news: I got a new phone today!  It's a Nokia N95: much faster than my N70, which runs like a brick bicycle, and has an utterly ridiculous five megapixel camera.  Also unlike the N70, it works with my Linux laptop, and has wifi connectivity that Just Works.  And yes, the LifeBlog software is there and fully functional, so I'll be able to blog from Festival.  Since I don't see much explanation for the talk of a "content strike" on Friday -- apparently someone in power at LJ is doing something nasty, but I haven't heard what -- I don't think I'll be too fussed about going on strike.  I'll post when I feel like it, like I always do.

Master Blayney writes:

I was on the site again yesterday and took the chance to dig a test hole and see how much water it could soak away. The answer is none. The ground is effectively saturated (but still firm and not boggy where we are camping).

This means that waste water will need to be collected from showers and washing up, carried to the uncamped areas and thrown on the grass (bring a bucket).

To avoid attracting flies, this means it is important that food scraps from washing up are removed as much as possible before the water is dumped.

We are camping on a river, but please don't follow human nature and turn it into a dumping ground. The river is tidal (1.5hrs behind central coast tides) so any waste dumped in there will hang around and cycle backwards and forwards with the tidal flows.

For those that haven't realised it yet, there are no communal showers. So you will need to establish your own or arrange to share. In doing this, you MUST have a method for collecting the water.

Hooooo boy. So: six hundred¹ people in an area that only avoids the name "swamp" on a technicality (the leeches have killed all the alligators), and there are no showers. That's going to be a special occasion.

I'm still happy to give it the benefit of the doubt... but I don't remember hearing quite so much worrying news about any of the previous sites.  If this works, it'll work; but if it fails, it'll fail spectacularly.

¹ That's the number according to a recent post on the Shambles. Significantly down on recent years, even the dustbowl years when all the asthmatics had to stay away. I guess people really are nervous about the new site.

So our plans for Festival are proceeding (see previous f-locked entry) and ditto the plans for my birthday party next weekend.  I've been tidying today, and the house will probably be respectable in time for an invasion of chums and chumettes, provided the BatPup doesn't decide to disassemble the bookshelf at the last minute and the EDoD doesn't set fire to the cat.  On past experience, both of these are at worst only moderately likely.

My brother and sister-in-law suffered a computer virus recently, so I've been rebuilding their laptop.  I used an Ubuntu Live CD to thoroughly reformat the hard disk - I figure very few viruses can survive the forced change from NTFS to EXT3 (ie from the Windows disk layout to the completely different Linux one).  XP is reinstalled, taking up all but 10Gb of the hard disk.  I'll be installing Ubuntu (Kubuntu, actually, since it's what I have) on the remaining 10Gb, so that if anything goes haywire again it will be relatively easy to log in to the uninfected OS and slurp all the files onto a CD or external drive without running the risk of further infection.

I'd love to get them into Linux properly, but my brother enjoys his games and my sister in law is Chinese - are there any versions of Linux that can be relied upon to handle Chinese input methods and software without barfing?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Bueller?  kirmish?

In other news: didn't get much done on the instructions for installing Gratian, or on the changes to automate the configuration for new users.  Too many nights of getting the BatPup to bed too late, and I can't do it on the bus because Jottit requires a net connection to work.  But I'll get there; at least I know syridian and Benedict (does he have an LJ?) have plenty of other things to do with their time, so they're not twiddling their thumbs.

Me, I have thirty seconds of thumb twiddling booked for 8:47pm on Tuesday, 23 April 2047, but I don't know if I'll be able to fit it in...

Here's what we would need for the EDoD and me to go to Festival this year:

• We have a tent, and it packs up well. We need beds. I think airbeds are the best idea, and we have an airbed pump that runs off a car power outlet (they used to call them cigarette lighters, those outlets, but honestly - who smokes nowadays?). So: repair or replace our two single airbeds.
• My sleeping bag is fine, but the EDoD's is a bit flimsy. Need to check if it will be enough in the subtropical conditions. Probably will, but just in case check and maybe replace EDoD's sleeping bag.  She's due a new one anyone, although it might come out of her extensive savings.
  
• I have enough garb for two half-days, but the EDoD insists on growing, so check and replace EDoD's garb.
• We don't want to be carting luggage on the train, so we need to find someone to drive our luggage to Festival and store it until we get there. No reason why they couldn't make use of our tent as long as they didn't mind us sharing it on one of the nights.  That would mean they would have to pitch it and take it down, of course, but that's not hard.  Our luggage would comprise a suitcase (garb + songbooks + some food), a couple of sleeping bags and beds, and a tent.
• Find someone to take us and our luggage home on Saturday afternoon/evening.  This might be the hardest part.  But taking the train both ways could prove too expensive.
• Book tickets on the Canberra Xplorer from Kingston to either Strathfield or Central.
• Double-check times and prices of the train from Strathfield/Central to Gosford.  Can we even make the connection???
• Find out the official arrangements for getting from the train station to the site.  They usually run some sort of shuttle bus, so we'll see if this part is sorted already.
• Find out the prices for the two of us to attend Festival.  The booking form says there's an overnight rate of $30 ($15 kids) and a day rate of $25 ($13 kids).  So I guess Friday afternoon to Saturday evening counts as a day and an "overnight", so that's $83 all up - right?
  
• See if there's a Bardic Circle on Friday night, since that's the primary reason I attend Festival after all.  If not, arrange one!
• Make arrangements for food: can we piggyback onto a food fund?  Alternatively, is there going to be food for sale?  We may manage with just our own supplies.
  
• Find out the conventions for swimming.  Not sure if I'd be happy for the EDoD to be swimming with the typical set of ugly naked old farts if it's the Fairholme Park convention (ie swimming cossies are not period, therefore it's "skinny" (ha!) dipping).

What am I forgetting?

Forgot to mention: after Beigefest's insanities, which included entirely too much struggling with my seven-year-old dome tent, the Beloved agreed that that tent I was drooling over might be a reasonable purchase for next year. So, given that I had a little extra cash in hand as the result of a windfall, I popped back to buy it... only to discover that the former price tag of $430 was no longer relevant. It now costs (drum roll, please...) $199 $299. Yes, that's right, less than only slightly more than half price. So I'm rather glad I wasn't convincing back then, because twothree hundred kangaroubles hurts a lot adequately less for a palatial nylon pleasure dome.

It wasn't in stock, but it'll be available soonish. The EDoD and I may even pop up to Spring Waaaaarghh on the October long weekend to give it a test run. We shall see!

One of the highlights of the beige, portaloo-avoiding marathon that men call Festival is the Children's Battle (some call it the Children's Crusade, but that name has unpleasant connotations so I avoid it). auntyyolly only has to run it once more for it to become an SCA Tradition ™: basically, it's an opportunity for the underage munchkins of the kingdom to beat up on any knights foolish enough to volunteer. This year, naturally, I wrote a song about it. The tune's an original, which you can download in MIDI format if you like. I'll have the sheet music as a PDF as soon as I can figure out why KDE NoteEdit doesn't talk to Lilypond (translation: Linux stupidities, as usual). Here it is:

Are You My Daddy

The children held the valley, the children held the fort
The knights held a meeting and they wouldn't cut it short.
So the children stood and taunted, the children stood and cheered
Till the knights stopped talking and they finally appeared.
And the children said...

    Are you my Daddy?
    Are you my Daddy?
    Are you my Daddy?
    Is what they said.
    Are you my Daddy?
    Are you my Daddy?
    Are you my Daddy?
    And -- oops! You're dead!

The knights tried it frontal, they tried it to the side
They tried their raps and snaps and taps, they tried it and they died
The children threw their missiles, with quite unearthly skill
Their swords in mighty concert flew and gave the knights their fill
And the children said...

The knights were all outnumbered, out-angled and outclassed.
But knights are pretty sneaky when it comes down to the last
They couldn't win by prowess, so they won by bribery
With bags of gold to buy it, they acquired victory!
And the knights all sang...

    Who's your Daddy?
    Who's your Daddy?
    Who's your Daddy?
    Got your fort right here!
    Who's your Daddy?
    Who's your Daddy?
    Who's your Daddy?
    Try again next year!

Must strive for balance, I suppose, so here's what was good and bad about Festival.

( Cut for length and namedropping )

I've had the Hunters & Collectors song Throw Your Arms Around Me earworming its way through my brain ever since celsa sang her magnificent filk version at the bardic circle. Just now, listening to my recording of the original, I got to thinking: what a pain it must be for "The Hunnaz" that, for all their other good work, they will always just be a one-hit wonder. Nothing else they've ever done comes close. It's probably the same for The Church with Under The Milky Way, Warren Zevon with Werewolves of London, The Proclaimers with Five Hundred Miles and, for that matter, John Cleese with The Parrot Sketch. And yet Queen survived Bohemian Rhapsody and Billy Joel moved on from Piano Man, so it's not an inescapable trap.

And hell, I even managed to go for an entire Festival without singing My Lady's Eyes, though I wouldn't be surprised if Oh The Baron becomes my new one-hit wonder given the reaction this year...

At least I have the option to put the really popular stuff in the next edition of The Known Words. Don't forget to send me your lyrics, celsa!

I will be very glad when the Crossroads site is no longer relevant. Come this Wednesday, I would be most pleased to see the entire place razed by bushfire to the depth of the bedrock. I think one of the biggest disasters of the last ten years of the SCA has been the amount of effort people have put into this one mismanaged pipe-dream.

Festival, in case it wasn't obvious, has not been an unalloyed success.

Certain of the troubles were universal, like the dust and the hills and the dust and the wind and the dust. Some can be put squarely at the feet of the stewards - the portaloos with no toilet paper, placed on a tilted surface so that a normal-sized person tripping as they rise to leave could easily tip them forward to land in a short sharp shower of disappointment. And certainly there were upsides: I scrounged enough wood for a fire on Friday night and the Bardic Circle went until midnight, and I sold a fair few songbooks as a pleasant side effect. But in general, we camp better as a family, and best of all as an un-stressed family. So the plan to have the Elder Daughter and the BatPup with me tonight did not, in hindsight, have a newt's chance in a supernova.

We'll go back tomorrow, the EDoD and me, fortified with showers and with a clear goal in mind: for her, it's to join in auntyyolly's Children's Battle; for me, it's to run the bardic circle tomorrow night and sell more songbooks. Nothing else; no heraldry, no networking, no nuthin'.

Oh, and if you want photos, here's a panoramic view of the Crossroads site. Note the detail of the dust. Roll on next year's horse shit and rain, is all I can say.

I know I said I wasn't going to bother, given the amount of work I have to get done before Festival, but I did a new version of The Known Words this past week. It's sitting at the print shop now, ready to be turned into fifty spiral-bound little miracles. I'll be selling them -- I hope! -- at Festival for $10 a pop, with the proceeds going to syridian's clever idea for a baronial defibrillator machine.

It's a nervous time. Did I get everything right? Are all the songs in the book listed in the index? Are all the songs listed in the index in the book? Are there appallingly stupid typos that I forgot to fix? Will the pagination work OK, so that King Henry, Stickjock and My Son I've Been A Rover (the only multi-page songs in the book) are positioned properly so you don't have to turn a page to keep singing? One miscalculation can mess up all that sort of careful planning.

But they're good. Seventy sixfive songs, I think; a combination of filk, folk and period, by legends and unknowns, all good stuff. (Well, all good except for My Lady's Eyes, which is turgid tripe, but it's in there because people keep asking for it.)

So... wanna buy a song book?

( And here's the contents, if you want more convincing )

Hey, Friendlist! You coming to Festival this year? Let's meet up some time! I'll be with the Elder Daughter of DOOOM and there at least on Friday and Saturday (and possibly other nights to run Bardic Circles, if The Beloved is feeling up to the task of impersonating a single mother). If you've friended me and I haven't returned the favour, it's because I haven't put a real-world face to your lj-name, so make sure you tell me who you are so I can stop being mystified!

And if you're going to the Folk Festival instead, I heard a bit on Artsound last night by a bunch called The Mammals, and they look like fun. Let me know if you see them!

Just heard from Sir Nancy of Berengar, Festival Steward, that he's quite happy for us to run bardic circles every night of Festival at the bardic firepit, half way up the hill to the Village Brown. Shiny! I'll be there for the Friday and Saturday nights at least, and I'm sure anthraxia and wenchilada and I can work out people to keep things going on the nights some of us aren't there.

Now I just have to finish Canon Lore and The Known Words Lite in time... That will be fun!

Every year it's the same: there's an Arts & Sciences coordinator for Festival, and everything gets nicely coordinated. And then, come the day, someone asks the coordinator about the Bardic Circle, and she gets this blank expression and utters the eternal words: Oh, I expect Blod, Finn and Bat will look after that.

So this year I'll bring along some songbooks, and be available for running Bardic Circles whatever nights I'm there. Gods willing, it will be possible to get some good singing done (and some bad singing, if D_______ and K____ and their ilk are there).

We won't be there for the whole time, very probably, but with Festival so close by for one last year, I can come and go. The problem is that my busily gestating Beloved is not mad keen on limping about and frequenting manky toilets ten times a night, but she's also not crazy about the idea of babysitting the BatPup at home all by herself for the entire time. So I may be commuting a little. At least it makes it easier to avoid taking time off from work, so there's that.