Post-Party.....

Wow.

That was a good party. If you missed it, well...what can I say that will make you feel better? Nothing. That's what. If you missed it I feel very sorry for you. Your life is poorer for it and I hope you can join us next year.


I had a blast. We launched our newest boat onto the pond and not only did my repairs work we had ship to ship water battles. That helped us keep much cooler. Bison Burgers? Tasty. Lots of Frisbee hacking. Some friends dropping by who I haven't seen in literally years.

My friends Joe and Christine from Monolith Graphics put together a VERY cool scavenger hunt over the entire property with a sweet map and prizes. I've wanted to do that for years but never had the time and focus. It was a blast.

Ed brought some amazing ribs and let me take his 911 for a spin at VERY LEGAL AND REASONABLE SPEEDS WHILE OBEYING ALL TRAFFIC LAWS.

So much food and drink...

Showed off some new corsets materials and the scarves from Turkey.

And fireworks? The theme this year was "Hard times". We did a short and fairly lame routine to a polite applause, then brought out round two. More boom, a couple of mini mortars. More applause and the crowd assumed that was it. Tthen we brought out the big stuff. Lots of bangs, big finale. Looked great. And all while sticking to a much smaller budget this year.

Drums were produces and two musicians played guitar and fiddle. I took a few people for candle lit rides in the darkened pond.

Clean up this morning wasn't too bad. Items left behind include some flip flops, a car key,a silver wrist bracelet and two people we found sleeping on a futon in the back of their car.

I can't thank everyone enough who came out to our remote little Hobbit Hole. I hope you had as good a time as I did. If you took pictures please send me a disk or post them to flickr and send me a link.

Spending money to ...save money....wait what?

Times is tough. Money is tight. So we're looking at ways to make our pathetic pieces of green paper go farther.

The first was changing our health insurance. Apparently the arrival of the new year is the signal for our insurer to tack on another $100 a month to our insurance bill. This we just can't take. It's gotten to the point of absurdity. But I don't want to have no insurance at all, so we make our deal with the devil. We lower our premiums by accepting more upfront costs. A LOT more. On the up side, when you tell doctors or hospitals you are paying cash, the bill is often lower. The plan is to save the insurance for the really bad stuff.

Car insurance will be next.

Then there's the phone. The local phone lines are so decrepit that we loose 50 - 80% of our service when is rains heavily here. I can't get cell signal in our home (being underground and all) and I don't want to try a call-repeater or change our number (which is tied to our business). The answer? Ooma. Ooma is a VOIP system, like Vonage. But unlike vonage, you buy the hardware once and that's it. Voice quality is also supposedly better. It looks like a pretty sweet system. I bought the base unit and one satalite unit. But I need to get a router working in my office to hook it up to. I also need to test the system with my wonky internet provider. But if it all works, I will be able to change over my landline to Ooma (something Vonage can't do here yet) and start saving an ASSLOAD of money. I'll let you know how it's working in a few days.

A sad confession

I visited some friends in Michigan two weeks ago and came away shaken. Their place, despite having two big dogs, was spotless. It was organized. And while I've always been a bit of a pack rat, I wouldn't say my place is a pig sty.

But it is.

The main part of our house isn't too bad at all. Rossana keeps it pretty neat and clean. But my office? My fortress of solitude whose condition I am solely responsible for? It is, in a word, awful. So I've spent the past week cleaning up. Really cleaning. Throwing out old magazines and paperwork. Cleaning off my desk. Dusting. Filing things.

It's not sexy or exciting work. It does not involve travel to exotic lands or dangerous characters, but it was long overdue. I must admit that a few times I got distracted by looking at art or stories or ideas I was playing with 20 years ago or so. But here was planty of crap too. And it had to go. It's a process I recommend. Cathartic and yet meditative.

Then I looked around the house and I realized that we just hadn't had time during the season to do much more that keep up with the mess generated by our work/lives. Try to keep on top or it. Put stuff away, send off packages, sweep up a little. But in truth the place hadn't been thoroughly cleaned since June.

Since Rossana was having a client over for a past life regression I helped really clean up today. But after a good vacuuming the carpet still looked...unvacuumed. Being a man I new that the only answer was a tool. But I'm tired of renting the rug cleaner from the hardware store. The whole miserable process sucks. Instead, we went on the internets and did some research. In the end we bought a run cleaner at Walmart. In this craptastic economy we've tried to keen a lid on unneeded expenses. But this purchase was am absolute necessity. We called it an x-mas gift for the house.

I ran it over what appeared to be the mostly clean and freshly vacuumed living room carpet. It was not clean. Not by a long shot. The machine extracted buckets of pure evil. I was so excited by the results that I gleefully cleaned most of the carpets in the house. (I am sure the novelty of this task will soon wear off) I swear I will never go a year between carpet cleanings again. Hell maybe I'll do it once a month. You could eat off our carpet now. It's exciting, in a mundane and domestic kind of way.

Catching my breath

The Bag End bash went of pretty damn well. Well, except for the torrential rainstorm that hit mid way through the day while we tried to play frisbee hack. But the weather soon cleared up and we were able to hack frisbees as well as enjoy the fireworks.

I want to thank everyone for coming over and bringing such great food. It was great to see some friends that I haven't seen in quite a while.

Just before the party my Dad came for his annual visit. This was canceled last year when he broke his neck in an accident. I am happy to report that he again rode him Honda PC800 down from Boston without too much trouble. Grimm was also in town building a trailer for Pennsic and even Ander came by to work on a camp chair.

No rest for the wicked though. It was off to Columbus for Origins Gaming convention (during which Wellington got a metric ASSLOAD of rain. Our house was fine but there are signs of the storm all around.

Back at home we only had a short rest before heading out to Geneva to prepare for the Great Lakes Medieval Faire. It was a frenzied 2 days of painting, cleaning, planting and more. Our new booth now has a proper changing room, a real storage area and a fresh coat of paint. All in all, it looks remarkably the same. This was a rather disappointing realization, but everything behind the scenes is in much better shape now.

The show opens this weekend and there a lot of activity on the site. Apparently Larry, the owner of the show bought out a lot of equipment from the now defunct Geuoga Lake amusement park. There was even a rumor he was building a roller coaster (Thanks god that wasn't true.) We didn't have time to look around, maybe tomorrow when we start setting up and primping the booth.

Par-tay!

The date for the Bag End Bash has been set! June 21st starting at around noon or so. I have sent out evites, but my email list may be out of date. If you know me and didn't get an evite you are still very much invited. I am not sending out physical invitations this year. It's just too expensive. I am hoping that this won't affect attendance.

We are planning on setting up the archery range as well as playing Frisbee hack. I might set up a croquet pitch as well. We will supply basic meats and drinks, please bring supplemental food, side dishes and maybe a dessert (cough*pie*cough) . I hope to have the custard machine again thanks to Lindsey.

It's possible that there will be a rack of corsets (some of them made with our amazing new exclusive materials) set up in the garage, but the would merely be a coincidence.

Want to fish? Sure thing. We may even have the remote control Pirate ships available. Want to slack off? Try the hammock.

Need crash space? Contact us ASAP. In house room is usually limited though tent space is plentiful.

In the workshop...

I bought a cheapo video camera for the Germany trip. I am not very impressed with it other than its size. But while I am testing it I thought I would record a brief update on a few projects I am working on in the shop. Enjoy!

Before and After

I went back and found some of the earliest pics I took of the house and compared them with how things look now. Wow. Pretty drastic changes! All all this is three years. I think we're done with big changes for now. Please dear god, please let us be done...



Here's a more static gallery of Before and After if flash ain't your thing