How things stand, mid-April

I enjoyed both Spring Coronation and Night in the Port. The latter was the Barony of Lochmere's annual rapier event as well as its Baronial Investiture. Laydes Fayre performed four vocal selections before the afternoon Great Court, and five of us Laydes performed an instrumental processional for the Last Court of the outgoing Baron and Baroness.

Yesterday I finished up and sent out the April baronial newsletter -- eight days late, unfortunately, but still better than my performance in March. This time last year I fell WAY behind, but my mundane-work-for-pay schedule was different.

Before I get any further, I should probably explain that I have several different "threads" of SCA activities going on, more or less simultaneously (or ebbing and flowing).

First of all: service. I'm serving as baronial chronicler. I'm Sea Tyger Pursuivant, the deputy senior herald in charge of education (though whether or not we'll have a University of Atlantia session in June is still up in the air). Those obligations aren't going away.

Second: Lithuanian studies. Often I shove this topic onto the back burner because so much else is going on in my life. However, I have a few goals in this area: schedule another Slavic Interest Group meetup for Pennsic 53, start working on a display or class about women in the medieval Baltic region, and maybe even start a website for SCA resources about the Baltic region.

Third: dance and music. I participate in the local dance group almost every Monday, even when my feet are hurting. I would really like to get back into instrumental music, because there will come a time when I am just too old and physically messed up to dance. I play soprano recorder and am trying to learn alto recorder (different fingering). I can also contribute percussion if necessary.

Fourth: weaving. I'd put my inkle loom aside for a while, but last Pennsic I took a class in Baltic pick-up weaving, and I love it. I'm slow at it, but I don't care. For once I am doing a craft that feels authentically aligned with my persona! I'm keeping a Flickr album of my work so far. I'm hoping to get as much done on the second band (gold design on a brown background) as possible before Storvik Novice Tournament on the last weekend in April, so that I can enter it into the competition A&S display there.

Fifth: Everything else ... making garb, fixing garb, knitting, making lucet cord and kumihimo braids, wire weaving, writing pysanky (called marguciai in Lithuanian), and doing all the other things I've tried over the past two decades.