I would entitle this “First night at war” but for those of you who are not part of the SCA, this might be mis-leading. When my friends and I from that middle-ages re-enactment club go camping for days at a time, usually the theme is that we are “At War” with another Kingdom, and the fighting scenarios include troops of knights and other armored fighters, doing battle with “swords” and shield, using field tactics, storming “castles” and other scenarios. So this is to set the scene, and now back to your regularly scheduled catch-up post.

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I did some of my packing the night before, and the rest this morning. I’m really quite glad I had the “Coffee Bar of Splendoor” already together from last weekend. I seem to be getting a little better at time management, because over breakfast (Denny’s down the street because it was fast, sit-down, cheap, and had coffee) I made notes about all the things I *wished* I could do, and then did a realistic time estimate on how long it would take to do each. Then I evaluated “what would the consequences be if I *didn’t* do this step?” which helped me put the whole thing in perspective.

When in reality it would take an hour to enjoy lingering over my ironing and watching an episode of TV at the same time, but the consequences would include sitting in rush hour traffic on a get-away Friday AND a holiday weekend, it was easy to walk away from that task. Were I not careful, I’d have done that first because then my room would be clean when I got home. I did need to dismantle my bed before leaving because Geoff and Mer are staying home this weekend, and putting together Geoff’s old loft bed for me.

Finally I decided on the bare minimums, which included cleaning the kitchen while packing my kitchen items and the last of my downstairs organizing. It might sound like cleaning the counters and other people’s dishes aren’t as important as packing and leaving, but I’d been away a lot this week and when I’m not home, the kitchen slips quite a bit. And I enjoy my vacations MUCH more when there’s a clean kitchen at home.

The drive was uneventful, even though there was plenty of traffic even WITH leaving by 2:30-3:00, but I enjoyed taking PCH and taking in the ocean before sitting in north-San-Diego-county traffic. Even the sunset was lovely, making the trip that much nicer. I got on site (at the SCA gigantic camping trip for the weekend) while it was still light out—another one of my goals for the weekend.

My roomie Mel is part of a household that has a nautical theme, and supposedly “all the ships” would be “at the docks.” I drove through the park and never saw anyone I recognized from their households, so I went ahead and parked my car and started looking for them on foot.

Met a nice lady in the parking lot who hailed from Northeastern Ohio (where I grew up!) and had a lovely chat before starting on what turned into a three-hour hike looking for my camping space. A three-hour hike in the dark is exhausting, and sadly the food court had closed before I could stop for dinner.

So I visited some other friends in their camping area around 9 or 9:30, and when they offered me a snack I started to actually cry a little with joy and exhaustion. It was all very silly, but bananas and cookies make a wonderful dinner in the cold and the dark. One of the guys there knew where “the docks” were supposed to be, and walked me out to a dirt road I never noticed, out towards the archery fields, where we easily found two pirate groups and my friends.

Turns out my camping group had only gotten there around 8:30 which explains why I couldn’t find them at 6:30. *grin* So, the camp is all set up, we’ve all had a lovely garlic chicken and veggies dinner in the dark, and my roomie has offered me a place in her pavilion (since on top of everything, my friend Lilya still hasn’t arrived yet with the tent she was planning to loan me). Time to sleep and start early tomorrow with coffee bar for everyone.

There are times when I find that time is more blended, less segmented. Today is a great example. Although it’s only Thursday, my brain is whirring with what to pack tonight, how to get on the road tomorrow, what I’ll be doing while camping Friday through Monday, and when we’ll be back in the studio next week after being away for an entire month. The drummer, keyboardist, and guitarist in my band have each taken a week’s vacation—consecutively. So for a month we haven’t been in the studio.

On the drive home last night, it dawned on me that there was something in my CD player. (Because there’s only so much George Noory that I can listen to on the radio without going stir-crazy.) So I popped it out to see what it was, and it was a band recording with the melody line for two sets of lyrics I was supposed to write and learn. The guitarist ended up writing one of them, because I just didn’t think I had the frame of mind to write lyrics for a song entitled “Sex Dream.” I have to say, he did a great job on that one and I’m glad I asked him to write it. Now I’ll just tweak it so I’m comfortable singing it. Anyways, I still need to write the lyrics to the other song, and ideally several more, if we’re to finish our 3rd CD by September (at least finish *writing* by Sept., which is our goal).

So today at work I’m letting another Tom CD run in the background, to remind me all the songs available and to start better memorizing them. He came into the studio with an hour’s worth of music on eleven tracks and just said, “Oh I wrote a few things, you might like them.” I love them. But they are all instrumentals for now, so I have to complete the lyrics as soon as possible.

Hence time is blending one segment into another and it’ll be June already and I should be well on my way. I may need to set up some weekly/monthly goals [have X, Y, and Z done in June, have A, B, and C done in July…] so that I’m all caught up again.

The best thing is that strong emotions evoke more lyrical creativity for me, and I’d qualify my silly jr-high-like crush from the weekend as a dose of strong emotions. So even though I’m certain we’ll just be friends and this is not someone I would ever be dating, I’m thankful for the jolt of creativity from it all.

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Which is also to say it might be a few days until I can post, because I’ll be out camping with between 1,000 and 5,000 of my closest friends. I’ll keep some logs along the way, so that I can catch you all up quickly afterwards.

With all my love!

Whew, wow. After taking months and months to get a photo album created for a website for my friends, last spring, I’m pleased to say it only took two days [working nearly 6-10 hours a day] to get the album done this time. So I hope my dear friend Brian knows that I really did this all for him, since he was the one bugging me last time.

If you don’t already have the link, I’m proud to present a photo album from an event this past Saturday: http://www.darachshire.org/galleries/Anniversary/

I’m doubly proud of my photography as well as my webdesign. Yippee!

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Some other good news in my day today: We had medical screening (for free) at work today. They tested our blood pressure, blood glucose, cholesterol, and body fat. I know that my mom and sister and I tend to have low blood pressure, and as I’ve too much weight for a while, it’s climbed to the “normal” range. And I donate blood regularly, so I’m pretty up on my blood pressure every two-three months. But I’ve never had the other bits tested before. Apparently I have *really* low cholesterol, and all the medical staff there gave me enthusiastic thumbs up for that reading. Glucose was also low, and so I’ve no symptoms of problems there.

And body fat, although I knew what the reading would probably be (the level that says “you should lose weight”) I did learn something very encouraging. My lean body mass is much higher than I thought it was. When you’re 5’4″, the old charts always say you’re supposed to be around 120 lbs. Ha! My lean body mass is 150 lbs—so I can stop worrying about being some skinny-binny some day (not like I was really worrying) because even at 0% fat, I’d be more than that. So I’ll probably have my body fat checked again in another six months, to see what progress I’ve made on my exercise, food, and weight loss regimen.

What a wonderful discovery today.

Well, after all that hard work on the photo albums, it’s time to (a) find some dinner at 9 pm and (b) do my laundry before sleep.

G’night!

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Recently Listened to: Aileen & Alexandra Grill, “Sof Ma’arav L’dor Vador”

You know the old saying that if you leave empty wire hangars in the closet, unchecked, they multiple when you’re not looking? I got that feeling last night when I started digging into the filing that had piled up around my home. I’ve got some major furniture re-arrangements going on, and so there were several piles of paper that just got shuttled around from shelf to shelf until their “real home” was decided.

Well, I decided that part of my cleaning-up-after-the-event-activities would be to put away my filing. Finished up one pile, looked around, noticed another one, flipped through it and found “Hmm, I don’t remember having two piles of filing-yet-to-do.” Finished up the second pile, looked around, found another one that was also just normal filing, sat and finished it, too. Looked around and… You get the picture. Hours and hours later, I had so much put away, so many clean and empty shelves, and a really small “To-Do” pile left on my desk. Pretty cool.

The only drawback was that I was wired at 2 am from all the industriousness of cleaning, and I just couldn’t stop and go to sleep.

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Yesterday there was no journal entry, because yesterday was a Migraine Day. It always amuses me that I don’t recognize a headache at first when I’m sleeping and one starts to come on. I toss and turn, confused and perplexed, until I finally wake enough to say, “Oh, take something for the pain and this will get better.” I came into work after lunch with this summary: It’s amazing what Meds, a Nap, Food, Coffee, and more Meds will do for you. Ah, better living through chemical engineering.

* * * * *

My roomies brought down the big moving truck full of Geoff’s stuff, and I hear that the garage is filled to the brim. But the new exciting thing for me is that I’m getting a loft bed frame from Geoff, custom-made by him. And he’s even offered to set it up for me, while I’m away camping with friends this weekend. It was nice to see that he seemed to be in good humor about it all, and I’m very thankful that he’s offered to assemble it.

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Recently Listened to: Sarah MacLachlan, “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” and Aileen & Alexandra Grill, “Sof Ma’arav L’dor Vador”

Lilya and I got up fairly early, grabbed some breakfast, and headed off to my church. She was really impressed with the pastor and the congregation, and got a better idea of what my church means to me. She said she finally understood another piece of me, and what’s important to me. There are so many different things people could mean when they call themselves “Christian” and seeing first hand the church I call “my family” she was impressed, and wants to come back again some time. Talk about a huge compliment, wow! She also hit it off with Craig, the pastor, and they’ve already started talking about things on their own—she’s planning to teach him to read Hebrew, he’s loaning books to her that’s she’s always wanted to read, etc.

Donna and I also made some specific plans about the sign language chapters we’re going to work on next, and I’ll be going over to her house in a few weeks to help her with her computer. She’s really excited about getting back into her studies to also become clergy, and I’m going to help her sew a few stoles and things for her clergy wardrobe.

After church we went back to Dayle’s, packed the car again, and heard a little bit about her crazy morning. She lives in the Historic District, and in preparation for the Home Tours this fall, some guys dropped by to see the house. Unannounced. Seems her real estate agent kinda forgot to mention she actually gave them an appointment day and time to come over. So poor Dayle had to clean the house in a flurry, and I felt bad that (a) I wasn’t there to help, and (b) my stuff from the tournament was filling her living room. But the place looked gorgeous, so I’m sure she impressed them in her ever-efficient way, as always!

Lilya and I went to hang out in the park, where normally the local guys have “fighter practice” on Sunday afternoons. This is where people learn to fight in armor and heavy swords (made from solid bamboo) or where they practice a form of fencing from the middle ages. But since it was the day after the local tournament, turns out that practice had been cancelled. So the only people who came out were the folks who *weren’t* at the tourney the day before.

This was kind of nice, too, since it meant I got to see some friends I *really* hadn’t seen in a while. And of course, Lilya hit it off really well with everyone here, too, and it’s a given that if she decided to move here, she’d be immediately part of the family.

As if my weekend weren’t full enough, another college friend has finally caught up with me again. “Moose” has been a friend of mine since my 2nd year in college, although we hadn’t heard from each other in nearly ten years or so. He didn’t even know I had been singing with a band or recorded two CDs, it had been that long! Lilya and I went over to their place, and we all went out for the local salad-bar-and-soup restaurant. Carl is almost four now, and Timmy just turned 18 months. *Again* Lilya hit it off with them, and carried most of the conversation. But then again, some of that was a self-defense mechanism because of different opinions about fundamental Christian missions overseas. So she got to talk at length about Judaism, and I was fascinated to just sit back and listen. I made Michael (Moose) and Connie promise to help me not let ten years pass until we see each other again. And so I’m going to try to come back again in another three weeks or so. We’ll have some alone time to talk about Michael’s plans to go to Uganda for a summer mission trip, and we’ll see how that discussion goes. But most importantly, I’ve just missed my “little brother” from college, and was glad to see we could pick up where we last left off.

And again, Lilya really got to see yet another part of my life.

We decided to take the coast for the drive back, and continued our weekend full of deep conversations. After so many hours of such intimate conversation, we were easily given to tears. But shared tears are a good thing sometimes. She’s definitely one of my closest friends now.

Finally, back at her house, she and I played Tablero while her husband watched “Attack of the Clones” on tv. She’s just completely engrossed in the “Known Worlde Handbook” that she was able to get at the tournament, and the rules for Tablero were in there. I finally had to leave even before the game was over, because I was so tired, but all in all a wonderful weekend.

It was slightly embarrassing that when I got home, I didn’t have the energy to unpack and go inside, so I just napped a little in my car (to keep my things safe). A nice young police officer came by to wake me and see if I was okay. And she chatted with me for a while about all the gear in my car that I needed just for a little weekend trip with friends. Once my contacts were back in, I was awake and alert enough to unpack everything and crawl in bed.

That wraps up my weekend!