derekl_1963

June Faire is Officially Ovah! I just pulled the last checklist from my clipboard a little bit ago.

Yeah, there's some tasks left, but they're now part of ongoing work like "laundry" and "clean up the workshop".

And now, June Faire by the bullet points...

• June Faire was as usual, pretty awesome. Seeing and hanging with friends old and new. Seeing some deserving folks get elevated or recognized by the Crowns and Coronets. Etc... etc...


• It had a few sucky bits too... The drummers at all hours Friday night and the noisy encampments Saturday night. And the dumpster fire during teardown that has caused the RV to smell like burning garbage.


• I finally got to meet the lovely rectangularcat and hang out a bit.


• This whole business of photo documenting the Faire turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. It was tiring not only because I was on my feet all day, both days, but also because of the mental effort of walking the site with my head on a swivel and constantly thinking about what I was seeing, After downloading the pictures, I'm anguishing over the ones I missed or forgot to take. Such is life, lessons learned and carried forward.


• It wasn't until yesterday that I figured out why I felt so crappy all weekend - I'd become massively dehydrated. Working in the demo as I usually do, my tankard is near to hand for a few sips of water whenever I want or need them. Walking about the site, I suppressed the distraction and never made up the lack.


• Photo-geeking with andras120 and Marcus was, as usual, awesome. (And thank you again Marcus for the gift if the ball head. I'm looking forward to using it when I can get over to Seattle and get a base that it fits.)


• For the first time in many years, we shared a camp... and despite the confusion (our camp mates forgot their tent poles, resulting in an ad hoc re-arrangement of sleeping quarters - in the dark) it was massively fun.


• It was pleasant to be recognized for my photographic work by the Coronets.

And I must be crazy - because still somewhat tired from last weekend and all the work leading up to it, and still being not entirely caught up from last weekend... I'm already starting to plot and plan and look forward to next year.

Took off for the weekend for the first longish trip in the RV, and had a blast.

Brenda and I are really liking this RV thing. Setup and teardown is so much simpler than with a tent camp along with being much more comfortable! Fifteen minutes after turning off the ignition I was sitting at the table with a cool one in hand. On the other hand, unlike a motel when there are problems - we get to deal with them instead of handing them off to the staff and leaving them behind us when we leave. (In this case, electrical problems, we've lost the lights at the dining table...) Still need to add a few things to the RV, but I suspect that will go on for a while until we get some more experience built up. When we got home, unpacking was a snap as if it came out of the RV at all it went straight into the house to either the kitchen or the bedroom. None of that "this goes in the garage, this goes in this closet this goes in that closet and this gets dumped in a corner because I've never actually found a spot for it".

The drive itself was interesting as this was the first time I'd actually driven the RV on back roads where the speed limit was higher than 35... Some of the curves got a little frightening because where a car can go neatly around the curve, the back of an RV is much further back and forces involved are much higher. I'm much more comfortable with it now, but a long way from completely comfortable. OTOH, when stuck in traffic waiting for our turn to move (they were paving and thus down to a single lane for quite a stretch the other side of Allyn) I was able to pop back to the refrigerator and grab a coke. I even pondered hitting the bathroom, but decided that would be pushing my luck. Half an hour later when we finally moved, I quite regretted that decision! :) Still, when a chance arose, taking a bathroom break was simplicity itself - I pulled over at a wide spot in the road and just headed back to the bathroom.

I'd picked up a pair of FRS radios and they proved a godsend because Brenda and I could keep each other updated as to the need for bathroom breaks, variations from the planned route, etc. etc.

Hanging around the campground was interesting - I never thought I'd spend an evening assembling a jigsaw puzzle while conversing with complete strangers. Yet there I was.

Both Brenda and I took a stack of books with us, but we spent a lot of time either in the camp hall or conversing with our neighbors and never cracked open any of them.

We got out on Saturday and did some geocaching - attempted 11, found 4, didn't find 4, and waved off on 3. A bit lower than average, but I'd picked some of the more challenging ones available. The most interesting one of the day was based on the life of John Tornow, The Wild Man of the Wynoochee. One of the reasons I enjoy caching is the chance to find odd little bits of local history that I might not otherwise encounter.

All in all very nice.