Tue Jul 4 - Happy Independence Day... hope you all had fun with whatever celebrations you enjoyed. After a very full weekend, I'm almost ready to leave tomorrow on my jaunt across the country.

The event on Saturday was officially 105 degrees, or something equally heinous, and I can hardly believe we survived. But I spent the majority of my day either in the shade spinning wool for "Sheep-to-Shawl" or hawking raffle tickets for the finished shawl. The idea is that spinners, dyers, and weavers create a hand-spun, hand-plied, hand-dyed, hand-woven shawl and the money goes to support our regional SCA newsletter (which is nearly as stunning as the resultant shawl). We raised over $550 with just the Sheep-to-Shawl, and I personally gathered over $250 on my rounds at the event. Besides that, I spent a little time with Her Majesty's Court, with the Inn of the Crimson Spade, and with my Captain... with whom I had carpooled in the first place. I did NOT get to spend any time playing my flute with Baron Thomas, and I owe him a musical improv at our next event together. (Sorry Thomas!!)

Sunday, Monday, and today have blurred together in one massive event-preparation blob. I've completed three brand new white underdresses, called "chemises," which is really to say I have three new sets of medieval underwear. (giggle) I also completed a bright blue overdress, repaired a pair of burgundy pants that I wear with my burgundy overdress, taken out the hand-alterations of my older blue dress, and done laundry. I'll finish altering the older blue dress tomorrow based on the successful pattern changes when I made the newer blue dress.

And I managed to get nearly a dozen changes done to our Shire website: some of which were months and months old in my archive folder. We have an event coming up in August, and people were starting to ask me "Where's the event info?" Since I'll be gone for nearly a week, it was BEYOND important to get that uploaded. But since I've always promised that oldest-requests get done first, newest-requests last, I had a slate of changes to load [in order]. I'm happy to say the ones that were either easy or desperately important are all done. There are some "I can postpone these" still in my folder (like loading photos that people sent me), but I hope everyone's okay with that.

I have a newly updated packing list for tomorrow morning, and my flight leaves around 4 pm. Lot and/or Caterina are dropping me off and picking me up from LAX, Teffan is picking me up in Minneapolis, Svetlana's taking me to get my rental car on Saturday, and I'm driving the rental to MSP to catch my flight home on Sunday. It's heart-breaking to figure out how to pack in just one checked bag and just one carry on, but I should be able to figure out a way to do it.

See you all in a week!