Monday, 29 September 2003

Happy Birthday to my Beloved Ken! (If I knew how to do little fireworks graphics around this, I would.) Feel free to send him online cards or e-mails, ken.meese@earthlink.net.

I’ve given him a card and one promissory (for a pair of massages for us, probably to happen tomorrow). I have another promissory (personal, so no, I’m not telling you what it is), a kit to grow a ginko tree (because he wrote me a love poem on ginko leaves when he was in Korea once. It’s framed by our front door so it’s the last thing we see when we leave the house.), and a book about Italian costuming yet to give him. We’re going to see “Under the Tuscan Sun” and go out to dinner, too. That’s it for official plans. We have folks coming over for sewing tonight, par usual, but we’ve warned them that we may kick ‘em out early…

I also have to do a couple of hours of copy editing, blah.

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Last night I figured out how to make little labels to put over the mistakes in the Combat Booklet table of contents. They’re glaringly white, but I finally realised that they’re not really that much more “obvious” than stuff crossed out and handwritten in. So.

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I started writing up about the weekend last night, but I was too wiped out to get very far, and besides, we had the 2-hour season premiere of “Charmed” to watch (not bad, but not brilliant) and the first episodes of “Lyon’s Den” (okay, but may not keep my interest in the end). I made nachos to go with “Charmed”, and they were trés yummy. I like our new food processor—but I made way too much tasty guacamole.

So, the weekend. Out of all the classes I took (and helped teach) this weekend, the biggest thing I learned was not at Collegium. What I learned was to never, ever take Tylenol PM. I learned that it gives me nightmares and makes me groggy for hours after I should be awake. Major ugh.

I took the following classes:

Worth Its Weight in Gold: Brocades. Very interesting, lots of slides.

Intro to Millinery. Excellent glass, learned a lot.

A Year in the Life of a 13th C Knight and Lady. What it meant to be a “knight”, what society was like at the time, etc. Taught by someone who could make it all interesting.

Fiber Survey. Totally rocked! The instructrix (I know, I’m a geek) gave us notebooks with fiber samples. The only downside was that it was the last class of the day, in a room that was growing darker. And she really didn’t have enough time to talk about everything, so it should have been 4 hours long.

History’s Mysteries and Scandals. An ongoing series that I absolutely love. This one was about the Elizabethan era. What story fodder!

Then I helped Eowyn teach the class on the Llangorse Textile, although I didn’t have much to say. My main contributions were the Time Team videotape and the “you can show this to people, but not copy it” hot-off-the-press info from my museum source. The folks in the class seemed really fascinated, and actually had some good ideas to send back to my source. (The museum folks are still trying to figure out the exact method of construction.)

We missed the women’s German construction class on Sunday morning due to my bout with Tylenol PM. I feel bad about that, but Arianna did see us later and invite us to a workshop at her place, which was sweet of her.

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I felt a little groggy all day yesterday, and was exhausted at bedtime, but had trouble falling asleep. I had lots of dreams again, but thankfully, no nightmares. In fact, it was a rather happy dream that I lived in a ritzy neighbourhood and Tommy Shaw moved in next door and had a big party for the rest of the Styx members. Except I was too shy to go over there and talk to anybody, and peered through the wrought-iron gates like the Little Match Girl outside the warm store.

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Should be in bed, but I remembered an e-mail I need to write, and if I don’t at least write myself a note about it, I’ll forget again. So, that’s it for today; I’ll recount the rest of Ken’s birthday celebrations anon (which, in this case, means tomorrow).