So, perhaps I should update on this past weekend…

Friday night Ken arrived home, and we puttered and packed and finally got on the road to San Diego and Kingdom Collegium. Our plan was to stop at Pea Soup Andersen’s for supper. PSA is a semi-famous restaurant up near Lompoc or thereabouts, that has billboards for hundreds of miles in each direction. I had no idea there was one down in SD as well. Ken swore there was, in a Danish village. Well, I spotted the windmill off the side of the freeway, and we exited. No PSA. There was, however, a Friday’s…in what was obviously the PSA building. We asked the waitress; it’s been there about three years. How sad. So I had French onion soup and a Cobb salad, and Ken had Chinese orange chicken, and it was quite yummy, but not pea soup. We continued on, found our Motel 6, found something random on TV, and I sewed pearls onto six bobby pins and we made a list of what classes we wanted to take, and then tried to sleep.

I slept badly, if at all. The people in the room next door had left their TV on—it was very low, but when it’s the middle of the night and everything else is silent… I noticed it only occasionally, so I must have slept some. The alarm went off too early, at any rate.

We took the following classes: Men’s Landskenecht German garb (both), the history of Justinian and Theodora (both), Women’s German garb (both), Russian Mediæval History (me), and, um, oops, I’ve forgotten what Ken took in the last hour. I think a history class taught by His Majesty.

Anyway, Eilidh did my hair during the lunch break (she taught spinning classes the first two hours and was too busy, so I walked around with my hair in pigtail braids, looking like a total goober). Afterwards, the plan was that we would head up to Irvine and the Rush concert; Rush being one of Ken’s favourite bands on Earth. But we hadn’t gotten tickets ahead of time, and our choices were lawn seats (kinda harsh after being pressed up against the stage for Styx); $400 apiece really good seats (wheeze), or $300 total scalped tickets. It was up to Ken, of course; I’m not a huge Rush fan (if he wanted to spend $400 for a front-row seat, I’d support him in that—but I couldn’t justify spending that for me). He decided that we could put the money towards a new TV (a bigger one, with a remote and stereo inputs and outputs). So we snagged Eilidh for dinner, and she was going out with Thea and Their Highnesses, and it ended up being about 17 of us at a decent Chinese buffet. Much silliness ensued, and A Good Time Was Had by All. Afterwards, Ken and I stopped at a local porn shop, where I discovered they were selling back issues of magazines, so we pawed through looking for the October ’95 Playboy (which has a picture of Pamela Shoemaker, Tommy Shaw’s ex). No luck. We went back to the motel, watched some silly home decorating programs while I proofed the first half of the Combat Handbook, and crashed.

Still not enough sleep, but we soldiered on. Eilidh did my hair, and we trooped off to classes. I took Life in the Terem (history of women in Russia) and Russian Folklore and Storytelling (all of the Russian classes were for writing rather than SCA stuff…). Ken took a Latin class and one on entering Pentathlon. We grabbed lunch at a Subway, and blew off the afternoon class to head home and prepare for his party.

I was so tired, though, that I promptly took an hour nap. And then I panicked because there was so much to do. We straightened, vacuumed, etc.; we made killer guacamole (everybody loved it…) and salad and prepared the meat for tacos. Maren and Ken’s mom and brother showed up early and we put them to work, chopping and so forth. Jackie brought the cake. J Just as other folks started arriving, I dove into the bedroom and put on my black lace tank top and a short flippy skirt and big dangly earrings. My hair was still in the totally cool coronet braid that Eilidh had done that morning (it survived the motorcycle helmet!), and I threw on some makeup and all was well.

The party was fun. An interesting mix of people, from one local SCAdian nobody knew to Ken’s divorced parents to good friends like Eilidh and becoming-good-friends like Maren and Lhasairfhiona. I got Ken a puzzle that you then put all the state quarters in (he loves maps and has an interest in coin collecting), a book of essays about motorcycles, and a t-shirt that says “Does this bike make my butt look fast?” It made me laugh out loud when I saw it in the catalogue, so I had to buy it for him. At my suggestion, Lhasairfhiona got him devil rubber duckies; Maren’s going to make him woven trim; his dad gave him money and paid for last night’s dinner; and his mom had paid to have our lawn mowed and trimmed recently. Everyone ate pandemonium tacos, Mexican casserole, and yummy cake (the latter two provided by Mom).

The final dregs of the party watched most of “Knightriders” and shuffled off at about 1 a.m., at which point we fell over and slept.