Gentle Readers,

Another weekend has passed. Three more to go before the fourth which is the Prize. In other words just a month left of me nattering on about my fencing practice to the exclusion of all else. And then I will likely continue with said nattering, but a bit more of other stuff will creep in.

For example, this weekend Lydia did her test for her Junior Green Belt. She was extremely anxious about this, cumulating with multiple meltdowns on Friday. Saturday morning at her test, however, not only did she know everything, but she was the only person who knew the Kimura. Even the kid with the green belt didn't know it. Her front rolls flowed like water. She looked awesome. I'm very proud.

After that, my Saturday didn't do so well. Apparently the Cliff Builder Bars are no longer on my safe to eat list. Something I didn't confirm until late last night. On the bright side I did get most of the taxes done for this year and last year. All we need are the child care/fitness expenses for Lydia and I can send them off. Sadly, no e-filing for me this year (since we didn't get last year done in time) but thankfully the return will cover the property taxes.

Anyway, in fencing news, I was playing with Meyer's lunge during my Friday morning practice and I had a revelation. For Meyer's lunge, you start in Right Ox (Similar to Prime) you lunge to target, turn your hand on contact and follow through with a slashing cut from right to left at the bottom of the lunge and then cut back up to Right Ox as you recover. Right Ox is one of the 4 Hangen. The others are Right Plow (Secunde in Tierce), Left Plow (Tierce in Quatro) and Left Ox (prime on the left? not sure how best to describe this).

So the revelation was that you can do the lunge to cut to recovering cut from all of these positions. And, if you play with it, you can do most cuts (some just take longer). And, because of the cut to thrust transitions that Meyer uses, you can also do this from all of your cutting guards like Vom Tage (Guardia Alta I think or maybe de Testa).

Nifty stuff and also means I know what I'm teaching tomorrow.

Because a class full of lunges never hurt anyone.

Mwa ha ha ha ha.

Gentle Readers,

I am lying in my bed after a lovely weekend away. We went south to visit Chez Arlette (I don't know if they have a preferred name for the house or not) and take in Ice Dragon. Ice Dragon was the driving force for the trip as I wanted to fight a bunch of people that I didn't know to get a sense of where I stood with regard to my personal skill.

The last (and first) time I went was 2 years ago. For some reason I had chosen to fight with Rapier and Buckler and I had my butt handed to me with every opponent. It didn't help that my pool was filled with lots of highly skilled aethelmarkian white scarves and their cadets. This time, either I got a much weaker pool or I was in a much better place skill wise as I did much better than I was worried I might.

I've been away from tournaments for some time and fighting strangers, especially ones from a different fighting culture, is never easy. However, this time I managed to force my game on them. I pulled off a beautiful Pallas Armata entry against someone who should have known better and managed some lovely Shieldhaus as entries into distance followed with a touch. In fact that was the shot that I used to kill the pool winner. Of the 12 fights, I lost 4 (I think. I can only remember 3 actual losses). The first one was a failure to control the sword of a legged opponent as I retreated out of distance (Meyer's Withdrawal), The second was a bad parry followed by a fluke shot. The third was a failure to be fully in synch with the Kingdom's fighting culture.

More frequent freeplay would have dealt with the last two and the first was the old problem of letting go of their blade within distance.

Another good thing: even with the very open hilt of the messer, I still had no problems defending the expected hand sniping. Even against the gentleman who I played with later who sniped a great deal in the tournament (with much success).

Another thing that I believe was contributing to my sloppiness was some combination of blood sugar and adrenaline shake which lasted much of the round.

Oh, there was also a great deal of sewing machine attacks. I found myself having difficulty with these, mostly because I didn't want to step in and get gut punched with a sword. I need to talk to Craig about how we used to deal with this particular problem.

Anyway, it was overall a very valuable trip. I'm feeling pretty positive about the trip. I think the daily practice is going to pay off in spades too.

Gentle Readers,

I'm still sick. It sucks.

It did not stop me from attending the inagural night of classes at Ottawa Swordplay's new Sword Hall. Craig is living the dream and I'm getting to come along for the ride. He's not even asking that I chip in for gas.

My first class as an instructor is not until Monday, but last night we did the full Thursday schedule: Armoured Combat(Spear/Sword/Dagger, limited targets) , Close Combat (Grappling and Dagger) and Longsword. It was wonderful. I didn't have the energy for any freeplay other than spear but that's ok. It was fun regardless.

This evening, I brought David out to the hall for some practice for my prize. Lessons learned:

• Do not move forward without a plan. you cannot force an opening, you can only create a situation where they give you one.


• Give them a reason to move in. If they don't have an invitation, they will leave.


• Stringering inside works great for moving forward, but move into third as soon you lose contact. Don't push past horizontal.


• Respond as soon as they move forward. It's what you wanted, so disrupt their plan.


• Learn the Stringer without. you need an entry to that side which is not just arm sniping.


• don't lead with your face.

There are probably more, but I think that's enough for now.

Gentle Readers,

This morning, I'm lying here in bed while Lydia takes advantage of my sunny room to build her new "girl" Lego. The set overall seems pretty cool, but I don't know why they felt it necessary to come up with a new (and incompatible) style of minifig. I'm sure they worked with a focus group.

It's been a surprisingly long and tiring week. I say surprisingly, as I was not expecting to be quite so tired last night, falling asleep before 10. I just couldn't keep my eyes open. I guess there were a number of draining aspects to the week, from working on a really tedious product re-branding to getting sucked in to a stupid internet argument. I'm really amazed that person in question managed a reinterpretation of history (history in which I was explicitly involved) that actually upset me.

After having met the ultimate troll while I was in university, a man who had the almost magical ability to deride something very important to you on your first meeting with him, I should not be surprised in the ability of a troll to aggravate.

Lydia has some plans today to go and hang out with one of her favourite big people while Cortejo and I go do some stuff that would likely bore her to tears.

Tomorrow we are going to Kingston for the Greyfells practice and also brunch.

Sunday should be a day for sewing.

I'm hoping we will be rejuvenated. Odds are good.

Gentle Readers,

This weekend I spent the weekend in an empty industrial building wearing weird clothes, listening to strange music, moving weirdly and playing with unusual toys. It was one of my favourite SCA events.

Things that were awesome about the weekend:

• Getting hungry and going to what google claimed was the closest sushi restaurant and having an amazing dinner while watching the Iron Chef America: Maple Syrup episode.
• Having a pizza named after our barony.
• Getting told by fineum that I'll do just fine on my prize.
• Arriving at almost 11pm and still feeling unrushed about getting settled in.
• Lots of fencing! With New People and People I rarely see.
• Being succesfull at what I tried to do with my fencing.
• Helping Gerwin with secretish mesurement task.
• Refreshing my Armoured Combat auth card.
• Getting tasked to sing a new Ealdormerian march by the composer because she felt it needed a manly warrior (ish) singing it.
• Doing it well.
• Being warm mostly.
• Pleasant dinner company.
• Outthinking the king then making him laugh.
• Seeing the queen giggle again
• Hanging out with A (and O)
• A suger free apple dessert with dinner.
• Tea with merimerimac on the way home.
• Running into an old friend at the Brockville Starbucks.

Things that were not that awesome:

• Scary weather on the drive down combined with Transfer Trucks with no awareness of personal space.
• Not getting any time in armour, dispite bringing it.
• Occationally having my fingernails turn purple because my hands were so cold (dispite the rest of me seeming plenty warm).
• Some conceptually nifty but uninterestingly executed fencing tournies.
• Chafeing from too much walking bat to the room with the cup on.
• Brown Sugar on the veggies.
• Not enough time with everyone!
• Waking up to a half meter of snow on the grownd (and the car) Sunday morning.

Things I'm still deciding on:

• The new Fourth Peerage announcement from the BoD. I'm pretty sure I want to be on that comittee.

Gentle Readers,

It is confirmed. I will be fighting my Dean's prize in the ealdormere Academy of Defense on May 12th.

I am going to be sending out invitations to skilled fencers to come and act as stand-ins for the other Deans I would be playing against if I we had any. I'm looking for suggestions of people to invite and also any suggestions as to how I should phrase the invite.

Gentle Readers,

While I'm glad this week is over, it's not the week ending I was expecting. I was expecting that right now I would be in the middle of the Tournoi du Coeur de Glace, however, thanks to a bug that Cortejo picked up and my lack of reserves to handle hours of driving with someone I don't know very well we are home this weekend.

The extra sad part is that thanks to people needing rides, I've already done more driving today than it would have taken me to get there.

Part of the reason I was hoping to be there is that they are working very hard to try and make this a prestige tournament for both Armoured and unarmoured combat. I'm all for supporting both the idea of a prestige tournament (As we have precious few here) and the fact that it is for both combat forms is just a bit of extra icing on the cake. However, the main reason I was hoping to be in the tournament today was that in May, I am supposed to be playing my Dean's prize in the Ealdormere Academy of Defence.

The EAoD is a merit based recognition group here which has a list of requirements for each level, and if you meet them, you get in. There's no voting from other members. There's nobody who can award the levels. You pass or fail based on your own efforts. The level of Dean is the highest level and, of course, has the strictest requirements. In addition to a number of service and study requirements (Teaching, Good appearance, knowledge of historical fighting styles, and so on) there is also a martial requirement. For Dean, you must fight 50 boutes against the other deans and win a third of them. Then you fight against all comers for at least 15 min.

You can read it all here: http://ealdormereaod.maven.ca/Dean_Rank

There is one tiny problem. There are no other Deans. I (and the other fellow who is also playing his prize) would be the first. So, the person in charge has decided that she will be bringing in a number of highly ranked combatants from all over. I, not being one to want to make things easy for myself, have decided that I will also invite a number of friends of mine who are very skilled to also be included in the pack of Dean stand-ins.

So the reason I wanted to be at the tournament today was to just see where I was relative to the people coming out and try and figure out where it is that I should be spending my training time. For the last little while I've been fighting a mix of scadian, foil and badly mangled Capo Ferro. However, with the work that we've be doing with Ottawa Swordplay, I've been trying very hard to push this as much into the relm of German swordsmanship as possible.

So, I have a few techniques that work quite well, I have a couple that I want to get to work like the clockwork they should be, and I want have a couple more hammers in my tool box for dealing with problem nails. The problem is getting that understanding of what kind of nails I will be facing. In order to do that, I need to go to tournaments, or at least go and fight. I've got three months to get myself up to speed.

I think I can do it.

Gentle Readers,

It's been such a whirlwind here this weekend, that all of us are exhausted and in bed even though it's not even 9pm yet, even Reyl. He spent the weekend working. The rest of us had a much less mundane weekend.

Originally we were supposed to go to Kingston Friday night for Saturday's Baronial 12th night, but even though it broke Lydia's heart, we decided that it was the smarter plan to not go. The storm that was ploughing through had knocked out power with our hosts and with that also taken out their heat. Given that there was also the remaining dregs of the blizzard to drive through, we decided to recognise that the Friday the 13th had won and sleep in our own beds.

We managed to get ourselves moving fairly early and made it to the event site by 10, just as they were setting up. We settled ourselves in and I spent much of the day sitting and sewing with Ilanikan. There were a couple of important points in the day.

The first was our early court. We managed some business and delivered some presents (which were hopefuly funny enough to make the court time worthwhile). The big thing was declaring the taxes for our forth year. Following our tradition of one word tax declarations (previously Supplies, Song and Presen[ts.
|ce]) our taxes this year is Pilgrimage. We want our people to head out into the bigger pond of sca and share a taste of Scrael. We also expect Hospitality i.e. providing for visitors to our barony) to also be part of this taxation.

The other cool thing was taking a more active role in one of our Skrael traditions. To elaborate, in Skraeling Althing, we have the dubious privileged of being visited by Black Peter to help purge us of our sins each year. I'm sure this is one of the reasons that Skrael is so pure. This year he was unable to make it and sent one of his peers, a monster known as the Krampus. For a Krampus, Moira took an old Gorilla stuffy and added tusks, a long forked tongue, evil eyebrows, terrible claws and horns and opened up a hole in him to turn him into a puppet. The thing about a puppet, is that they need an operator. That operator was me. So, for a basket full of sins, I was The Krampus. With a voice halfway between Cookie Monster and Rodante Kapor I scared the sin out of the populace. Well the voice and a big stick.

Even better was I got Lydia to help me. She read the sins out loud to the audience!

I think I got it right as lots of people complimented my performance.

We headed back to Moira's were Cortejo "learned" tablero and I had a lovely time socialising with some new friends. Eventually people managed to leave or fall asleep and I did the same. Unfortunately, shortly after I fell asleep, Lydia came in asking to sleep with us. We made some space for her bed and she slept fitfully all night. At one point I woke up to find her cuddling my left foot.

Sunday we got woken up early by a min-pin puppy who seemed to think that doggy french kisses are the best thing to wake someone up with. We managed to get out the door to get home by 11 (an hour after my proposed time (just as I planned)). We got home in time for Cortejo to have a nap before we Zoomed off to the Ottawa Classical Swordplay demo.

The demo went amazingly well, even if none of the people I invited showed up. There were still about 75 people there which was awesome. I didn't do so good with the Longsword freeplay but won the Rapier freeplay which is as it should be since I am the instructor. I did talk a bit too much for my section, but I should have been paying more attention to time.

After that, we were originally intending on going skating, but some forgotten equipment complicated that. We tried checking out dow's lake, but the ice wasn't ready there and the only open part of the Canal was in poor condition. So instead we went to the local rink and Lydia and I skated for a half hour or so.

Such a busy weekend I can't keep my eyes open any longer to type.

Good night.

Gentle Readers,

So, I fenced last night. Not hard, not fast and definitely not well, but I did fence. I probably could have played the whole practice which makes me happy regarding my stamina. It's hard trying to not overdo things. Now I just need to change the physical results of going from many hours of intensive physical activity a week to nothing for a couple of months.

I feel so very unconnected with my body as a result of this incapacitation and it and I are going to need some time to get to know each other.

Gentle Readers,

I've got 2 things to write about after this weekend. This is the not sad one. The head instructor for OCS is away until Wednesday and so he asked me to cover his classes for this weekend. This shouldn't have been a big problem, but the weekend was already booked with the anniversary event of our investiture and the internment of my aunt (more about that later (that's the sad bit)).

Anyway, possibly thankfully, the event did not make it into the Tidings (the group newsletter) and so it was not an official event and we couldn't have an official court. Because of this I decided that I wouldn't try and manage 4 hours of driving to be at the event for less than two after what was already a very full day. This turned out to be an even better idea due to the fact that the Birch trees in Ottawa were exceptionally randy this last week with grains/m3 going back and forth between 250 and 420 (where 80 is considered high). This lead to my body finally giving up on friday evening and blowing a fuse or something because I was unconscious before 9 and slept for almost 11 hours.

Unfortunately this lead to me waking up with low blood sugar and just not coping well. I managed to get my shit together for the class at 9 am but it was close. I was teaching the final classes for the 2 Medieval Longsword classes that Craig was teaching for the Association of Bright Children. I had gone out last weekend to meet them and for the most part they seemed like a good bunch of kids. The first class particularly. The second class, however, was a bit more rambunctious and had one kid in particular who was especially annoying. While I was there he felt it necessary to call out "Boring" every 5 min with regard to the exercises the class was doing. It did make up for it by also having a 13 year old girl who loves swordplay so much that in addition to taking the class a second time, she also convinced her parents to get her fencing lessons. She's really good.

Luckily for me he was one of the kids that didn't show up (probably due to the weather) and (also probably due to the weather) the classes were pretty low energy. This let me spend more time on the class and what we were doing than trying to keep everyone focused. The kids had much more of a tendency to want to sit down and take their masks off instead of acting up and being difficult. In all the classes went fairly well, an at least one of the kids had a good enough time that he called out good bye to me as he drove out of the parking lot.

Here I skip over the sad and draining bits to more fencing.

Since, as I mentioned before, Craig was out of town, the open class space was available so I invited Don Aaron and a couple other people to come and fence, however, he was the only one who was available so we ended up doing a a fair combination of fencing an analysis of style and comparison of historical techniques.

The first and most important point was that I tend to have a very active style and unlike most people, I don't respond to his planting by planting myself. This is good in that I'm not giving him enough time to set up his action or counter action, but it's bad in that I'm not really giving myself a chance to do that either. This was a bit of a revelation as I've been thinking of myself as more of a patient fencer. However, this does explain why my arm has been getting so exhausted when I fence as of late. I spend a lot of the time playing with blade engagement and trying to take the superior position long enough to take advantage of it. My defense is very solid, but it's not followed effectively by offense and no matter how good, a defense will eventually be breached.

When I do find that hole, I can exploit it pretty effectively, but becuase I'm pushing so hard to find it, I think that I don't always wait for a good hole and make an attack that can be more easily countered. What he suggests is that I change my game from the fast thinking reactive game to a slower game where I set up, wait for their response and then counter that. After we talked about this for a bit we tried again, but with Daggers instead of Single. I tried slowing down and it seemed to go better for me. After that we talked a bit about the German 1 and 2 handed styles that I've been doing and the counter actions that come from there. In that situation, I do have a good sense of what to do in response to the opponents reactions to my action. I just need to transfer that over to rapier.

And so, practice.

The afternoon went by uneventfully I did some cleaning and some talking and some watching of knitting and some sword fighting with Lydia then, all of a sudden, it was time for the evening class.

The Sunday evening class has switched from Capo Ferro to Dall'Agocchie and as such from Rapier to cut and thrust. As of the last class, Don Aaron has decided to switch from his old translation to a newer one from Stephen Reich. Because he has moved from the old work to the new one, the class has changed from a student/teacher class to more of a study group where I feel a bit more comfortable contributing to the interpretation. We looked at the defenses against the Dritti Fendenti and then at some of the provokings. Good stuff. There were still a couple of things that didn't quite make sense like how to move into the Coda Lunga e Stretta from a dritti stramatazoni, but I'm sure we will figure that out soon enough.