Wednesday - T Minus Seven Days.

.....It is Wednesday, a little over seven days before we start setting up the site for September Crown. There are still a number of things left to do before the event, but the countdown is getting louder in my head. It is getting much more difficult to concentrate at work, much to my embarrassment on several occasions. The new job on the East Coast is requiring much more coordination than is the usual case. So I work hard at maintaining focus on where it needs to be and let the other leaders on Team Haggis do what they need to do to get the work done.

.....Last Saturday's Serjeantry Trials were completed, and I believe I even felt a little of that magic from the previous year there several times during the day. The candidates had all worked incredibly hard and it showed. TBT and I were so tense on Friday that we could hardly sleep. That tension did not relax during the day very much at all. The schedule kept pretty much on track though, with some extensive scheduling work by Madrun and Ellen.

.....There were several moments of sheer nervousness. And at least one heart wrenching decision to be made. Which was not easy at all. If anyone thought that we arbitrarily made a snap decision without much soul-searching and wringing of hands, they do not know us very well at all. By the time we made it home that evening, we were absolutely exhausted.

.....Sunday started off quickly with a party to move hay bales from Port Gamble down to the September Crown site. It took a little longer than I wanted it to. But we also had to do some adjustments to the site map. Take some measurements. And a few other things that slowed down the day's progress. But we moved close to 100 bales to site. It'll make do for September Crown, hopefully with enough left over to make it to Last Chance.

.....The Madrone Equestrian Guild traveled from Seattle and toured the site. The only concern I heard expressed was what challenges were to be performed as part of the Kingdom Equestrian Championship at Crown.

.....I also experimented with a plastic tent spike in the secondary camping area. The ground is a little rougher in that patch of land than it is on the main field of site, so there was some concern about stakes being able to be pounded into the ground and staying in place. I pounded a plastic spike in several different place and in every spot the stake pounded in evenly and stayed in place. So I think we'll be O.K. in this area for the weekend.

.....Last night was the Social at Fight Practice and was a good turnout, with some new people in attendance. Heard a number of stories about Autumn War. I put a note out to the list asking about stories from the War, and Arqhai told us about the battles online, which seemed to be epic.

.....Tonight is about the move of the Water Tank from Oliver's house to the site. It has been at Oliver's for a number of years now and I doubt very much that he is sorry to see it go. :-) When we are done with it at September Crown it'll go to its new home at the Poulsbo PUD. Which reminds me that I need to speak to Barnet about making arrangements for that. I'm not sure when we'll have a free day in September to make that move.

.....Tomorrow night is the Regional Pelican Meeting. Actually, a Teleconference. It's an experiment to see if we can make it work O.K. Scheduled to last an hour (as that is all the bridge line time I could capture). The online meeting we did last year was O.K., but had some issues. Conversation flowed based on an individual's typing speed, along with how many people were co-located in the room with the typist. So a person by themselves could be talking up a storm and moving on through the candidates, while the slow typist was spending extra time just trying to get their thoughts typed out. I'm hoping that an actual conversation will flow easier. We'll see.

.....Friday night is my shopping night for event related merchandise. I have a list of stuff like batteries, hoses, marking paint, etc. Renart pointed me towards Home Depot for cheap hosing, so I think I'll start there first. Costco seemed a bust for everything except batteries.

.....Saturday morning I am going to sleep in first. :-) It'll be the first morning I will have been able to do that in a while. I'm very much looking forward to it. Sometime that day though I'll need to bring Lobelia down so we can clean her out and get her ready for September Crown. I'd like to have her all packed up and ready to go by Sunday as we're planning on taking her to Imperial early in the week to have her electrical system checked out. We think it is a dead battery, but we want to make sure as we will be relying on that power for the length of the weekend, four days in total.

.....I also need to clean out the garage. It is stuffed full of things accumulating since June Faire that will need to be packed into the U-Haul on Wednesday for transport to site. Both pavilions, the Arts and Sciences signage, our chairs, and much other assorted 'stuff'. by the time I go through it all maybe I'll be able to walk through the garage again. :-)

.....Time to get busy, got Ajax to pick up and a tank to move.

.....Aaron / Arontius.