Medieval Faire 2007

Aaaaarghh!! It do be Medieval Faire time again and this last Saturday my son Zach and I set sail, bound for Geneva, Ohio, and our annual trip. The luck was with us, as it happened to be "Pirate Invasion" weekend, which is always good for me as it do match me garb. This year I dressed up but chose not to carry me trusty cutlass, opting instead to bring my camera, but fear not, it wasn't as if I was unarmed as it's a "canon", which every good Pirate should have. I would have posted this tale sooner but it took all day Sunday to edit these pics as I fired off me canon 432 times, nearly emptying my one gig hold, by three quarters, of all the shot I had on board that day. It was a good thing that I brought it with me as there were all kinds of strange folk and creatures about, the likes of which I have never seen in all me travels. I swear it be true, there where men with horns, and Elvin folk with pointed ears, tinkers and alike, and even belly dancers who would come brazenly up to the camera shaking their wares and tempting a man to... take their picture... As Poseidon is my witness there must have been evil spells and incantations being cast as to ensnare a brave mans soul. I tell thee there was indeed wickedness about, but I had me Canon with me, so not to fear from the temptations about... but I digress...

There were many Knights about with their trusty steeds doing battle, though their show of daring seemed much shorter than previous festivals I had attended. Perhaps it was due to the fact that they seem to have a different group of knights every year and this group seemed to be made up of lords a bit long in the tooth to be jousting. Also the showing off of their bravery included very little jest and boasting as I had come to expect of men of high honor, nay they had very little to say at all, just straight into battle they went. Still it was good to have them about to help protect honest sailors from eyes as green as the deep sea which peered deep into the lens as if to enthrall a brigands heart (sigh)... but alas I digress again...

My son Zach did seem to enjoy the Faire, though I sometimes wonder if he comes along just to please the old captain. This year, more than any, he really seemed to enjoy it even if some of the shows like the Falconer and the Tortuga Twins were not there, and even the brochure that you get at the entrance had been reduced from a booklet to a mere single page. He especially liked these large oxen though the sign in the back did say "Black Ox Good Food", which kind of made me wonder what manner of creature would want to eat such a beast after they had petted it. No doubt it was one of those Gypsy Queens that can vex a mans brain by flaunting their scantily clad midriffs, shaking themselves all about... hmmmm, I do be having problems concentrating on the tale at hand...

Some of my favorite minstrels, "The Pyrates Royale", where on hand singing their bawdy tales again this year. I watched their show last year but forgot to pick up a cd at the end of the show, a misgiving that I remedied this year. It's hard to find good pirate music, but these buccaneers are definitely first rate. I especially enjoy their song, "Hellship", a story about being clubbed by a comely wench in a tavern and spirited aboard a pirate vessel and forced to man the ship, and also their ballad, "The Boatman", a story of a woman longing for her man lost at sea. This ballad has an enchanting tune just like I've heard the sirens sing tempting a man to dive overboard. There must be some wicked magic about that can stop the heartiest of souls dead in their tracks and take the wind right out of their sails with a mere come hither stare... (Keep it together Dagoth)...
As always there where lots of wares for sale many of which would cost a Pirates treasure.
The "Washing Well Wenches" and the "Battle Chess" were back again this year, along with some new shows, so all in all it still made for a good Medieval Faire, even if some things seemed to be cut back. If you wish to see more pictures they are posted here at my Flickr site.
The weather was much better than last year when it was very hot and humid, and my pirate boots served me well for sloshing through the mud, everything was pleasantly dry this time. This will probably be the only weekend I will go to the Faire this year as there are only two weekends left and I didn't get a seasons pass this year...No I mean it, I'm not going back, no matter how much the gods tempt me!... Someone lash me to the mainmast!... Arrrrgh!!!

"Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell."
-Anon

Photographic Expedition No. 1

Yesterday I went on my first photographic expedition. I thought there would be many when I purchased my new camera, but life has conspired to delay my first one, as life often does. I felt that an expedition should involve a quest, so I decided to make my first quest the U.S. Brig Niagara, which is a recreation of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's flagship and is based right here in Erie, Pennsylvania...

When I got downtown to the ships birth, there was no tall ship to be had. I know it had been here on Wednesday when I had passed by this place... I wondered where it had gotten off too and decided to look around for it...I found many sailing vessels, but not quite the one I was looking for...I even found old sailing ships, though they were still not quite the tall ship I was looking for...I looked out over the bay, and though I found Perry's monument over on our peninsula, Presque Isle, I did not find his ship...
I even zoomed in on his monument, thinking perhaps it was hiding (though how could you hide such a large vessel? I just like the zoom feature), but alas still no ship...I searched the waters of the bay for this ship, but found only ducks...And more ducks...I found a new Convention Center being built...I found a tall tower... and I thought, if I went up in it, I could see the whole bay and find this missing ship...Yes, a very tall tower...But alas the tower was closed so I could not use it to find the Brig... Where else should I look? I decided to journey around the bay, and go out onto the peninsula, where I could see Lake Erie, and perhaps find my lost ship out there plying the waves, as tall ships often do...On my journey I found a clown fish, though there are many fish here...I found a big blue frog, there are many of them here as well, if you know where to look... This one's in love...I finally made it out to Presque Isle and looked back to where I had come from, thinking perhaps it had come back, but still no tall ship...I found Perry's Monument that I had seen from the other side of the bay, but his ship was still not here... I grew dejected...I peered out onto Lake Erie and my heart rose! There were many boats here, perhaps one was the one I sought...But I found only beautiful sandy beaches, and the blue water of the lake, and no tall ship...
I found many colored flags fluttering in the wind, but these were not the big white, square sails and the rigging that I was looking for...I even found seagulls flying in the breeze, but they were not really seagulls at all... But a mere illusion...

So, sadly I headed home... My grand quest a failure... and when I got home I checked the Brig's website, and found that the Niagara was off visiting neighbors... Which had I checked before I left, I would have known she was not here, and there would have been no need to go off on this foolhardy expedition. I could have saved my self all this time and trouble...

Afterwards I realized that journeys do not always take you where you thought they would, and you do not always find what you are looking for...

Sometimes marvelous things find you instead...

"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end."

-Ursula K. LeGuin

Not Impulse Buying...

Yesterday I was watching one of my new chipmunk friends making a spectacle of himself on my back porch mere feet from me. He couldn't see me through the glass window of the French door so the first thought that came to mind was to grab my digital camera and snap a few shots of him, but then I sighed and said "why bother, the pictures won't come out well anyways."

My old Kodak DC3800 had become a real disappointment. It was a good camera in its day but as with all electronics these days, "Its day" didn't last very long. It had a whopping 2 mega pixels, an 8 meg memory card, and no zoom capabilities, that pretty much makes it about as good as any camera phone these days. It really wasn't all that expensive of a camera to begin with and I have really wanted to get a better one, but I'm just not a spender. I'm the person who always worries about the "what ifs". What if the car breaks down? What if I loose my job? So consequently I'm always saving my money.

I had finally had it with that camera and after the chipmunk incident, immediately hopped into the karaoke battlewagon and headed off to the store. Now this does not qualify (in my mind) as impulse buying, as I had thought about it for a long time, and it wasn't like I was at the store right when the "desire to purchase" came over me. Ok, so a new camera wasn't high on my list of "needed things" to get, it was more like on a separate wish list. There certainly are much more important things that I could have kept saving my money for. The thing is, I have been working a lot of overtime lately, and saving every dime (can you hear me convincing myself in my head), and haven't splurged on anything in quite some time, and so don't I deserve a "little" extravagance for myself?

Looking over the cameras in the store it pretty quickly came down to two, an Olympus and a Canon (their most expensive models). The best part was I had two of the girls in the camera department helping me out and it turned out one girl owned the Olympus and one owned the Canon and I managed to get them to argue over who's camera was better. The girl who owned the Canon (the slightly less expensive model) did admit that the other girls camera was better, but proceeded to rattle off a list of reasons why her camera was better, and she put up a pretty convincing argument, the best of which was that the Canon had a fold out LCD screen that you could point downward and shoot while holding the camera high over your head (she showed me a picture she took at a concert by using just such a method). The part of that which I liked the best was that you folded the screen face against the camera body protecting it; the Olympus' screen was affixed to the back of the camera, leaving it exposed. The Canon finally won out (I never buy the most or least expensive of anything and I was maybe feeling a little guilty about the money I was spending).

So after picking out a few peripherals, I left the store with my new "Canon Power Shot S3 IS" with 6.0 Mega Pixels, 1.0 gig memory card, 12X zoom and 0.1 second between shots (I missed a shot of some deer in my backyard the other day with my old camera because it took too long to be ready to fire again) in hand and also a DVD copy of "Apocalypto" by Mel Gibson (another thing I didn't need, but it was an excellent movie especially if you like Mayan and Aztec cultures like I do) and thereafter proceeded to go shutter happy (how was that for a run-on sentence?). I've spent most of the weekend (except stopping to watch the movie) taking shots, loading and playing with the software that came with it, and reading the plethora of materials that came with this complicated machine. There are a lot of different settings, which I am just starting to learn what they all do. I was very happy to find that it has a "Diopter Adjustment Dial" that allows you to focus in the view finder, just like focusing a pair of binoculars, because while I was in the store I was unable to admit that all the little icons in the view finders were blurry, and I thought it was just because I need a new pair of glasses (another thing on the list), and the girls might chuckle at my poor eyesight (you think about these things when you're a guy and you get... older).

So from now on my blogger posts should contain more and better pictures even though I still have to edit them for size (the pictures, not the posts), as no one wants to have to wait to download a 3 meg picture. I've included in this post new pictures of "Tunneler" the chipmunk who dug a tunnel under my sidewalk to my flower bed and has an amazing ability to "dive" into the bark in the flower bed and pop up somewhere else, also some better pictures of "Chubby" the groundhog and "Oscar" the red squirrel who live in my shed. I hope you all have had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, I'm just glad to go back to work tomorrow so that I can pay for this shopping spree...


Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

-Sydney J. Harris

Things that make you say "Awww Crap!!!" Part 2...

Did I mention that I had more of these? That's all of them I promise...

Bad Parenting

Forgive me but I found this to be very funny in a sad and morbid sort of way. So if you find this to be as hilarious as I did there is something really wrong with you...:)

Things that make you say "Awww Crap!!!"