OK, I admit it

I miss the SCA.

It was dumb a lot of the time, and full of nerds, but it was mostly a big huge honking gas. I've written about it before, I think. All those mornings, waking up to the sweet smell of wood smoke, fresh air, in a big home-made wooden knock-down camp bed, surrounded by silk banners waving in the morning breeze, listening to the birdies singing and your early-rising friends getting the tea on, and thinking about what you'd like for breakfast before fencing practice. Maybe a little left-over venison.

A friend of mine, whom I met at a little annual war on Saltspring Island when I was sixteen, and who is still in the lifestyle, likes to say that when they turn those fluorescent lights back on, we're all just nerds wearing drapes. And that was true.

But when the hall is properly lit, the music is playing and there's dancing and home made mead to drink...

It's hard to like the modern world, and I can't begrudge people who simply get out of it as often as they can.

And I liked all the Ansteorrans I ever met. Texans. They are the most down-to-earth of all SCA nerd-dom, and they got the tongue-in-cheek part perfectly. But at the same time, they took it all the most seriously. They were the ones most likely to actually take up blacksmithing just to get really into it. A lot of them were military guys, making them markedly less obnoxious than the West Coast hippie types we were stuck with in BC.