Cold Toes

[anastasiav]

I am very, very, very tired of being cold. For various reasons I won't go into here, the temp in our house is always set to 60 degrees (downstairs) which means that its closer to 57 in our bedroom. So I get up cold in the morning, and am cold while I get dressed, then I get into a cold car and come into work where my desk is right by the front door, so the cold air blows in. Then I get back in my cold car and drive across town to my other job, where its a big, drafty, metal call-center building, so its cold in there too. Then its night and I get back in my cold car and drive back to my cold house and get into my cold bed and sleep....

I was trying, last night, to remember what it was like to be warm by thinking about being at Pennsic, but the only sensory image that conjured up was cold, wet feet.

Our local Yule event was on Saturday night, which was fun. I second msmemory's recent comments about small, local events -- although Yule this year was the largest ever, and there were lots of people there from neighboring groups that we didn't know (or at least didn't know well), including two Laurels who apparently have moved to Brownfield from somewhere in the Outlands. They were very nice, if a bit geeky. They had brought along samples of some of their stuff -- the weaving was beautiful, the metalworking beautiful, the illumination was .... very nice for an out-of-Kingdom piece. There was a Roman feast, which was good, although the presentation could have used a bit of work. Also, lots and lots of music and dancing -- who would have ever thought that music would be what this group would do best.

One thing that Miles and I discussed at the end of the event was the fact that we've somehow failed in teaching a lot of the new people the old 'pitch in and help' ethic that we grew up with in the SCA. Miles noticed that he had far more people from outside the group offer to help in the kitchen than he had local folks offer. Does anyone know a cure for this? How do we teach them that service is sort of a duty, while not making it seem quite so much like an onus?

I almost forgot: Here's another photo from our friend Mark, who is currently (we think) in Mosul, Iraq.

Some Things I Was Reading Over Lunch:

The Comming Wars (Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker)

Will Iran Be Next? (The Atlantic Monthly)

Internment Camps and Authoritarian US Fast Becoming Reality (note the copyright date)

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

The Correspondence of Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI

Zingerman's Fine Foods - alas, they are sold out of Garum....

Comments

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Cold. I got up around 5:00 and put another quilt on the bed. I'm all bundled up here at work in a turtleneck and wooly sweater - good thing we have a casual office.

[cat9.livejournal.com]

That is the best photo ever. It also, of course, reinforces my faith in those fine men and women over there. For example, Dwarf. (Who probably wouldn't strap a scrub brush to his head, but might consider it. Who knows?)

We seem to have a lot of "pitch in and help"-ness around here, but I will say that is often seems centered around about five people who can be depended on. I'm not sure there are too many people outside of the core group who can be said to consistently help with clean up, etc.

[jducoeur]

There's no simple cure for the pitch in and help thing, but I think that, as with so many things, personal connection makes a huge difference. You're far more likely to get assistance if you ask a specific person "would you help me with this?" than if you put out a general "would someone help with this?". And it tends to grow on people with practice -- the more they get used to giving a hand, the more they do so automatically...