A Maiden and a Rogue Walk into a Medieval Fair

You know you've homeschooled correctly when your teenager brings up the term "medievalism" all by herself, AND when she gripes about the term "Ren Faire" because everybody is cosplaying the Medieval period there, NOT the Renaissance.

It's been a whopping four years since we last went to this nearby Medieval Fair, a length of time that I can hardly believe since we had so much fun last time! This time, though, I think we had even more fun, especially because this time I wasn't the lone cosplayer. In fact, I actually gave my costume to Will, so while she looked awesome as a maiden and Syd looked awesome as a rogue (wearing the Halloween costume she sewed for herself also four years ago), Matt and I were the boring, modern-day tourists.

There was jousting-- 

--combat--

--and mounted archery--

--and in between the shows we wandered the vendor tents (I bought a book with a hidden compartment in it from Peddler's Chest, but Syd did not find the corset of her dreams--I think I'm going to have to sew one, ugh)--

--did the Scavenger Hunt--

--ate turkey legs and pulled pork, and sat in the sunshine and enjoyed ourselves:

Guess who's the most delighted person at the entire Medieval Fair?

Alas, for I did not use my time wisely, so in the afternoon I had to choose between the final show of the sword swallower and the final show of the fire breather, dang it.

I chose FIRE!!!

When it's not hosting a Medieval Fair, Clayshire Castle is a bed and breakfast and event space. It's fun to walk around inside it and pretend that you're a noble family with the festival going on outside your castle walls:

I LOVE the castle's own collection of cosplay garments!

At the ticket booth, the kids had to choose sides in order to receive their Girl Scout fun patch (they also had to give the Girl Scout Promise to the ticket agent, which was apparently horrifying, but they both did it!), and they both chose the just cause of the House of York. Here is their queen, standing next to the Lancaster queen:

I think my maiden dress must be cursed, because Will also got an awful sunburn while wearing it, oops. Or it's the fault of that tricky autumn weather--so hard to remember to reapply sunscreen when the temperature is so lovely and cool!

So after one last walk past the axe-throwing arena and the drinking horn vendors (so tempting!) and the chain-mail artisan, we headed home to put cold, wet washcloths on our red faces and eat Hostess Scarycakes (because yes, I DO have to buy every holiday-themed food that exists) for dinner while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

Because obviously your post-Medieval Fair chill-out movie can ONLY be Monty Python or A Knight's Tale. Do not even try me with any subpar non-Medieval alternatives, because I will not have it!

Week 4 With the Foster Kittens: Seven Weeks Old and Part of the Family

Taboo

 Seven-week-old foster kittens are so fun!

They're mostly responsible enough now that they can have free range of the house while we're up and awake. Old habits die HARD, though, so there are a few pee spots here and there that I just can't seem to make less tempting--any and all advice is welcome, please!

Anchovy

Taboo

My favorite kitten is still the one that's sleeping on my lap and purring, but dangling a bootlace is now my second-favorite kitten-related activity. The other day I spent a full twenty minutes pulling the bootlace around for them (and I timed it because I was waiting for two teenagers to freaking GET READY TO LEAVE THE HOUSE ALREADY I SWEAR TO GOD YOU DIDN'T TAKE THIS LONG TO GET READY TO GO WHEN YOU WERE TWO AND FOUR!!!!!) and they were still racing back and forth for it when I stopped... although they did all collapse immediately into slumber once the game was over. 

Spots does not want anything to do with us these days unless we are literally outside, but Jones is even more on top of us--

--and even chases and wrestles with the more adventurous kittens. To be honest, it IS a little difficult to ascertain if he's playing or low-key trying to murder them (or both!), but it's terrific kitten socialization, at least!

Socks

from left to right: Socks, Athena, Anchovy, Taboo, and Pickle

The babies found themselves in the mirror last week and I didn't catch it on video, dang it, but this week they found their first sunbeams!

Athena and Socks

Taboo

I love watching each of their personalities develop. It's not safe to send them to their forever families until they're speutered, but it's kind of a bummer that they are being so adorable and sweet and charming and personable, and at seven weeks they're so hearty and easy to take care of (at least in multiples fewer than five!), but their families don't get to enjoy them. 

Socks

Pickle

Taboo

Athena

I really hope they all get adopted within minutes when they finally head back to the shelter in a couple of weeks, both for that and because my heart will physically hurt knowing that they're in a containment area instead of a comfy, loving home...

Athena

... especially Athena, who is my own personal little darling, and it is going to sting when I give her back. I just keep telling myself that everybody wants a kitten, and if I really want to adopt I should take a senior cat, but also I don't want to adopt, because when the kids are both in college I want to travel more. 

But then Athena climbs up into my lap and falls asleep, purring happily to herself, and I forget again. I should make signs and post them around the house at my eyeline!

Here's our foster kitten glow-up so far:

• Four Weeks Old
• Five Weeks Old
• Six Weeks Old

Girl Scouts Love State Parks, and a Very Strange Cemetery Visit

In Indiana, it wasn't great timing for the annual Girl Scouts Love State Parks weekend. The forecast called for just enough rain all weekend that one could neither plan confidently nor cancel confidently. Normally, my Girl Scout troop is fairly tolerant of miserable weather (we've happily completed entire badge meetings and cookie booths and camping trips more-or-less in the rain!), but all of the activities that they most wanted to do--full moon hike! Trail ride! Campfire dinner! Earning the Ambassador Photography badge!--called for fair weather.

Also, high school students are so busy! I fear that I'm past the days when I can gather my entire Girl Scout troop together at the same time in the same place. Someone's always got their part-time job or volleyball practice or play rehearsal or a college visit or, ahem, ballet class six times a week.

So it was with a much reduced number of Girl Scouts that I went to a local history program put on by one of our nearby state parks one Sunday morning. Not the whole day of fun some kids had hoped for, but we'd learn some local history, at least, spend some time together outdoors, and, most importantly, earn those fun patches! Honestly, I was going to be thrilled if the rain held off long enough for us to at least take a walk around the historic cemetery and take some photographs.

Happily, the rain held off long enough for us to attend the entire program and have a (quick) picnic afterwards AND take a (few quick) photos for the badge.

Allens Creek Cemetery has an unusual reason for being. The land we live on once belonged to the Miami nation. In 1809, William Henry Harrison unethically "purchased" most of Indiana from the indigenous nations who lived on it, then the Shawnee leader Tecumseh led a protest, then Harrison led an attack on Tecumseh's people that he later used as a campaign slogan, then he talked so long at his presidential inauguration that he became ill, then he died. 

Meanwhile, post-Battle of Tippecanoe but pre-Inaugural speech, let's say around 1815 or so, settlers, mostly Scottish and Irish, came into the area to take over the Miami's former land and farm it.  Some of their descendents were still on that same land, still farming it when they weren't working at one of the local limestone quarries, when the state government used Eminent Domain to buy their properties away from them so Monroe Lake could be built. 

Here's a quote from Herbert Lucas, one of the landowners whose property was taken through Eminent Domain:

"You know, you grown up and read about how they took the land away from the Indians and you don’t sympathize until it happens to you. Then you think about it.” (Salt Creek Valley)

Interestingly, he was also specifically upset that the government planned to take and move the cemetery where all his family, including the great-grandfather who was the original homesteader of his property, was buried. 

Our event was to tour where they put Herbert Lucas' great-grandfather, as well as all the other residents of all the other cemeteries that were moved during this process. 

I'd worried that the tour would be boring for the kids--it was a very deep dive into very local history, and although you know how *I* feel about very local history, the kids couldn't possibly be expected to feel the same.

It was, however, very interesting, and VERY strange!

A volunteer was there to demonstrate the proper way to clean an old headstone. Although you can clean more thoroughly with D/2, or even engage in restoration work, it turns out that you can get most old headstones quite clean with just a low-pressure water sprayer, a soft brush, and a non-metal scraper:

A future community service project, perhaps?

And then we took our tour!

As the naturalist explained, this cemetery held the burials from several prior cemeteries, all moved from the Salt Creek Valley during the preparation to create Monroe Lake. 

[here is where the kittens decided to help me!]

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Here's where the kids and I had our first whispered, furious conversation: That's all they did?!? But surely they missed some people!

We brought this up to the naturalist, and she agreed that yes, they surely missed some people.

Some of the cemeteries that they decided to move would be well underwater when Monroe Lake was completed:

Others actually wouldn't have been, but might still have been subject to seasonal flooding:

When the workers came to move the cemetery, they used the surveyors' work to locate the graves, and when they placed them in Allens Creek Cemetery, they preserved the original placement of graves in location to each other, but put them closer together.

If a headstone had any carving on it, it was moved, as well--

  

--but if it was a fieldstone or had no discernible carving, it was left and a standardized headstone was put in its place at Allens Creek Cemetery:

At this point, the kids had another furious whispered discussion, then I was marshalled to ask what it looked like when the Black migrant tobacco farmers who had been hired for this project exhumed graves: did they find caskets, or did they gather skeletons, or?

And so here's where the naturalist blew all our minds: in most cases, they found nothing.

The naturalist said (and Will and I Googled it on the way home because we didn't believe her, but she was correct!) that remains, even bones, decompose within 20 years. So what the workers actually did was excavate down until the soil composition changed, then collect the 12 inches of dirt above that line, put it into a box, and bury that box in its new location in Allens Creek Cemetery.

The kids and I were all, "WHAT?!? JUST... WAIT, WHAT?!?"

Government administration, Folks!

This pointless transferral of dirt was also mandatory. If there were any living relatives of the deceased, they could choose to have the remains re-buried in a different cemetery, at their own expense, but the relatives could not choose to simply leave the dirt that used to be their loved one in its spot to be covered by the lake.

In case we thought that this might have been completely fine with the Salt Creek Valley citizens of 1965, the naturalist told us the story of the "missing" cemetery. It had been surveyed, with a census and photographs of the grave locations, but when the workers went back to that spot... there was nothing there. Were they bribed? Did the family members remove and hide all the headstones? Was there an administrative mix-up with the original survey? Nobody knows, or if they do, they're not telling!

After the event, the troop had a picnic in the back of my car, then we tried to work on the Ambassador Photography badge for a few minutes before the rain really got going. One of the kids brought this awesome prism that she let me try out--

--but when I looked up from playing with it I discovered that all my Girl Scouts were actually in the street and I had to go supervise, because those edgy standing-in-the-middle-of-the-country-road photos only look cool if you don't get hit by a car right after you take them!

Frankly, I hadn't expected a lot from this event. All I'd needed was for the kids to not be too bored while we did an activity that was just long enough for them to earn their Girl Scouts Love State Parks fun patch. So I was STOKED at how legitimately fascinating the tour was, and how fascinated the kids clearly were! It was an especially great event for teenagers, because it got them thinking and talking about big questions that don't always have a right answer. Here is just some of what we discussed:

• Why should a government get to take land away from someone who already owns it?
• What's the point of moving a cemetery if you know you're going to miss some of the bodies?
• What's the point of moving a cemetery if there are no actual bodies to move?
• Why couldn't people choose to let their loved ones stay in their original cemetery locations under the lake?
• Would it have been useful to do an archaeological excavation of the cemeteries as they were being emptied?
• Where did the contracted Black workers stay, and how were they treated? And were they hired because they would work more cheaply, or because it was work that made white people squeamish, or because it was work that white people thought they were too good to do, or because it was work that local people refused to do because they didn't want their cemeteries moved?

And of course, most importantly:

• WHAT IS THE REAL STORY OF THAT MISSING CEMETERY?!?!?!?

The Harper Tunic, a Second Try--And This Time It Fits!

 

The bad news first: fewer kittens fit in your pockets when your Harper Tunic actually fits!

Although to be fair, the kittens, themselves, are bigger now, too. Look at these nearly seven-week-old chonkers!

The lightest of them (our picky Pickle!), is about one pound, 10 ounces currently, so we'll probably have these foster babies for another couple of weeks. 

With my first try at the Harper Tunic, I took the advice that if I was between sizes, I should size up, but the finished tunic was just too roomy.

This time, I cut the pattern down to an OSP, and I love it!

I also love sewing this tunic. It's got some nice details, but is overall quite quick and easy to sew. My fabric of choice was a $5 thrifted sheet, the perfect price so that if, as with my first tunic, I didn't love it, I hadn't thrown too much money at it. I've got enough leftover from the sheet to sew some other projects, although not enough for another garment.

Don't you love a nice spiral of tidy double-fold bias tape?

Also as with my first tunic, I sewed a second pocket onto the front. When I tried the first tunic on, I just wasn't feeling the asymmetry, so I added the second pocket to this tunic as a matter of course:

Good thing, because the pockets are my absolute favorite part of this garment! I can hold so many kittens, sure, but also gardening shears, oregano sprigs, and sunflower cuttings:

It's also VERY comfy, but alas, it's still not anymore flattering than it was with my first try. I, personally, don't care, but as we were getting ready to go out the other day, both Matt and Will each asked me separately if this was what I was planning to wear:

It most certainly was! Here I am in a McDonald's parking lot, waiting for my French fries and Diet Coke:

After that, I wore my new tunic to the Museum of Miniature Houses (yay for Smithsonian's Museum Day!), then to IKEA for dorm stuff for Will, then to Trader Joe's for almost every single seasonal autumn product they had in stock, and then back home to lie around drinking pumpkin cider and eating Halloween Joe Joe's while my brand-new vanilla pumpkin candle burned and kittens used my body as a battleground:

That's probably all the Harper Tunics that I need for myself, although I do have the short-sleeved version printed out, and I could see myself sewing it up next summer when it's hot but I miss my giant pockets. Will's also somewhere in the middle of piecing together a Harper Tunic pattern of her own (oh, the hell of all those 8.5"x11" pieces of paper that must be trimmed, lined up, and taped together!!!), so that will be a fun beginner sewing project for me to help her with.

And then we can go out and about with our matching unflattering but comfy tunics!!!