dragonlady7

It's a sort of meme that most Pennsic stories start with the phrase, "No shit, there I was..."
I was going to do a dry, factual recounting of how Pennsic was and what happened, as I sent to our head of household (who couldn't make it), but I am thinking now that would be boring. So... Instead, I present to you, the No Shit, There I Was files: all the crazy shit that happened.

* We totally lied our way onsite. Z, Liesl and I caravanned down Saturday morning at 5am. Campers aren't allowed onsite until after the land agents have met and conferred; that meeting happens at 8am Saturday morning. The three of us arrived at 8:03, and were duly shepherded onto the battlefield after checkin. Except Liesl made a wrong turn, and innocently wound up at the West Gate, and upon showing them her site token and car tag, was waved in... So I lied and said I had to go get gas, and they let me off the battlefield, and I real quick zipped down the West Gate entrance. We all wound up drunk with the neighbors before our land agent even showed up.

* Rat snake. Three-foot rat snake! No shit. I got pictures.

* My household is so frugal, we did not one, not two, but three town runs to motherfucking OHIO. Yes we did.

* So my household lights torches all along the length of a very dark street upon which we live (the Causeway). One night, due to rain and internal fuckery, the torches didn't get filled, and thus couldn't be lit, for the first time during Pennsic in several years. Not one but two drunk people, in two separate incidents, went tumbling off the Causeway and slammed into tents of household members. Unsettling! One of them lost his wallet and it took us two days to find it.

* Underpants gnomes. I have no idea what that was about, but following a very long night of their shrill screeching (hilarious), we kept finding lost pairs of undies all over the Swamp/Bog area.

* Wolgemut, a German bagpipes-and-drums band (professional, very authentic medieval), played our porch. Again.

* Some tin-hat came by and lectured us on the proper forms of address for SCA ranks. One of her retinue noticed the surreptitious eye-rolling of one of my campmates, and promptly recruited him to help perpetuate an incredibly elaborate and long-planned prank on her. I officially know nothing of this, but it was pretty funny.

* I savagely beat a man with an eight-inch blue rubber dildo. I was in my own common area (which, in local etiquette, amounts to my own living room), wearing what for me was sensible Swamp attire-- a lace half-shirt and gold glitter booty shorts-- and he looked me up and down, said something patronizing and offensive, and proceeded to talk through me at the man next to me. I tried to be light-hearted as I challenged him on this, but he responded to my impertinence by trying to put me in my place. I let him know I was offended, and he responded even more forcefully that I had no right to speak to him in this way. So I threw my drink (water) in his face, grabbed the dildo from the bar (where it was an ornament), and proceeded to chase him out of MY camp, thwacking him repeatedly with the implement. He later came back protesting to the (male) bartender that I'd had no right to throw him out (his attitude was very much "but she was just a piece of ass, how dare she speak to me thus?") , and the bartender and several other of my campmates promptly chased him out. Much to my gratification. I'm wondering what the odds are of him ever telling his buddies that story.
(Here is a photo of the dildo in question, adorning the bottom of a mug:)

* Doom plums. So it turns out a good way of making plum cordial is to score the skins of ripe plums, soak them for a couple of months in 150-proof vodka, then add a little sugar syrup to the vodka at the end. The plums in question come out somewhat pickled but quite tasty. If you eat one... well, I wound up lying on my face on the bridge over the ditch in our camp, in the rain, intermittently throwing up and ruminating on how comfortable that rain felt and how nice the grit on the bridge felt, surprisingly, against my face. That was my sole major drinking indiscretion of War, and I feel a bit cheated that it wasn't even a drink that did it to me, but a relatively harmless-seeming fruit.

* At one point, near 2am one night, my campmates and I were gathered around the fire on our front stoop, laughing so hard at one another's stories that the neighbors assumed we were stoned. In fact, we were all stone cold sober by that point. "THERE'S CORN ON THE CAT!"

* Drunk stumbles into the bar area. Down the street, a bagpiper is practicing. "What's that noise?" the drunk demanded. "Bagpipes," we answered. "What makes it?" the drunk asked. "... A bagpipe?" we answered. Drunk then proceeded to stumble over a piece of firewood, pick it up, and without looking, lob it forcefully into the darkness. We all waited with dinner-plate eyeballs for it to hit someone, but the crash it made sounded like tree leaves. "I must destroy all those who oppose me," the drunk explained cheerfully, "and it opposed me." He then stumbled off into the night.

* I punched a dude in the cock entirely by accident. He was trying on a new breastplate of armor for heavy fighting. I pointed out that it ended short of his groin. I thought he was standing a little farther away than he was, so to illustrate my point I feinted forcefully toward his groin. There was a distinct squishing sensation and his eyes bugged out. "... Whoops?" I said. Henceforth I was known as Cockpuncher. That coupled with the dildo beating have sort of made me a legend, I'm afraid. It's a good thing I'm not trying to get a date.

* We're all sitting around the fire. One of my housemates comes over and murmurs somewhat discreetly (mostly so as not to interrupt the people talking) that they're going to go to his tent and engage in the consumption of some substances of questionable legality, would I be interested? I decided what the hell, I was (they're legal in some states, sort of! It's medicinal!), and went to ask my boyfriend if he was also interested. He shook his head no, and said "Go ahead," to me, so I went with my housemate and his wife back to their tent. The next morning, another campmate asked, oddly coyly, "How was it?" I must have stared at her, because she asked what I'd done the previous night, and when I explained, she started laughing. "I assumed you were going to their tent for a threesome!" she finally managed to explain. When I told Z, he said, "In her mind, we're waaaaaayyy cooler than we really are."

* One of my campmates is The Prettiest Princess. His hair is the kind that goes into a white fro if left unattended. He let us put hair gel in it to see how crazy we could get it. Then he didn't wash his hair for a day and a half. So the saga got epic. We spiked his hair, we made it stand up, we even put glittery hair clips in it. If you look through the pictures, that's what all that was about.

* The sole fighter in the House of Daves managed to get a kill in one of the battles (usually his job is Meat Shield). Meanwhile the three fighters of the Wicked Monkey Tribe managed to be part of the breakthrough of one of the bridges in the Bridge Battle, so they ran around behind the bored opposition fighters at another bridge and killed a bunch of them who were just standing around literally leaning on their spears in boredom. Eugene described it as "Dinner-plate eyes of fun!"
(Eugene telling war stories:)

I'm leaving stuff out here, I know it. But I have to post this and move on. (I have today off, then I'm working the next seven consecutive days, so I gotta get crackin'.) So instead I leave you some recipes. Three Swans' bar serves hundreds of people over the course of War, so we started off with homebrewed root beer from Klaus von Rugen this year but of course ran out within days. So the rest, we served with punches that I made. So here's my recipes for a couple of the good ones. These are in five-gallon quantities so definitely scale down if you don't have several dozen friends handy.

White Peach Sangria
1 bag cheap white wine (contains either 4 or 5 bottles of wine-- I used Franzia Chablis. I have an idea for next War where bars compete in a Tour de Franzia, making Not-Beer mixed drinks out of cheap boxes of wine. Remind me to tell the other bars about this.)
1-2 bottles of peach daquiri mix (found in mixers aisle of restaurant supply store, probably obtainable in grocery store-- bottles held about a liter)
hefty splash of 1:1 simple syrup (made by boiling water, then adding equal parts sugar until sugar dissolves; it was the secret ingredient in almost all of my punches)
cheap peach schnapps to taste (about half a handle)
water, to fill
Mix very thoroughly, as the daquiri mix will want to settle out. Mix in a 5-gallon water Gott; add a standard-sized block of ice to keep chilled/servable for 2 days. (The second day, the melted ice may have weakened the drink; add a little more daquiri mix and the other half of the peach schnapps handle, to taste, and if you have any more wine throw some of that in.)

OK I gotta go. Maybe I'll share more recipes later. Maybe I'll even scale them down to pitcher size.