Kingdom Arts & Sciences

We survived our trip to Southern Georgia to attend Kingdom A & S. It was, overall, not a bad trip. There were a few snags here and there. In one case, literally, but I will get to that in a moment. The first and most noticeable thing about it was that it was ungodly hot. Far hotter than early June has any right to be, in fact. We spent most of the day Saturday baking in our armor. Needless to say, nobody really wanted to fight that much. We did some warm up fights in the morning, worked with some of the newer people on a couple things and fought in the one and only tourney, but that was about it. The tourney was... interesting. It was the Queen's Favor Tournament and she had decided that we would fight with two-handed longswords, which few of us are familiar with. Ysabel has been working with ours for a couple months fairly intensely, but I haven't really put much time into it. I ended up fighting Elijah Cameron, a transplanted Warder from the Midrealm, in the first round. Cam is fast. Damn fast. And graceful as all get out. Our fights (best two out of three) were later described as being "like watching two mongooses on meth". Despite the fact that I won the match, it took everything I had. I had nothing left and was dispatched easily in the next round by Thomas O'Toole. Thomas is experienced with a two-handed sword and a hard fight at the best of times. I didn't feel too bad about that loss. I was a bit miffed at having torn my favorite shirt during the fight with Cam. His quillions must have caught in my sleeve (hence the "snag" mentioned earlier) during one of our close exchanges. We were both so focused on the fight that we didn't even notice until one of the marshals called a hold over it. Great fight, though.

On Sunday we met Ysabel's sister, brother-in-law and their new baby boy for lunch on the way back through Atlanta. The kid was cute and lively, but babies aren't really my thing. I tend to scare small children, so I let the women folk have their baby fix while I quietly stuffed myself on a heaping pile of salad. It was still too bloody hot to want anything heavier than that in my stomach.

Once we got home it was back to business as usual. I had to work from home on Monday because the cable guy was coming out to hook us up with digital phone service. We were fed up with AT&T and Comcast had a pretty decent deal on their service bundles. We even got a DVR included for free. That's a Digital Video Recorder for those that are acronymically challenged. Not sure how much we will use it, but, hey, it's free, ya know. I wasn't planning on being home all day, but he got there late and it took a long time to rewire the phone stuff outside. Apparently, it was kind of screwed up. But everything is all better now and hopefully we'll end up paying less for more channels, broadband internet and decent phone service than we were before. Ah, such mundanity is so exciting, isn't it? But never fear, we have plenty of freakish extra-curricular activities coming up in the next little while. Our weekly DnD game, for one. And more sword-swinging antics than you can shake a stick at. Or a sword at. Or something... Well, anyway, stay tuned.