Movie Night

Inception @ Crowfoot @ 7 pm.

Salt @ Crowfoot @ 6:55 pm.

Or, you know, Inception if people bitch.

Anyway, we're seeing a movie at Crowfoot. Show up around 6:30 and I'm sure we'll figure out which one.

Quad War 2010 - Relax, You're Two Tents!

The first thing you have to understand about the following exchanges is that Elias' has a Viking wall tent that is very large and distinctive looking. For Montengarders it's one of the tents we use for navigation (i.e. "so-and-so's tent is next to Elias'"), because everyone knows what it looks like. For this reason it's generally referred to as Elias' massive erection. Double entendre definitely intended.

Annys is walking by my camp and asks "Is that little tepee yours?"
"Yeah, it's a Bell of Arms tent. It's for Civil war re-enactors to store their muskets in. I put my cooler and my archery gear in mine."
"Well I think it's really cool that someone has, effectively, a period armour tent. Every time I walked by it, I just had to giggle."

A moment later (after she's out of earshot sadly) the perfect quip came to me. I walk over to Elias who's sitting down for a breather while tearing his own camp down.

"Hey dude, how's it going?" asks Elias.
"I'm sad", I say with my lower lip jutting out.
Suddenly serious, "What's wrong?"
Pointing at the bell-of-arms, "Annys laughed at my tiny erection."

Elias did a spit-take, as did Annys when I related the joke to her later.

As I mentioned earlier, the tent is near perfect, but it does have it's problem. The biggest problem is it has crossbars about 2/3 of the way up the tent for leaning your muskets on. This works well with a 55" musket, but not so much with a 62" re-curve. I wanted to hang my bow off the center pole, not lean it resting on the ground.

The solution is to attach small hooks to the top. That fixes problem #1. There are two other problems.

The next is the fact that there is no ground sheet. Panther sent me a ground sheet - I asked for one custom made to fit (that is to say, a circular one 5' in diameter). They sent me a square one that's about 6' on a side. Not terribly useful since I'd like to be able to pound stakes into the ground and not poke holes in the groundsheet. I'll have to find some method for folding it (probably into an octagon of correct size). Doing so will allow me to use it as a guide for the center pole and tent pegs.

Finally, the pole is too long to go into my trunk. To transport it to quad I had to run it up the right side of the passenger seat. This is OK if you're driving alone (like I did for Quad), but kind of sucks if I have a passenger. It's doable, but not ideal.

For this, I'm just going to saw the center pole in half and get a steel sleeve for it. I'd love to be able to make an extend-able, metal, pole for the thing (because it only needs to look good on the outside).

On the bright side, the tent packs up small if you ignore the ridge pole. Also, I can use it to display my banner.

My Soulpad got some attention again. Not as much as it probably could have, but I suspect this is because there were other pads on site that were more centrally located. It did lead to an amusing exchange with me and snooness:

"Can we go back to your tent so I can look at your pole? Oh wait, that came out dirtier then I intended."
"Did you want to see my etchings too?"

The Thursday night storm (not much wind, but a fair amount of rain) put the Soulpad to the test - it stood up very well, with the only downside being that the six zippers for the fly and main flap all converged on the same point and what little wind there was made them jangle like a wind-chime. I might simply stuff a sock in it when this happens, or I'll see if I can somehow coat the pull tab with rubber.

At any rate, I'm well satisfied with both tents and if they both survive Whipping Winds (I just noticed the double meaning there), I'll likely sell my modern tents.