jamesq | Tales of the Work Weekend

The ride out went smoother, CT was quieter and JW drove faster then I anticipated. We got to the site a little after midnight and the Borealans were already on site. We were given access to several of the onsite cabins and we were thus able to sleep indoors.

I mentioned all the things the group did during the weekend. I had a hand in several of these activities, but not all of them. In general I wasn't the foreman for any of them - I just tried to be johnny-on-the-spot when it came to helping out.

Saturday morning we had breakfast and DA described the jobs we had planned. I ended up helping OW with building the new biffy. OW was a carpenter by trade, so he knew what he was doing. He had a slow, methodical pace that got things done eventually, but sometimes meant I was waiting around picking my nose. I learned quite a bit watching him. I could probably build a biffy myself now. I think I'll work on a camp bed instead though.

I didn't think that a hammer would be something that benefits from being better constructed (it is, after all, just a club) but it really did. Heavier, more ergonomic hammers really do drive the nails better.

One of the things I learned was the beauty of bib coveralls (I picked up a pair for $20 at Costco a few weeks ago in anticipation of this weekend). Damn they came in useful. They protected most of my body from a lot of tiny irritants and gave me lots of easily accessible pockets. The pièce de résistance was the hook at my hip for holding a hammer.

There was a break for lunch then OW and I continued at our task. It was a hot day though and OW crashed hard around 4 pm. He went back to the cabin to snooze for a few hours and didn't reappear until supper time. This left me idle so I went looking for things to do.

I ended up with DJ and Beothuk and we went to the remains of the Viking Triple-biffy that they had spent a few hours demolishing. Everything that was completely above waist level they ended up salvaging. We now have a fairly large and sturdy roof sitting on the ground lacking anything to hold it up. Of course there are also a pair of giant, steel-jacketed doors lying n the ground nearby (not part of the Viking biffy) so devious intent, some lumber and elbow grease could make a pretty odd looking, but functional shelter.

From what I heard, everything below waist-level was not only a right-off, but also verging into nameless-horror territory. They found the remains of both a bee hive and a hornet's nest in one of the walls.

By the time I got there it was really just a mound of shattered lumber that you didn't want to handle without thick gloves. We had thick gloves and a pickup truck, so we tossed it all into the truck bed and hauled it to the burn-me pile halfway between the crossroads and the castle.

We then hauled assorted garbage to the dump. Then it was time for the communal supper. The work of the day being done, I started drinking.

Now before leaving, I made a pre-mixed drink. I bought some cheap Co-op diet cola and mixed it with some cheap rum in a 3-to-1 ratio (in hindsight this was probably too strong). I drank a little over a litre of this concoction over the evening and ended up tipsy and happy. Exactly the sort of drunk I like - and the sort that if I don't sense it coming on I'll abort the drinking early, which happens about half the time.

Somebody set up an archery butt and a mannequin head and we peppered it with arrows (all the archers had brought there gear with them just in case). I was in particularly good form that night, which I attribute to being slightly inebriated at that point. I suspect that the only thing stopping me from getting that 100-point royal round score I covet is tension. Shooting after one drink seemed to do the trick. Two would be too much though.

For my next trick, I'll mix fire-arms and mushrooms! God only knows what the hell I'll be shooting at!

Before I was loaded though, Beothuk went to light the fire we would use to destroy the scrap lumber. He piled the two meter diameter fire pit high with the lumber from the biffy. It lit with one match, no doubt due to it being marinating for several years in 90 proof Viking piss.

It burned so fast and so hot that the ground around the fire pit caught fire. To their credit, they did clear this area of grass and debris. What caught fire was the organic material in the dirt (grass roots and stuff). It began to burn towards the wood pile (which in turn was between the fire pit and the copse of trees that contains the infamous Grotto.

Yes folks, Our Baron very nearly went down in history as the person who destroyed the Grotto!

I ran back to tell the others that the fire was starting to burn out of control, and we all convened on the area with water jugs and fire extinguishers. Fire breaks were quickly dug and we managed to stop it from reaching any major sources of fuel. For awhile there we just stood well back and watched in awe as the fire pit burned bright enough to be seen from the moon. Now there is a two meter strip of burned-out ground around the fire pit. Beothuk took a lot of good-natured teasing about this. I'm of the opinion that this was really an accident of inexperience - nobody realized that the Viking biffy would go up in flames so fast.

Once the fire was down to a manageable level we fed it at a more reasonable level, eventually clearing out the Viking biffy entirely as well as a lot of deadfall that another crew had spent the day clearing out. We managed to burn about half of it and much fun was had around the fire until late in the evening.

I remember trying to explain how to get things done in the SCA to one of the Borealan officers (summed up it's "don't give your royals a problem, give them a solution", meaning, if you want some activity run at an event, offer to do it rather then bitch about how it's not happening). Of course, we were both three-sheets-to-the-wind by this point so I'm not sure how much actual communication occurred.

The next morning I was hung over something awful. Water and drugs killed it in about ten minutes though, the benefits of a decent metabolism.

We doubled the crew on the new biffy, which didn't really speed things up because we were getting in each other's way after all the parallel tasks were completed. So LC and I went and rebuilt the roof of another nearby biffy that had been blown over during a windstorm sometime in the previous ten months. The roof needed new plywood, shingles to keep it from rotting (which is what happened to the original plywood) and it needed to be reattached to the existing biffy. We swiped some scrap lumber (the peg boards for last year's tournament tiles, which had suffered water damage to one side - really good wood aside from that damage) and cut it to fit. Then we attempted to tile it. Neither LC nor I had ever tiled before. Well, that's not entirely true - I helped Dad retile the roof when I was a nine-year old. This distant past event did give me confidence around heights, but it didn't convey much information on roofing. Thankfully OW spotted what we were doing and gave us a few helpful pieces of wisdom, like how to line up the tiles, where to pound the nails and how to do the cap. It took us a short time to tile the biffy roof, owing to it's small surface area. It did serve to give me enough experience to make me look like a genius a half-hour later though.

Meanwhile, the new biffy construction crew had a different plan for their roof, they scavenged a large piece of tin roofing that was lying nearby and pounded it to the top after cutting it to fit. We probably have enough left to coat another one.

The new roof finished (but not attached because that would require holding the fallen biffy up, a task we lacked the manpower for) we both moved onto other tasks. I went to help the large crew that had just begun to retile the autocrat's shed.

At first this was light work - just steading ladders and throwing tiles up onto the roof as requested. The people up on the roof (Wilma and PT originally) were working from ladders because the roof was too steep to stand on. I managed to correct them on the technique I had only learned an hour previously. We kept telling PT to stop over reaching because it was dangerous. He had to do this though because he's fairly short (but still built like a Sherman tank - the guy's survived being shot so he's got nothing to prove to anyone). Finally he had me replace him because he couldn't stay on the ladder and reach the very top of the roof to nail the tiles in. The three of us ended up doing about 1/3 of the roof each. It was hairy towards the end though because JM caught a tile in the nose and the cap of the roof had rotted to the point where the nails were holding the tiles to each other and not much else. It should still last a few years, and by then we'll just replace the shed (Montengarde gets the event again in 2011).

Despite the injuries and poor substrate, Wilma and I had a great time pounding nails in the roof, we were cracking jokes constantly across from each other.

The tiles we'd been using? A large pile of them had been found in the scrap pile, damn-near good as new. There's a lot of buried treasure on the site.

We finished with about another hour or two of time to spare before dinner, so everyone went around finishing small clean-up jobs.

We had another great dinner provided by the meal crew. Let me tell you, having a meal crew for this kind of weekend is a god-send. We got a lot more done without having to worry about hunger. Kudos to D and G.

Again we sat around a fire socializing. It was too windy to risk the fire pit again so we just used a brazier near camp. It was a more subdued evening, but still pleasant.

Next morning we spent the morning finishing off jobs. I accompanied JM around the site with DA doing inspections and making plans. After that was done we packed up and headed home. I got home around 8 pm and pretty much dove into the shower where I stood for about an hour. I am grateful for the massive hot water heater here at Pepperland. I had an awesome sleep that night too, owing to a weekend of hard work and a sense of accomplishment and camaraderie.

Never did get the biffy roof reattached though.