Smoking Rocks Barony Birthday

April 12, 2009 at 8:56 am | Posted in Barony of Smoking Rocks, Music | Leave a comment

Our Barony Birthday was a tremendous amount of fun, despite the pouring rain.

My children’s class making catapults went well, and I later spied a father using his son’s catapult to launch peas during the feast, so there was some multi-generational enjoyment. The “medieval games” kid’s segment was a bit rougher, since the children attending were a touch too young to want to play the card games and we ended up doing a lot of chasing games indoors to avoid the aforementioned massive downpour.

Despite some initial worries – the boy scouts monitor looked like he was going to raise a fuss, but then changed his mind – the combat archery double elimination tournament went off without a hitch. We had seven people shooting at each other, and it was ridiculously fun. I wish it hadn’t been raining, because more spectators may have meant more converts, but it is April after all. I’m just glad so many people were willing to get soaked.

I got to help judge the Barony A&S contest, which was very educational. I had been wanting to help with judging because really experiencing the “other” side of those judging sheets they hand back to you can be eye-opening. We had a lot of food entries, and it was hard to come up with comments that didn’t all sound exactly the same. I can only imagine what it must be like to judge at one of the large kingdom-level events.

Ami, Rufus, and I also presented our performance of Bransle de Champagne on soprano, tenor, and alto to the Baroness. Rufus has been teaching us how to play the recorder for about two months now, and it was Ami’s and my first audience outside of our pets or our husbands. It wasn’t perfect, largely because we were doing it by memory, but I don’t think anyone else noticed the occasional slipped note, especially with three different musical parts being played. I was quite proud, especially since I’d forgotten that most of Fracta Modi (our Barony’s music group) was standing close enough to listen, and they all came up afterwords and told us we’d done a nice job.