The Faire, day one.

My friend, Brigg, and her cousin, Jan, at our booth.

 

Brigg took a photo of me working. She gave me another chance to pose, and Jan exclaimed, "Fosse!"  This is me doing my impersonation of a Fosse pose in a renn faire costume.

The work itself was really easy.  I don't think we had one lousy customer.  On the first day, schools piped over children, and they just loved the metallic garlands. For some reason, they didn't stay at the faire as long as they normally do. I've been told they've stayed till about 2:00pm, but they didn't stay much longer than noon.  Also, since there were at least five of us working the tent, we got lots of chances to go on breaks and explore the faire!  The green purse you see on me in the picture above is something I purchased there.  Also, the bodice Brigg is wearing is something she purchased there. The lady working that booth suggested I latter-lace (ladder-lace?) the sides of my bodice so as to get that more "authentic wench" look.

There were some great food items at the faire.  We all ate these teriyaki chicken breasts on a stick at this Chinese food stand.  There is a booth that sells meat pies.  And later on in the day, we found a coffee and crepes stand!  The had, like, ten different kinds of crepes.

The first day of the faire was nice, except for the ginormous winds that came up and occasionally blew our merchandise over.  The fine people who ran the park placed a trash can right outside of our tent, as we were right in front of the Field of Honor (where the jousting took place). The major consequence of this was that our tent quickly became filled with bees. Fortunately, one of our customers was a lovely (real) British lady who's dad used to keep bees.  She suggested to sprinkle clove oil around the tent to keep the bees away.  *She also mentioned to keep the clove oil out of reach of small children* There just happened to be a spice tent accross the way from us, so Brigg went and came back with a vile of clove oil and sprinkled it around the tent.  In about twenty minutes, the bees were gone!
As the sun began to set, the wind picked up even more. An advisory warning was spreading around the fairgrounds, calling for 50 mph winds from 3:00am to noon the next day, but they came early.  For the next two nights, the temperature dropped to somewhere in the 40s.  It blew everything around. Another thing it did was seriously stir up my allergies.  I was not doing too well on the first day.  The wind turned my hair into one big knot.  I vowed the next day to be ready.

My Big Renn Faire/Vegas Vacation!

Earlier this month, I took part in the Age of Chivalry Rennaisance Festival in Las Vegas, NV.  Originally, I had planned on taking a vacation to Vegas and visiting my friend and her family.  However, her family heard I was coming and decided I should work it with them.  At first my reaction was, "Great. I'm taking a vacation off work to go... work."  But then it occured to me that I had never worked a rennaisance faire before, so why the heck not.  So I made plans to work the faire and then spend some time in Vegas doing the Vegas thing.

The Age of Chivalry Rennaisance Festival is held in October, usually on Columbus Day weekend.  It is three days long and is held at MacArthur Park.  Whereas the previous faires I have been to feature one setting, such as Elizabethan England, there is no particular setting.  It is simply a faire, and many countries and kingdoms are represented here.  There are even some vendors, guilds and what-have-you that I shall list in the categorie of "other".  These would include ancient Romans, faeries, barbarians and some other barbarians that looked like a cross between characters out of World of Warcraft and Raiders fans.

One cool thing about this faire is the size.  This thing is huge!  There is just row after row of vendors.  There are also several stages, a field for jousting, a lake and many guild encampments.  Also, everyone there was really nice.   

I arrived Thursday afternoon to help set up and decorate the rest of our tent.  My friend's aunt makes head wreaths, wands, flags, unicorn horns and dragons teeth.  She started doing this because she wanted people to be able to go to faire and actually leave with something.  So, the garlands made out of metallic garland sold for a dollar each.  Everything else in the tent sold for six dollars or two for ten.  This, I've been told, was and has been much to the chargrin of other vendors, who sold almost an identical item (usually the metallic garland we sold for $1) and $6 or more.  One vendor, I believe, tried to sell theirs for over $20.  It would be interesting to see customers come in and get angry because they very much over-paid for their item, when they could've purchased the same thing at our booth for barely a fraction of the cost.

But I digress.  On to faire!

I just wanted to point out that I stopped at Baker on my way there.  You can't get to Vegas from southern California without passing this place (well, maybe you can, but not from where I was coming).  I stopped for a munch and took a picture of the world's tallest thermometer.  You can't read it, but it says "98" degrees.  We shall see about that.

So, as I mentioned, I arrived and help set up the tent.  The wind was really blowing in Vegas.  Really blowing!  Several vendors who didn't have proper tents had seen theirs blow right over or further down a few spaces.  Fortunately, ours was fine.  This is on a different day, but this is our tent.

Here are some of our wares.

More to come.

Demotivational LOL

I Can Haz Cheesburger now has a feature where you can take a picture and make it into a poster. Here's my first one!


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Homage LOL

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The rest of Comic-Con

I haven't posted in a while, so I decided to cut the suspense and show you the rest of my Comic-con pictures.

Here I am waiting to get a chance to take the Dharma test. There was no line, and it was very unorganized.

Here is a guy who was promoting the new G.I. Joe movie taking the test. He got in, and I'm happy for him, but quite frankly I didn't think it was very fair.

Here are ladies from the Dharma Initiative telling everyone that they're all full for today, please try tomorrow. I had been one layer of mob away from the sign-up sheet when they first made this announcement. I was completely bummed after this, and it really put a damper on my whole Comic-Con experience.

Here is the Stargate booth. I enjoyed SG-1, and I'm just getting into Atlantis. They're talking about doing a third show, with a more youthful bent. My reaction: uh-oh.

Random flower shot.

"B" and me.

Fat Momma and her son were kind enough to pose for a picture with me. She was really very polite, and her son immediately gave me a hug (he assumed everyone was posing for a picture with him, and he was more than happy to oblige), which made me smile.

After I had my picture taken with Fat Momma, and "B" had seen the lectures for the shows she had wanted to see, we both felt we were pretty much done with Comic-Con. So we headed out of the convention center and crossed over into the Gaslapm District.

We wandered around for a little bit and it was very nice. "B" knew what parts of the district were the "not scary" parts, so we did just fine.

May I just say, I had no idea just how many "authentic Irish pubs" were in San Diego, but there are a ton! The Irish must love San Diego. For one thing, the weather is considerably better, I'm sure.

After hobbling around the Gaslamp District (our feet hurt), we drove accross the bridge to Coronado. It was very pleasant, and I managed to get this great picture of the Hotel Del Coronado. You can't even see the full dumpster that was a few feet behind the sign!

We walked down to the beach and took off our shoes. The soft, cushy sand was like a natural foot massage. "B" went down to the water and stood just where the ocean rolled onto and off of the sand. I joined her, and it had to be the best idea all day!

We saw some beach cruisers.

We then ate at this great restaurant called Costa Azule. It was surprisingly affordable, and I had the best shrimp quesadillas ever! I would've taken a picture of the food, but that may have been a bit too much.

And that was our trip to Comic-Con. Honestly, I didn't like it, but I'm glad I went. I'm really glad that "B" came with me, because had I gone by myself I would've been miserable. It was far too crowded, and maybe I'm too spoiled by theme parks, but not everyone could take part in everything. As with the Dharma Initiative booth, very few people could take part (about 40 out of 125,000 people for that day). I'm pretty sure I won't be going again. There are plenty of other things I can do to get my Lost fix. "B" said pretty much the same thing while we were there, except all of the stuff about Lost, as she is not a fan of that show.

And there you have it.

LOL!!!

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So I bought me some patches...

I bought some patches while we were at Comic-Con.  This was going to be my big purchase of the day. 
I purchased this Disney one:

I think this is my new mantra.
Also purchased these:

And this one:

And these two:

Patches are awesome, because you can take a perfectly normal pair of jeans, sew a geeky Lost-related patch onto them and BAM! Dharma pants!  Seriously, I had sewn a Las Vegas patch onto the back of a pair of jeans I had purchased from Express, and I used to get all sorts of compliments on them from other girls who wanted a pair.  The conversations usually went as follows:

GIRL

I love your jeans!  Did you get them in Vegas?

ME

Thanks!  No, I bought them at Express.

GIRL

Oh.  Do they sell Vegas Jeans there?

ME

...?...

So, yeah, patches are fun.

Eh?

How about that!  I finally figured out how to do  new template on here!  It's a little bright, so I'm not sure if this will be the permanent look of my page.  Plus, it appears as though I can't add as many elements to my page with this setup.  But I bet I can figure it out.  Anyway, the point was to see if I could change the look of my page, and it turns out I can!  For anyone interested, I got this layout from a site called Final Sense.

Update: I changed it, again!  I like this layout better, so we'll stick with this one for a little bit.  I think what was preventing me from uploading a new layout before was Blogspot was experiencing some technical issues involving spam.  I might still play around with these, though.  The pictures look kind of faded on here, now.  Also, in case you couldn't tell, this layout is from Pyzam.

Heads up.

So, I'm going to try a new layout for this blog, mostly because I'm bored. I'm using the site Pyzam because they have lots of templates to chose from. If this works, I might change my background every so often, until I find something I like. The only problem seems to be that when I load a new template and then try to preview it, Blogspot won't let me. The instructions on Pyzam don't say anything about being able to preview it, nor is there a page to ask for help on their site. So if this doesn't work and everything goes away on my page, rest assured I'll get things back up. Eventually. Maybe like Sunday, because I have to work both jobs tomorrow.
So here's hoping!

CPLOL

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