Weekend Update

Sorry for not posting an update yesterday. I was still kind of recovering from the weekend. It was an awesome weekend. One of the best in a long time. I'll just go day by day through it and hope I don't miss anything.

Friday
Friday I had to scramble to get everything packed and ready for Kingdom Crusades. I had to work at 9 that morning so I had to get everything ready to go before I left in addition to showering and shaving. Work was ok, I got a good bit done and organized some things. Even though I didn't have any classes to set up I still felt pretty productive. I was going to take Colin up to KC along with Kate, Ludwig and I. But he remembered that he had something to do and couldn't go. He will be attending Games Tourney and practices if he can swing it. So we could leave as soon as Kate got off from work, which would be a little after 3. I went to Target and got some things for the trip, some pants in case Jen didn't finish the yellow ones(she didn't so they came in handy). Contact solution, pain medicine and some hand warmer thingies in case we were out in the cold on Saturday night. I thought about going to Kate's room to take a rest but decided there wasn't time. I picked her up and took her to the bank before meeting Ludwig out by the interstate. He was excited to go and we talked about a lot of things on the way up to Maryland. We made good time, only stopping once for a bathroom break and got there in 4 and a half hours. That's the fastest I've ever made it up there I think.

We got there and I introduced Ludwig to everyone, including Ros and Gaston. After we kind of settled down we put in the movie Shaun of the Dead. A British comedy that was sort of like Office Space meets Night of the Living Dead. It was incredibly hilarious, I will have to review it if I have the time tomorrow. We went to bed pretty early, before midnight I think. I was completely exhausted from driving and not sleeping the night before. Normally I sleep better with Kate in the bed but not this time unfortunatly. We slept in the back room bunk bed. Ludwig was underneath us on the bottom bunk. I slept fitfully, and spent most of the morning hours trying to go back to sleep.

Saturday
I got up fairly early I think, it was around 8:30 but I can't really remember. I had a doubleshot to wake me up. We all got our garb on, Ludwig looked good in his. And Kate had barrowed a bodice and skirt from Julie looked really cool. Ros and Gaston left really early because Gaston was in charge of the melees and had to pick up something at wal-mart to use as flags. I'll get to those in a minute. My boots felt pretty good when I put the garters on them. They looked pretty cool too, I got a few compliments on them during the day. We stopped for breakfast at a rest stop on the way. It was a really big rest stop and we got plenty of stares in our garb. The funny thing was that we got very little reaction out of them. Most of the people just looked away. Normally we get fairly open stares. We got to the event at about the same time as Dante and Celric. We checked in ok and got set up at the rapier field and I started introducing Ludwig to people. As near as I could tell he was getting along ok. Kate went to do waterbearing and it's a good thing she did because they were short on people. She is really getting into the water-bearing thing. And I guess it's pretty gratifying for her to hear the compliments from heavy fighters that she badgers to drink. She always talks for a long time about all the people she meets, and calls herself the "water nazi".

I took Ludwig with me to watch me get inspected so he would know what to expect. Chris Cunning did my inspection and he failed my stick because there were splinters on it. So I had to go put tape on it before he would pass. So my stick looked like a shiny blue cane of some kind oh well it still worked which was what I was happy about. We did the melees first. They had a ton of hay bales set up to be a town. On one side there was a ship with two gang plank entrances. On the other side of the field there was an outline of a church with two doors. Between them were about six "buildings" set up, three on each side with a path down the middle. Each building had one flag and one door. The flag was a cool little set up that was made of a 2x4 and rope. On the 2x4 were two eyes with a rope looped through them. Attached to the rope were two pices of cloth. One was blue and white for Atlantia, the other was purple and gold for the East Kingdom. You could pull the rope through the eyes to bring your flag to the top. To "take" a building you had to enter the building and pull your flag above the other teams flag. For the first melee one team started in the town, owning all of the buildings and the other team had to start on the ship and take over the town. Then we would switch. We attacked first, and I had a team of Black Diamonders to defend the ship. It was pretty boring at first because they didn't get near the ship much. And we had two guns with four shots each. So when they actually did get three people back near us I mad a brilliant tactical desicion and told Magpie to "shoot that guy"! Boom! Dead, problems solved. After a while they switched us out and let us go fight in the main battle. We took all but about two flags each time they called hold. It was a great scenario. About halfway into it people started hitting hard and they had to stop a few times because people got hurt. The Atlantian fencers were really kicking butt, I got on a couple of runs where I felt untouchable. And Melchior told me that he was on fire too. Ludwig was watching fom the top of the hill and he had a pretty good view of what was going on. One cool thing that happend to me was that I got behind the EK main line and came up and joined them facing my own team. They thought I was on their team so I got right up beside one guy and then killed him. The next guy in line didn't pay attention so I worked my way up to him, tapped his shoulder and then killed him. I went all the way down the line and killed five people that way. And we took back a building, it was awesome. The melees were 20 minutes each. Which is a really long time to do a melee. Everyone was a little bushed by the time they were done. In the middle of the second melee Kate came over to me and was in tears because one of the Tuchks has spit water on her. He was trying to hit his friend but missed and hit Kate. I was really pissed and if I hadn't been in the middle of the battle I would have done something about it. But she went back and the leader "Beast" got one of his people to beat the crap out of the guy that spit on her, and then gave her a necklace to make her feel better.

After the melees we all took a nice break. Everyone was milling around and talking about the fights they'd had. I had a couple of people come up and talk to me about some different fights. I got to make some new friends. And Ludwig got to hear everyone talking about what was happening. I searched out Pascual because I didn't see him at all during the fight. Then it was time for the Champions battle. Where each side picked 9 fighters and pitted them against each other. Connor and Nataliia were the warlords and had worked out beforehand who would fight who. I was picked as one of the Champions along with people like Marcellus, Robert, Aedan, Kinji and Ihsan. It was a real honor. I was Connors representative as his "brother" fighting against Nataliia's cadet. A guy named Jacob. I had been talking some smack with Nataliia on the listserv and so we were having a good time making fun of each other. So when I fought her cadet I was goofing off a little. Skipping around being bouncy. One bad thing about Kate doing waterbearing is that she rarely sees me fight anymore, but that's ok she used to get really bored waiting for me to fight. Anyway I managed to leg Jacob pretty easily, and as he was sinking down to his knees I turned to the crowd and said "Now he really looks like Nataliia" refering to her diminuative stature. That got a huge laugh from the crowd and Nataliia chased me around the field for a little while. It was all in good fun, and it was a ton of fun. I then killed Jacob fairly easily because I was completly hyped at that point. Lots of people came and shook my hand. Costanca gave me a hug before running off to a class. After the Champions battle which they won 6-3, we did some random melee stuff and pickups. I actually managed to get a fight with Connor in. It was kind of scary how much we fight alike now.

After wandering around the vendors a little and loading stuff up in the car, we went to court to see Kenji get his Sea Dragon award. He really deserves it, I think at least. There was talk about him being the next Free Scholar for a while. But that seems to have died out, maybe to introverted or something I don't know. And Connor can't tell me either. I think he would make a great Free Scholar. But it's not up to me, I don't even get a vote lol. At this point I don't know who the next one would be, I can only speculate. We snuck out after Atlantian court was over. And when I say snuck I mean we started to leave and a lot of people followed us, negating our sneakiness. We were going to go to a resturaunt and then come back to site for partying. But we were all exhausted and by the time we actually got sitting down at Olive Garden there was no way were going anywhere but home(Troy's house).

That night we were all really bushed. Troy was as tired as I've ever seen him. He kept nodding off in the middle of the conversation. Kate was dead from running around giving water to people. Even Ludwig was tired. We went to bed but I had messed up my hamstring again and couldn't sleep for more than about a half an hour at a time.

Sunday
We purposly didn't set any alarms and didn't check any clocks so we didn't know what time it was when we got up. We ended up getting up around noon, which was later than we had planned but we really didn't care. We loaded up the car and went to lunch. I had a nice big hamburger that was really tasty. I purposly sat at a different table than Kate and Scott to give them some time. We left straight from the resturant at about 2:30. And we made pretty good time. Ludwig really enjoyed his first event but will enjoy it even more when he can fight. Which should happen in a couple of weeks if I can get him away from Dominos to go to an event again. All in all a great weekend. I would have liked to have spent more time with Kate but hey you can't have everything.