added post on renaissance fair

1 files changed, 120 insertions, 12 deletions

diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt
index e083772..2040640 100644
--- a/scratch.txt
+++ b/scratch.txt
@@ -213,6 +213,115 @@ Since I first read Shop Class I have decided it’s better to go down swinging.
 
 
 # Stories to Tell
+# jrnl
+
+## Renaissance Fair
+
+One of the things I find most peculiar about our current age is our utter disregard for the past. That's only true in the realm of mainstream culture though. Step outside the increasingly tunneled vision media presents us and you find that most people love the past. They love visiting it. They love learning about it. Most of all they love pretending to be in it.
+
+What better way to understand other people in other times than to put on the clothes, use the tools, and see where you end up?
+
+We're no different. The kids love history. Travel would be pretty dull if you didn't like digging into the history of the places you're going. We've enjoyed all sorts of [re-enactment festivals](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/around-washburn), [working 19th century farms](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/06/alberto-and-land-between-lakes), [historic forts](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/rodeos-and-fur-trading-posts), and more. Our most recent foray was something less strictly educational and more oddball fun -- [The Gulf Coast Renaissance Fair, Pirate Festival, Wild West Roundup, and Historical Festival](http://gcrf.us).
+
+I have never been to a Renaissance Fair before, but I've heard some stories. This one was pretty laid back compared to some accounts I've heard. There were plenty of costumes, but there were also plenty of us not in character. Or in totally different characters, like the girls, who dressed in Greek Chitons. Ancient Greece wasn't on the bill, but the very first person we saw inside the festival took one look at the kids and said, "are those Chitons?" Clearly these were our people.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_130920-1_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3367" class="picwide" />
+
+The festival was true to its name. There was a section for Wild West enthusiasts, a section for pirates, a section for all things roughly late Medieval to Renaissance, and plenty of random elements as well, like fire eaters and a woman laying on a bed of nails. 
+
+As anyone who's ever been to Medieval Times knows (I have not, but I assume), the big draw for kids is always going to be the jousting. Huge war horses done up in armor, knights in full metal armor as well, riding at each other with actual jousts -- who doesn't love that?
+
+The answers is, everyone loves that. Pro tip: head the stands early if you want a seat. We did not, and had to content ourselves with some standing room in what was, I think, the cattle pen when the rodeo is in town. The jousting turned out to be slow getting started, with overly long intros to the knights that we couldn't hear because we were behind the speakers. 
+
+<div class="cluster">
+    <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_123138_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3363" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_123123_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3362" class="cluster pic66" />
+    </span>
+</div>
+
+The girls lost interest so Corrinne took them over to do some archery. Even I was contemplating heading elsewhere, but Elliott was not to be dissuaded. Eventually the real action got underway though and it did prove worth the wait.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_134709_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3368" class="picwide" />
+
+
+It doesn't look like much in the photos. In fact it looks like they're missing each other, but they aren't. It was wood ramming metal . It look I believe seven passes before one knight unseated the other.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_140100-1_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3369" class="picwide" />
+
+When that was over we wandered off to try our hand at archery. Anything hands-on is always the favorite thing with out kids. Arrows were flying. A few even hit the bullseye.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+    <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_130455_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3364" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_130508_renaissance-fair_x3dx4KX.jpg" id="image-3366" class="cluster pic66" />
+    </span>
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_162330_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3370" class="cluster picwide" />
+ <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_162411_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3371" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-03-05_073454_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3372" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+</div>
+
+We ate a packed lunch with some overpriced lemonade in the shade and then the kids decided to break into their savings accounts to buy bows and arrows and a cross bow before we called it a day. We're now the most heavily armed campers in Big Lagoon. Well, most visibly armed anyway.
+
+
+
+
+## Wagoneer
+
+My favorite way to travel is with everyone in the bus, no other vehicle involved. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_080825_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3360" class="picwide" />
+
+As we've slowed down our travels though, spending more time in an area makes it nice to have a car to go exploring, run errands, and get to places the bus can't. For that reason we bought a 2006 Volvo during the pandemic and have been relatively happy with it ever since. It's easily our lowest maintenance car ever. Other than changing the oil periodically we haven't done anything to it. 
+
+Which is to say, we never loved it. It was practical, ran well, but it was just a modern car. They're all the same. Ours was black, but this graphic illustrates what I think of modern cars better than anything I could say.
+
+<div style="margin-top: 4rem">
+<img src="images/2023/design.jpg" id="image-3355" class="picfull"/>
+</div>
+
+We talked about replacing the Volvo. We decided we'd get a late 1980s Jeep Cherokee, with the 4.0 engine. Chrysler's last inline six is, by all accounts, a great engine. In some ways it's a bit like the 318 in the bus, it runs forever. My kind of engine. And hey, I could figure out fuel injection. Probably.
+
+But the Volvo ran fine. I don't fix things that aren't broken. The Cherokee was just a rough plan.
+
+Then the Volvo started to show some alarming behaviors -- stuttering and dying in parking lots, randomly rolling down windows. Things I found best described as "electrical gremlins"[^1]. I tried to ignore these as best I could, but one day in Destin the Volvo stuttered and died in a parking lot and it took me quite a bit of tinkering to get it running again and home.
+
+From what I read on the internet that night it sounded like it could be the battery. Or something far more expensive. The battery is in the trunk (I don't know either) and it was a two-year battery going on year five, which seemed like a reasonable culprit. The next day I dropped the kids off at the condo my parents had rented and headed over to the auto parts store to get the battery and alternator tested. 
+
+On the way I happen to past a very cool looking old Jeep Wagoneer. Not a Cherokee, but in most ways cooler than a Cherokee. One of my best friends in high school had a Wagoneer and it had hauled all our gear climbing, hiking, and skiing more times than I could count. I always loved that Jeep. It seemed strangely fated that I should see one now. I texted Corrinne a photo and said, hey, maybe we should just buy this Wagoneer and be done with the Volvo. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-02-17_162333_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3357" class="picwide" />
+
+She immediately started doing research to figure out if it was a good deal or not. I got the alternator and battery tested. Both were fine. According to the test. I decided to replace the battery anyway. Except that the parts store told me I couldn't. I did not believe them so I looked it up myself and sure enough, you can't change the battery in a 2006 Volvo without the expensive diagnostic tool to "reset" everything. Sigh. The Volvo was on its way out of our lives.
+
+I drove back over to the Wagoneer to have a closer look. A cursory inspection revealed a little body rust here and there, the front windshield had leaked on the passengers side, but the body was in surprisingly good shape for being being 34 years old. I was shocked to learn in was a 1989, it looked much older thanks to what's known as a "Rhino Chaser" front end the owner had put on. 
+
+<div class="cluster">
+    <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2023/2023-02-17_133235_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3356" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_200749_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3358" class="cluster pic66" />
+    </span>
+</div>
+
+
+I took a few more pictures and texted the owner to see which engine it had. It turned out to have a rebuilt stock engine, the V8 AMC 360. Despite being a 1989 vehicle, the AMC 360 is an aspirated engine. The Venn diagram of vehicles with carburetors and post-Freon air conditioning systems is very small. But the Wagoneer is in there. Check.
+
+We had family in town and it turned out the owner was out of town for the week as well, so we mostly set the idea aside for a week. 
+
+After life settle back down we moved up to Fort Pickens for [the bus's photo shoot](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/02/photo-shoot), but before the photographer got there I took a drive back to look over the car in more detail and talk to the owner. Everything I was interested in checked out. The number of recently replaced things on this vehicle is too long to list. It's easier to say the transmission is original and pretty much everything else is new. The previous owner sunk a lot of money into it and then, apparently, his wife wanted to get rid of it. My wife wanted to get it. We had a deal.
+
+A week later we wired over the money, signed some papers, and drove off in our new 1989 Wagoneer.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_200820_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3359" class="picwide" />
+
+We haven't had a chance to really shine it up yet, but
+
+
+
+[^1]: Further research revealed that electrical gremlins in a Volvo of this era are not uncommon and notoriously difficult and expensive to solve. They sometimes include fun things like the car suddenly shutting down at highways speeds, the brakes deciding not to engage, the throttle sticking open, and other treats brought to you by modern over-engineering.
+
 
 ## Fort Pickens Photo Shoot
 
@@ -225,9 +334,9 @@ How I came to write a story about the bus for *Wired* is something of a story in
 
 I don't recall how it came about, but a few years ago some enterprising person at Wired put together a mentoring system, which connected those of us with less experience with more experienced writers and editors. Now, my current title at *Wired* is "senior writer", but I signed up to be mentored because this seemed like a good opportunity to learn.
 
-You might be wondering how I ended up writing for *Wired* in the first place. People sometimes ask me for advice about becoming a writer and I always tell them, find something useful to do and keep writing in your spare time. Making a living writing is very difficult. Most people I know who do either come from money, had a significant other who makes real money, or were prepared to live on rice and beans for a very long time. I went the latter route, but it was a long circuitous journey. 
+People sometimes ask me for advice about becoming a writer and I always tell them, find something useful to do for money and keep writing in your spare time. Making a living writing is very difficult. Most people I know who have succeed have had some way to get through the lean years -- either they come from money, have a significant other who makes makes enough to support them, or were prepared to live on lentils and rice and beans for a very, very long time. I went the latter route. I hate lentils.
 
-I was fascinated by the early internet and started putting together websites in my spare time way back in 1996-1997. By 2000, the height of the dot-com bubble, I was pretty good at it, such as it was back then. I was still working restaurants to pay the bills, but I had a nice side income building websites. Meanwhile, a friend became a writer, and later editor, for Webmonkey.com, which was *the* place to go if you wanted to learn how to build websites on the early internet. It was a collection of tutorials mostly, instructions on how to build websites and the culture surrounding the developer community.
+I was fascinated by the early internet and started putting together websites in my spare time way back in 1996-1997. By 2000, the height of the dot-com bubble, I was pretty good at it, such as it was back then. I was still working restaurants to pay the bills, but I had a nice side income building websites. Meanwhile, a friend became a writer, and later editor, for Webmonkey.com, which was *the* place to go if you wanted to learn how to build websites on the early internet. It was a collection of tutorials mostly written by the developers working on Wired's website, which was then called Hot Wired.
 
 By coincidence in about 2002 I met up with him and his wife in New York. Despite me living in Georgia and them living in San Francisco, somehow we were all in New York at the same time (we've also met up in [Paris](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2011/05/from-here-we-go-sublime) and [San Miguel de Allende](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/06/hasta-luego) by coincidence). I remember telling him that I'd just been rejected by a bunch of graduate writing programs and he said something like, meh, that's for the best, pitch me a tutorial about web development, I'll get you a little money, and then see how much you care about grad school. 
 
@@ -237,19 +346,17 @@ Even when you have an in, you don't always get the story.
 
 <img src="images/2023/2022-02-14_111142_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3342" class="picwide caption" />
 
-But he took my second pitch. And the third. I was still working my day job running a restaurant kitchen, but it wasn't long before I was making more money writing than I was in the kitchen or building websites. Don't worry, that didn't last long. Luckily for me, I liked cooking and I didn't quit that job because eventually economic times changed and the tutorial money dried up. Not entirely, but it wasn't nearly as good or frequent. 
+But he took my second pitch. And the third. I was still working my day job running a restaurant kitchen, but it wasn't long before I was making more money writing than I was in the kitchen or building websites. Don't worry, that didn't last long. Luckily for me, I liked cooking and I didn't quit that job because eventually economic times changed and the tutorial money dried up. Not entirely, but it wasn't nearly as good or frequent. Eventually *Wired* sold Webmonkey and my friend went on to other things.
 
-I'd been saving every penny I could for several years though, and so I did finally did quit the restaurant, but I quit to go [traveling around Southeast Asia](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/southeast-asia/2/) and [Europe](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/europe/) for a year. 
+I'd been saving every penny I could for several years though, and so I did finally did quit the restaurant. Rather than getting serious about writing though, I took my savings and went [traveling around Southeast Asia](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/southeast-asia/2/) and [Europe](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/europe/) for a year. 
 
-Writing for Webmonkey opened quite a few doors, though none of them led to more writing. Instead I was able to get programming jobs, not a ton, but enough to extend my trip in Southeast Asia. I'd go travel around Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, periodically returning to Bangkok to work and earn some more money. This was 2005 and 2006. I ended up worked freelance this way for about three years, some of it traveling, some of it back in Athens, GA.
+Writing for Webmonkey did open quite a few doors, but mostly they led to programming jobs, not a ton, but enough to extend my trip in Southeast Asia. I'd go travel around Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, periodically returning to Bangkok to work and earn some more money. Then I'd go out again. I ended up worked freelance this way for about three years, some of it traveling, some of it back in Athens, GA.
 
 <img src="images/2023/2023-02-13_165517_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3346" class="picwide" />
 
-Around 2009, *Wired* re-acquired Webmonkey.com and relaunched it. I went back to writing nearly full-time, though I was still technically freelance. That lasted for about five years. One day *Wired* got a new editor who decided he didn't want Webmonkey anymore and shut it down. I went back to programming. About a year later is when we sold our house and left on this trip. I went back to freelance programming and writing again.
+Around 2008 *Wired* re-acquired Webmonkey.com and relaunched it with my old editor now in charge. I went back to writing nearly full-time, though I was still technically freelance. That lasted for about five years. One day *Wired* got a new editor who decided he didn't want Webmonkey anymore and shut it down. I went back to programming. About a year later is when we sold our house and left on this trip.
 
-When we were in Mexico my primarily client in my freelance business tragically passed away and the company he founded cut me loose. I had put all my eggs in one basket (classic small business mistake, don't do it, no matter how good that client is, don't do it) and I had to scramble to find work. I even applied for jobs, something I hadn't really had in over ten years at point. One of those jobs was a full time position at *Wired*, working closely with my friend who'd first published me at Webmonkey. 
-
-That was appealing, but more than anything, I was kind of over writing about technical subjects. I didn't want to tell people how to make things on the web. I didn't want to write about software anymore. Moving from Webmonkey to Wired would, theoretically, give me a chance to write about other things. 
+When we were in Mexico my primary client in my freelance business tragically passed away and the company he founded cut me loose. I had put all my eggs in one basket (classic small business mistake, don't do it, no matter how good that client is, don't do it) and I had to scramble to find work. One day Corrinne noticed a full time position at *Wired*. I still did the occasional freelance review and enjoyed it so I applied. I also applied for a job elsewhere as a documentation writer, but I was tired of writing about technical subjects. I didn't want to tell people how to make things on the web. I didn't want to write about software anymore. Moving from Webmonkey to Wired would, theoretically, give me a chance to write about other things. 
 
 <img src="images/2023/2023-02-13_172501_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3348" class="picwide caption" />
 
@@ -257,12 +364,14 @@ That is how I ended up a product reviewer for *Wired*. Note the total absence of
 
 I told that editor that I'd always wanted to write a feature. She very kindly started coaching me. This was right around the time we moved to the house in Iva and, despite being stationary for the first time in years, our internet was worse than ever. I decided I should write about rural internet and how bad it is. I called experts. I got lots of quotes. 
 
-But then I started paying more attention to my neighbors out there in the woods. They didn't seem to be hurting for internet. Sure it wasn't great, but what use was the online world anyway? There was livestock to feed, fields to plow, work to be done. I came to believe that whole notion that rural America needs better internet is a story people in cities tell themselves because it's what they would want if they were out here. It's not what the people out here want. Rural America needs infrastructure investment and resources for entrepreneurs. The internet is good enough. 
+But then I started paying more attention to my neighbors out there in the woods. They didn't seem to be hurting for internet. Sure it wasn't great, but what use was the online world anyway? There was livestock to feed, fields to plow, work to be done. I came to believe that whole notion that rural America needs better internet is a story people in cities tell themselves because it's what they would want if they were out here. It's not what the people out here want. Rural America does not need further dependence on the complex systems that are already failing all around us. Rural America needs investment in localized systems and resources for local entrepreneurs. The internet is good enough. 
 
 I had to come back to my mentor and say, you know what, this isn't the story for me. She was very gracious about it and kept meeting with me. The mentorship was supposed to last six months, but a year later we were still talking once a week. Somewhere in that time I started telling her stories about living in the bus, and she said, you know, you should write one of these stories down, but tell it in such a way that Wired readers will get something out of it. I ended up wrapping a story of how I came to love working on engines around the larger culture of repair. 
 
 Now, almost three years after we started talking, that story is going to be in the May issue of *Wired*. At least that's the plan, you never really know until the ink is dry. I do know that it's real enough that *Wired* paid a professional photographer from Houston to come hang out and take pictures of the bus for a few days. The photographer they sent was very nice and made something we were all dreading not that bad in the end. 
 
+<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_072422_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3354" class="picwide" />
+
 That's the story of the story. Of course the photo shoot was only one weekend out of nearly two weeks we spent at Fort Pickens. We had plenty of beach time and even discovered a spot we could get away from everyone and play baseball in the cool of the evenings.
 
 <img src="images/2023/2023-02-14_161701_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3349" class="picwide" />
@@ -275,10 +384,9 @@ That's the story of the story. Of course the photo shoot was only one weekend ou
 
 I still worry that this story may bring unwanted attention to us, but we already get quite a bit of attention, I can't see one story adding too much. Hopefully. While it's about the bus, and me to some degree, it's really more of a ode to the dying culture of repair, the DIY spirit, and the love of sturdy old things that so many people I've met over the years share with me. For me at least, it's about everyone else. We'll see what the rest of world thinks in a couple of months.
 
+<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_200926_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3353" class="picwide" />
 
 
-# jrnl
-
 ## Family
 
 After a few weeks in the Pensacola area we headed back east, across the Florida panhandle to St. Andrews state park, a little postage stamp of protected land off the coast of Panama City Beach.