

A travel journal....a diary....a place to kick back a bit. Laughter and poignancy are correct here. Rants are, well, for my OTHER blog.


Characters in the above pic...Arthur the empty armour, Bill in Chain Mail, Jean V. in his Samurai Suit, Shayne in his chain mail, and Leanne with the sword and rather lighter chain mail.
Here Shayne is showing Leanne the moves that keep him alive.
The Camera is being held by Leanne's assistant Wayne, and he is talking to me. I love the long horse tail coming off my helm.
A nice collection of fighters, all mugging for the camera.
And that was April of 2005. Lots of water under the bridge since then. Both Shayne and Bill are slimmer, and the Samurai Armour is chipped and "used", but all in all, the same bunch of great guys haveing a great time.












This is Coralie, who spent several days in my shop making her armour. This is the three piece backplate she made....normally a fairly standard design, except of course for the customizing details....her high waist, and superior posture make for a custom armour which looks very nice. I'll post pics of the front as they are made.
My poor unfinished second story deck, looks like it is supporting the snow without difficulty!Gilbert Gargoyle, trying to not see the snow which is almost up to his perch.

The above pic was taken on 3 March, the ones below were taken only 2 weeks later! The icicles are really cool, long, and look at the stalagmites coming up on the rain barrel! The ice dam is starting up top. Compare these cute little (?) icicles to what they became in only two weeks!
Looking out my front door. The snow from the porch roof had to be tossed overboard...it was sagging, and I had to install jack posts to hold it up! The resulting pile of snow is too high to see over!
The pretty church next door looks like a Xmas postcard. Snow is up to the windows. And the rest of the porch snow got tossed into the driveway...so much for having a driveway this winter!
The garage roof seems to have a glacier on it. twenty pounds of salt may get rid of it...mayby. It is a classic "ice dam", and if it gets much worse, the meltwater will back up under the shingles to come inside. So far this has not happened.
And amazingly enough, this glacier got even worse after I shoveled off that half yard of snow from the garage roof. Ah well, and people wonder why I don't have time to finish their armours! Just surviving in this horrid climate is trouble enough!
Oh, and this week we graduated two courses at the College, a Basic and and Advanced which were running in parallel streams have graduated, and have now come together in an Advanced class which will run for another 8 weeks.