Home Again

My vacation is over, dammit, and I'm back home now. Camelot Days was a blast, and a LOT of hard work. There is something really satisfying about being dead tired from working really hard all day and still having a great time doing it. Helping my friend, Tigre, with her booth at the faire was a LOT more work than I had anticipated. But the work involved was also really cool. I met a lot of really neat people, saw some great costumes (called "garb" in the Ren Faire circle), caught a few brief minutes of some good entertainment acts, helped sell some product, and the jewelry and other things we sold really made people smile. How can any of that be a bad thing?

Have you ever had some of those times where you are pissed off or frustrated as hell, but know that you will look back on it later and laugh about it? A lot of this weekend was like that. My friend and I went to Wally World before the event to pick up a new air mattress for her tent. We found a really cool one, double height queen size, big ol' fluffy thing that just looked comfortable as hell, ya know? I also picked up a battery-powered air pump to inflate that big sucker with, since we would be on a primitive camp site with no electricity. After the first day of vending, we go over to another vendor's booth to relax and talk and just enjoy some good conversation and company. We finally all get tired, and head back to our site to put up the tent and get some much needed sleep. The tent goes up without too much problem, and I roll out the new matress. I think, man, that thing is big in this little tent. Eh, no big deal we are only gonna sleep in here for a few hours.

Then I open the box the new air pump is in. Uh oh. That doesn't look right. I pull out the pump and look at it by lantern light. Aero-sport? WTF? I bought a Coleman. I look at the box, I look at the pump. Yep, sure enough, the box says Coleman battery powered air pump. The thing inside it was Aero-sport pump that needed an AC adapter to work, wich of course, was not in the box. THIS IS NOT GOOD! Tigre hears a few naughty words escape my lips and asks what's wrong. I give her the wonderful news, and we start discussing our plan of attack, which is basically to start walking through the site begging others for a spare pump. First we talk to the guys who run the trebuchet who did have a pump we could use...a BICYCLE pump. For a double height queen size mattress.

Um. No. Thank you.

Next we found a wonderful gathering of people sitting around a fire pit and getting their drink on. They had a pump we could use that would actually work! Score! And it was the exact pump that I thought we had bought at the store. Grr. So we take it back to the camp site and I begin inflating the mattress. Tig is sitting off to the side while I get this done. And in just a few minutes... she hears these squeaking sounds. "What is that noise?" she asks. I begin to snicker and reply "you really don't want to know." "Is it leaking?" "No" I reply, "that sound is ...well... it's the sides of the tent bulging." Long pause. "WHAT?"

Yes, the sides of the tent bulging. The damn mattress was bigger than the tent floor. And getting bigger. So big in fact that by the time it was fully inflated, the tent door wouldn't completely close. DAYUM! The tent looked like a muffin that had risen bigger than the muffin pan and spilled over the edge. All we could do at this point was just snicker. Getting the fitted sheet on the thing was also a challenge, but eventually we got everything done and crawled into the tent, and zipped up the door as much as we could.

The mattress had a built-in pillow, but due to the size of the thing, it was next to the door, which wouldn't shut completely and you really don't want to sleep with your head next to the door anyway, and the thing was so big, bulging out the tent sides there was no way to turn it around. So now our feet are elevated like we were in traction in the hospital. The mattress is double height, which puts us just a couple of feet from the tent ceiling, and if you have ever camped, you know that most tents have one of those little gear bags suspended from the ceiling so you can store stuff up there that you don't want on the ground, like wallets and watches and stuff. Well, we are so high up, that if you raise up a bit, that damn bag hits you in the head.

By this time, we are both so tired, we just laugh a bit and go to sleep eventually.

But you know something, even with the comedy of errors, I still had a great time and can now laugh about it all.

Now it's time for the holidays.