So I spent most of today at the Renaissance Festival (and by that I mean *the* Renfest) with various people. aelkiss was down from Michigan for the weekend, so that was the excuse, and I spent most of the day wandering with him & his girlfriend, who I finally got to meet and is a wonderful person.

Anyway. He claims I don't update LJ enough. :P

stellar_dust was around too, and she talked me into going as a pirate maid for the day instead of wearing my usual basic-garb-dress. So that was fun, & fun to be in character, and I even managed to steal my sister's treasure bag right out of her hand! YArr. Even if half the time I didn't really feel like I was in costume - basic pirate is close enough to normal dress for me that I'm probably going to wear basically the same outfit to church tomorrow (except possibly with slighly less bling) and I bet nobody'll even blink.

We watched a Midsummer Night's Dream, their big production for this year, which was fun. (I like their company's Shakespeare because I get the feeling it's quite a lot more like the venue and company and budget taht the plays were written for than most places they're played today. Although granted there's little rotten fruit at the Renfest. Although I was struck once again by OMG, what a fanficcer Shakespeare was! Midsummer Night's Dream is generally listed as one of the (only three!) plays where yay! He actually made up his own characters and plot rather than borrowing somebody else's! Except if you actually watch the play, it's obvious that it's actually, at base, Theseus/Hippolyta wedding fic, with a Germanic folklore crossover thrown in and some annoying high-school-kid OCs having hijinks. (I mean, it's a fun play, but why is it never staged with people actually wearing, oh, I don't know, Ancient Athenian clothes? And Hippolyta never acts like an Amazon? And analyses never try to talk about the happy chaos of this wedding in the context of Theseus' later wedding to Phaedra?) I just imagine young Will sitting in the Stratford grammar school, staring out the window at the woods and daydreaming about his little dark-haired girl across the aisle, while the teacher drones on and on about the Twelve Labors of Hercules... Hey, it even has a freaking *disclaimer* at the end! You don't get more fanfic than that!

Other than that it was mostly wandering around looking at shops, and listening to music. They have deep-fried cheesecake-onna-stick now, which is *way* better than the frozen kind, which I never really saw the point of anyway. Other than food, I didn't buy anything, due to being safely very broke. (...I really need to get moving on getting another job.) And as I was with aelkiss, it was lots of listening to music, hooray! Now I have pirate songs stuck in my head.

On the way out, traffic was *horrid*. As in, we got to the car at 6:30 but didn't even get out of the parking space until over an *hour* later. We think there was some kind of accident or emergency, or at least we *hope* there was. Which is why I didn't manage any sewing tonight.

While we were sitting in the parking lot I started reading Mr. Midshipman Easy. I picked up a hundered-year-old copy at a used books sale a few months ago, 'cause I figured that if I've been reading all the 20th century Age of Sail stuff, I might as well read something *period.* When sister saw me looking at it, she asked "So, *is* the midshipman easy? (Shush, you pervs! ... I'm only on chapter 11, he's barely 16! .... I do have to keep looking up and exclaiming to myself, "OMG, Jack, you're a pirate!", though. All that stuff about the sea being the only remaining source of true freedom? Not to mention the plundering. And the glib. Hurrah for Jack Easy!)

As predicted, none of this has dampened my deisre to someday actually *write* the "Prince Hamlet signs on the Black Pearl" story. (I'm supposed to be preparing for NaNo! Which is actually kind of relevant here, because space travel and combat in my NaNo novel *is* supposed to be mildly based on AoS, but still. No new stories till after November!)