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lwoodFlorida 6: Osprey Bay Hospitality
Mark "Demarus" Donegan lives in a three-bedroom, two-bath house with his wife Tracy, cat Loki, and dogs Griffin and Rig—he swears the god-named animals were so named before he started doing heaten things and as such are Not His Fault, Dammit.
I pulled up in the late afternoon, much refreshed from having visited the sea and diven, fast and far, up and down central Florida.
Rig, half-wolf and half-mutt, sprang to meet me when we left him in from the back porch. The dogs can't be together or they fight, so Griffin was relegated to the garage for the evening. Rig is almost all black and weighs over a hundred pounds, so of course he loves jumping on people. It's natual enough behavior, and I never wear anything terribly fragile when travelling, especially if I know there's a large dog at the end. Several times during the evening, he bounded up to me and bathed whatever part of me was in reach with his broad, pink tongue. I'm no Laurel (she's uncanny at animal elations), but I do all right—Loki-Cat used me as a comfortable pillow at several other points, too.
I was just the prologue to an exciting weekend fo Florida heathens. This was Thursday night, an informal dinner with a couple of the Osprey Bay folks and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
illuviel, who I'd be meeting in person for the first time. Friday, Lazarus Chernik was going to give a rune workshop, while on Saturday and Sunday, Laurel will be talking about ancestor veneration and non-oracular seidh.
Demarus and Tracy are exemplary hosts. I'm very glad I came prepared with a necklace of jasper beads and matching earrings to give Tracy when I got there, or I would have been significantly in the gift-hole!
While Demarus busied himself in the kitchen with steaming leeks, broiling salmon, making crab and lobster cakes, and sundry other delights, Tracy and I perused the paint roller extenders I'd brought; she wanted one of the Fabulous Hrafnar Collapse-O-Staffs, and I'd brought the rarest of the components with me in triplicate.
See, the travelling staffs are something Diana originally came up with while on a trip through a loal hardware store. They're made from wooden paint roller extenders with metal fittings. This is key; if you can find the wooden ones at all anymore, they'll have plastic fittings, which is completely unaesthetic. I did extensive web-based investigation and couldn't find them online, but the local Orchard Supply Hardware chain (locally-run building supply store, bought out by Sears a few years back) carries them regularly. Whenever Diana and I have an excuse to be at OSH, I pick up all that they have on the rack.
In each package, there's an obvious top (rounded at one end, male thread at the other), one middle (female thread on top, long male thread at the bottom), and one bottom (female thread on top, short male thread on bottom). For people less than six feet tall, you need three packages of paint roller extenders: one top, one bottom, and three middles. All parts are wooden, including the threads; the metal fittings are just collars on the female side of the join. This, therefore, presents an exercise for the student of determining the optimal order for the center pieces, and which of the three possible tops and bottoms to use. If more than one top is acceptable, then it's possible to have multiple tops for one's staff.
Once Tracy and I worked out the optimal arrangement, I got my trusty Sharpie marker from my purse and wrote a Roman numeral, from I-V, on each male-threaded tip. This last innovation comes to us courtesy oflferion and is ideal for remembering the assembly order!
We all gabbed amiably while waiting for the other guests: Everte and someone-I-can't-remember from Ospey Bay rolled in, followed just before dinner byilluviel.
Dinner was marvellous! The salmon was a perfectly broiled boneless filet served alongside steamed leeks, potatoes au gratin, light and dark rye breads, and lobster and crab cakes. Demarus hallowed the food and we all tucked in with a will. I enjoyed mine with a bottle of the Very Freyr Beer—after having made a second run for a second six-pack, because I swiftly realised that was the only way any of it would make it to California!
After lightning-fast tableside discussion that rocketed through a wide selection of movie character impressions (What's-His-Face and I did duelling Sméagols—fun!), we lit on the topic of gods at Everte's request, and at some point I fished out my (discreet, teensy) valknut.
He's a Thorsman, and I always appreciate those. Thorspersons tend to be straightforward, regular Joe kind of guys, and Everte was no exception.
In fact, he even said as much, pointing out that if Thor's mad at him, he finds out right off instead of having to wonder about it while the world goes upside-down, inside-out, and backwards 'round his ears. As a result, while he hails Odin at appropriate times, e.g. Winternights and Yule, the rest of the time he stays a prudent distance.
And, y'know? I completely understand that. Himself has a completely deserved reputation for being a shithead. That he also has a reputation for making it a helluvan interesting ride with exciting stops along the way doesn't make that risk "worth it" for everyone; as Diana quite rightly wrote in the Wodan's Children trilogy, he's always done his best and worst by the ones he loved the most. In his defense, though, several of those unpleasant ends are quite justified: people fucked it up and paid for it.
In my defense, I try not to fuck it up.
Part of "not fucking it up" was that I quit doing IT work professionally. This isn't as awful as it might seem, or as I try to convince myself in more depressed moments: IT was only something I happened into because computers were a hobby at which I could make money. During all those system administration jobs, I had no ambition, no plans for a career, just doing the job I was at and untangling knotty problems—and as it was work and not play it was deucedly less interesting than poking at the server I had up for my friends and I to enjoy. Maintaining lorien is somewhere between work and play; I consider it a significant part of my calling and ministry to make it available and cheap, but what's come of that is fascinating to me.
And pursuing the path of seidhkona and gydhja is more than either; it's a calling. As I told my brother, a calling to ministry isn't something I could honestly heed in the church of my youth due to my gender (female + Roman Catholic = no priest for you). As I told my father when we spoke so obliquely on matters of faith, there are few (are there any?) truer contentments than finding what the Powers, however you perceive them, have called you to do—and doing it.
But does the walker choose the path that best complements his native talents and acquired skills, or were the talents given him and the opportunities for skills shown to guide him gently to that path?
As Garth Nix is so fond of writing: Does the walker choose the path, or the path choose the walker?
I think this is one of those telling questions, really, where the process of the answer's arrival is as much or more important than the actual answer.
Anyway, it wasn't the right place to express things in that level of detail. I had to resort to handwaving and wisecracks like "I knew the job was dangerous when I took it—or when it took me, and damned if I know which."
"You had a choice?"
"Well, I always thought I did, but seeing as I've had Exciting Eye Crap since the age of five... maybe not so much."
We all laughed. Heanthenry gently insists that both free will and predestination exist in many of its traditions at a very deep level, and always awards Many Points for style: do well by your friends, take you enemies down and die with élan, and you'll go far.
But things went overall quite smoothly. After dinner and a pause for digestion, Demarus bade me chop nuts while he got out...
Valhalla Ice Cream!
Only available at Publix grocery stores in the States, and thus only in Florida and Georgia, Valhalla ice cream comes in several flavors—tonight was Odin's Exciting Wildberries. We simply must get some for January's party—illuviel had made willing noises about shipping some. Dry ice will do the trick of keeping it frozen if the package is shipped overnight... but dammit, I have to top last year's blue and black M&M's.
And it's good ice cream, too! Blueberries, blackberries and, uh... someotherberries...
Contrariwise, though, we won't be making plans for the Freyja flavor.
It's vanilla.
Da noiv of dese people!
How about.... dulche de leche (that's "carmel," you non-California Anglos) with honey or caramel swirl and butterscotch and chocolate chips? Chock full of UPG and a part of this delicious banquet spread...
Between dessert and mead,illuviel and I went for a walk so we could discuss some woo matters personally pertaining to her.
The mead was "Ragnar's Reserve" (ObVikings-the-Movie: Hail, Ragnar! Hail, Ragnar's Beard!) from Honeyrun, a commercial brand Demarus had found. It was rather dry for my taste, but I bet Diana would like it, and it accompanied an impromptu sumbel beforeilluviel and Everte left.
It was only here that Demarus and I felt free to talk Rede and kindred-running business, and this kept us up for another two hours of earnest give-and-take.
One of the most amusing bits actually comes to us from the troth-conservative list, aka the "Lorrie is the derided symbol of everything we don't like about the Troth" list. It's meant as an insult, but what can you do but laugh when asshats in their ranty pants manage to come up with a reasonable half-truth?
"If Diana Paxson took a hard right turn, Lorrie Wood would die of a broken neck."
Anyway, after one thing and another, I moved us to the bedroom so I could start repacking the clean clothes into my bag. He showed me some of the Rede mail I'd missed over the past week (I was amused that dearest P-clone made the exact same points in her e-mail that I was making verbally before reading her e-mail.
Well, that's one proof of clone theory...
Oh, wait, I should explain Clone Theory:
The idea is that the gods, being lazy and wanting the maximum return for the minimum effort, only made about ten thousand people, which was great before we all got travel-mad, so now we're meeting each other and finding this out. Know your clone by meeting them but suddenly having known them all your life in ways up to and including telepathic rapport. Finding your clones is fun and a way to help acheive world domination!
The next morning, the house was filled with the smell of eggs and bacon: Demarus had, once again, cooked me breakfast and put it in the oven for me to discover when I awoke. Needless to say, I cannot recommend him as a host quickly enough, and I'm really, really happy I gave host-gifts. He left me a note, I left a complementary note on the back. No-one had touched the Ravenswood wine, so I settled it on the pillow when I made the bed to leave for Laurel (she'll need it!).
Then I packed my little blue I-on-you Saturn and made for the Tampa airport with all deliberate speed.
-- Lorrie
Mark "Demarus" Donegan lives in a three-bedroom, two-bath house with his wife Tracy, cat Loki, and dogs Griffin and Rig—he swears the god-named animals were so named before he started doing heaten things and as such are Not His Fault, Dammit.
I pulled up in the late afternoon, much refreshed from having visited the sea and diven, fast and far, up and down central Florida.
Rig, half-wolf and half-mutt, sprang to meet me when we left him in from the back porch. The dogs can't be together or they fight, so Griffin was relegated to the garage for the evening. Rig is almost all black and weighs over a hundred pounds, so of course he loves jumping on people. It's natual enough behavior, and I never wear anything terribly fragile when travelling, especially if I know there's a large dog at the end. Several times during the evening, he bounded up to me and bathed whatever part of me was in reach with his broad, pink tongue. I'm no Laurel (she's uncanny at animal elations), but I do all right—Loki-Cat used me as a comfortable pillow at several other points, too.
I was just the prologue to an exciting weekend fo Florida heathens. This was Thursday night, an informal dinner with a couple of the Osprey Bay folks and
illuviel, who I'd be meeting in person for the first time. Friday, Lazarus Chernik was going to give a rune workshop, while on Saturday and Sunday, Laurel will be talking about ancestor veneration and non-oracular seidh. Demarus and Tracy are exemplary hosts. I'm very glad I came prepared with a necklace of jasper beads and matching earrings to give Tracy when I got there, or I would have been significantly in the gift-hole!
While Demarus busied himself in the kitchen with steaming leeks, broiling salmon, making crab and lobster cakes, and sundry other delights, Tracy and I perused the paint roller extenders I'd brought; she wanted one of the Fabulous Hrafnar Collapse-O-Staffs, and I'd brought the rarest of the components with me in triplicate.
See, the travelling staffs are something Diana originally came up with while on a trip through a loal hardware store. They're made from wooden paint roller extenders with metal fittings. This is key; if you can find the wooden ones at all anymore, they'll have plastic fittings, which is completely unaesthetic. I did extensive web-based investigation and couldn't find them online, but the local Orchard Supply Hardware chain (locally-run building supply store, bought out by Sears a few years back) carries them regularly. Whenever Diana and I have an excuse to be at OSH, I pick up all that they have on the rack.
In each package, there's an obvious top (rounded at one end, male thread at the other), one middle (female thread on top, long male thread at the bottom), and one bottom (female thread on top, short male thread on bottom). For people less than six feet tall, you need three packages of paint roller extenders: one top, one bottom, and three middles. All parts are wooden, including the threads; the metal fittings are just collars on the female side of the join. This, therefore, presents an exercise for the student of determining the optimal order for the center pieces, and which of the three possible tops and bottoms to use. If more than one top is acceptable, then it's possible to have multiple tops for one's staff.
Once Tracy and I worked out the optimal arrangement, I got my trusty Sharpie marker from my purse and wrote a Roman numeral, from I-V, on each male-threaded tip. This last innovation comes to us courtesy of
lferion and is ideal for remembering the assembly order!We all gabbed amiably while waiting for the other guests: Everte and someone-I-can't-remember from Ospey Bay rolled in, followed just before dinner by
illuviel.Dinner was marvellous! The salmon was a perfectly broiled boneless filet served alongside steamed leeks, potatoes au gratin, light and dark rye breads, and lobster and crab cakes. Demarus hallowed the food and we all tucked in with a will. I enjoyed mine with a bottle of the Very Freyr Beer—after having made a second run for a second six-pack, because I swiftly realised that was the only way any of it would make it to California!
After lightning-fast tableside discussion that rocketed through a wide selection of movie character impressions (What's-His-Face and I did duelling Sméagols—fun!), we lit on the topic of gods at Everte's request, and at some point I fished out my (discreet, teensy) valknut.
He's a Thorsman, and I always appreciate those. Thorspersons tend to be straightforward, regular Joe kind of guys, and Everte was no exception.
In fact, he even said as much, pointing out that if Thor's mad at him, he finds out right off instead of having to wonder about it while the world goes upside-down, inside-out, and backwards 'round his ears. As a result, while he hails Odin at appropriate times, e.g. Winternights and Yule, the rest of the time he stays a prudent distance.
And, y'know? I completely understand that. Himself has a completely deserved reputation for being a shithead. That he also has a reputation for making it a helluvan interesting ride with exciting stops along the way doesn't make that risk "worth it" for everyone; as Diana quite rightly wrote in the Wodan's Children trilogy, he's always done his best and worst by the ones he loved the most. In his defense, though, several of those unpleasant ends are quite justified: people fucked it up and paid for it.
In my defense, I try not to fuck it up.
Part of "not fucking it up" was that I quit doing IT work professionally. This isn't as awful as it might seem, or as I try to convince myself in more depressed moments: IT was only something I happened into because computers were a hobby at which I could make money. During all those system administration jobs, I had no ambition, no plans for a career, just doing the job I was at and untangling knotty problems—and as it was work and not play it was deucedly less interesting than poking at the server I had up for my friends and I to enjoy. Maintaining lorien is somewhere between work and play; I consider it a significant part of my calling and ministry to make it available and cheap, but what's come of that is fascinating to me.
And pursuing the path of seidhkona and gydhja is more than either; it's a calling. As I told my brother, a calling to ministry isn't something I could honestly heed in the church of my youth due to my gender (female + Roman Catholic = no priest for you). As I told my father when we spoke so obliquely on matters of faith, there are few (are there any?) truer contentments than finding what the Powers, however you perceive them, have called you to do—and doing it.
But does the walker choose the path that best complements his native talents and acquired skills, or were the talents given him and the opportunities for skills shown to guide him gently to that path?
As Garth Nix is so fond of writing: Does the walker choose the path, or the path choose the walker?
I think this is one of those telling questions, really, where the process of the answer's arrival is as much or more important than the actual answer.
Anyway, it wasn't the right place to express things in that level of detail. I had to resort to handwaving and wisecracks like "I knew the job was dangerous when I took it—or when it took me, and damned if I know which."
"You had a choice?"
"Well, I always thought I did, but seeing as I've had Exciting Eye Crap since the age of five... maybe not so much."
We all laughed. Heanthenry gently insists that both free will and predestination exist in many of its traditions at a very deep level, and always awards Many Points for style: do well by your friends, take you enemies down and die with élan, and you'll go far.
But things went overall quite smoothly. After dinner and a pause for digestion, Demarus bade me chop nuts while he got out...
Valhalla Ice Cream!
Only available at Publix grocery stores in the States, and thus only in Florida and Georgia, Valhalla ice cream comes in several flavors—tonight was Odin's Exciting Wildberries. We simply must get some for January's party—
illuviel had made willing noises about shipping some. Dry ice will do the trick of keeping it frozen if the package is shipped overnight... but dammit, I have to top last year's blue and black M&M's. And it's good ice cream, too! Blueberries, blackberries and, uh... someotherberries...
Contrariwise, though, we won't be making plans for the Freyja flavor.
It's vanilla.
Da noiv of dese people!
How about.... dulche de leche (that's "carmel," you non-California Anglos) with honey or caramel swirl and butterscotch and chocolate chips? Chock full of UPG and a part of this delicious banquet spread...
Between dessert and mead,
illuviel and I went for a walk so we could discuss some woo matters personally pertaining to her.The mead was "Ragnar's Reserve" (ObVikings-the-Movie: Hail, Ragnar! Hail, Ragnar's Beard!) from Honeyrun, a commercial brand Demarus had found. It was rather dry for my taste, but I bet Diana would like it, and it accompanied an impromptu sumbel before
illuviel and Everte left.It was only here that Demarus and I felt free to talk Rede and kindred-running business, and this kept us up for another two hours of earnest give-and-take.
One of the most amusing bits actually comes to us from the troth-conservative list, aka the "Lorrie is the derided symbol of everything we don't like about the Troth" list. It's meant as an insult, but what can you do but laugh when asshats in their ranty pants manage to come up with a reasonable half-truth?
"If Diana Paxson took a hard right turn, Lorrie Wood would die of a broken neck."
Anyway, after one thing and another, I moved us to the bedroom so I could start repacking the clean clothes into my bag. He showed me some of the Rede mail I'd missed over the past week (I was amused that dearest P-clone made the exact same points in her e-mail that I was making verbally before reading her e-mail.
Well, that's one proof of clone theory...
Oh, wait, I should explain Clone Theory:
The idea is that the gods, being lazy and wanting the maximum return for the minimum effort, only made about ten thousand people, which was great before we all got travel-mad, so now we're meeting each other and finding this out. Know your clone by meeting them but suddenly having known them all your life in ways up to and including telepathic rapport. Finding your clones is fun and a way to help acheive world domination!
The next morning, the house was filled with the smell of eggs and bacon: Demarus had, once again, cooked me breakfast and put it in the oven for me to discover when I awoke. Needless to say, I cannot recommend him as a host quickly enough, and I'm really, really happy I gave host-gifts. He left me a note, I left a complementary note on the back. No-one had touched the Ravenswood wine, so I settled it on the pillow when I made the bed to leave for Laurel (she'll need it!).
Then I packed my little blue I-on-you Saturn and made for the Tampa airport with all deliberate speed.
-- Lorrie
