Drone video of the old Virginia Renaissance Faire. (Fredricksburg/REC site.)

I remember the original Virginia Renaissance Faire.  Everyone tells me that it ran for three seasons, while I remember that it ran for four.  (Mostly because I remember which dates I took to the faire.)

The Virginia Renaissance Faire (VARF for short) was owned by Renaissance Entertainment Corporation.  (REC for short.)  REC had a number of faires throughout the US, traded on the stock market, and even had their own Visa card.  When they came to Virginia, I thought this was the biggest thing ever.  I was even approached and asked to work at VARF the first two years.  (I turned it down, but that is a story for another time.)



I remember so much about this faire, and I've forgotten so much.  Not too far from the entrance was a herb garden.  Somewhere I have a photograph of my friends and I against a stone wall next to that garden.



I used to try to catch every show by a performer who went by the name of Rollo Pollo or Rolo Polo.  He changed his stage name and I caught his act later up at Tuxedo/NYRF, and for the life of me I can't recall what that new "name" is.  (Heck, I found his Facebook page a few weeks ago.)  As a matter of fact, I took to carrying around a lighter just so he would take it from me for his act.



This was where I first heard the Minstrels of Mayhem.  I didn't appreciate them as much as I should have initially.  But they grew on me and I have every single one of their CD's.  They broke up a few years ago and I took it a bit personally.

I remember the mud beggars.  I remember someone on stilts dressed as a tree.  I remember the jousts, the storytellers, the arts and crafts.  I remember the people and the playtrons.







The last time I was on the site was to do clean up work.  Out Of The Woodwork Productions tried to restart the VARF and was in talks to rent the site.  There were so many of us cleaning up and cutting grass by hand.  Someone had brought a tractor in to bushhog, and the tractor had issues.  Someone had stolen a very expensive electrical panel, and caused extensive damage taking it out.  I was upset at myself because I didn't walk the entire site, but consoled myself with the fact that I'd be back another day to volunteer to get the park back together.



Unforturnately, talks between OotWW and REC fell through.  OotWW is now hosing a smaller VARF in Spotsylvania which includes a number of the original staff, so the dream still lives on.

Meghan Trainor - All About That Bass (Home Free a cappella cover)

This is quite interesting.  "All About That Bass" covered by Home Free.

So unmotivated.

I need to get motivated.

I'm not sure what is up with me.  I'm not doing... Well, anything.  I should be calling people and making appointments.  I should be doing maintenance on the car.  I should be cleaning the house.

I should at least clean out the litter box.  The cats are in revolt.

I've just been completely unmotivated.  This lazy mood of mine has lasted about two or three weeks.  Even when I am on my computer, I don't do much of anything productive.  Heck, I forgot to balance part of my finance tracker for about three weeks.  (Kind of like balancing a checkbook, but it covers all of my finances such as loans and credit cards.)

At least Iv'e gotten my clothes washed.  One of the tasks I hate is washing Adorable Preciousness' clothes.  Toddler, so everything is stained in some way or another.  I have to treat each piece of clothing.  It's time consuming.  Also we run through a lot of stain treater.

At least I updated my blog.  My three readers will be pleased when they notice.  =o)

The Ultimate Hi-Point

I'm sharing this just because everyone else is!



And it made me laugh.

DC's handgun ban is now unconstitutional

This: Yahoo: Federal judge rules DC ban on handguns unconstitutional.

And this: Says Uncle: A civil rights victory.

And the big one: Alan Gura: Victory in Palmer v. DC

The court case was Palmer v. District of Columbia.  The progress of gun rights marches forward!

I miss Love Me Dead.

She moves through moonbeams slowly

She knows just how to hold me

And when  her edges soften

Her body is my coffin









I'm just feeling nostalgic tonight.

Bestamvsofalltime ▪ Vacant Heart AMV [Edited by JazzsVids]

In lieu of actual content, here is an AMV!  The music is "Not In Love" by Crystal Castles.



(Yes, I need to post more...  I guess.)

Peter Sellers: A Hard Day's Night

The Beetles hit "A Hard Day's Night?"  Who knew that it was influenced by King Richard III?



 

Happy Birthday to The Whiteboard!

Congratulations on 12 years of web comics to The Whiteboard. 

Today, the inmates won.

Most of the time, we win.

Sometimes, the inmates win.

Today, the inmates won.  Without threats, without violence, the inmates won.  Through slow pushing, an incoherent bureaucracy, and an administration that acted without investigation.  The inmates won.

Accomplish your goals! Accomplish nothing!

Today's goal:  To get up and moving first thing this morning so I can get all of my errands done by noon!

Reality:  I forgot to charge my cell phone last night, so it was almost dead this morning.  My wife has the checkbook so I can't pay the bills.  (Not everything is convenient to pay online.)  No one seems to be in their office when I call them.  And Adorable Preciousness keeps demanding my attention...  Distracting me from hammering out the math to pay certain bills.

I'm frustrated that I'm not accomplishing any of my goals.  So, I abandoned them.  Took it easy and pushed my daughter on the swing.

I'm already about three weeks behind on my work.  What is another day?

Kristin Moura - Once Called Home

I love the music on this!  The words, the tune...  And the video is even really good!



She used to be a guild mate of mine in World of Warcraft.  She transferred off to another server, but she was always friendly and kept in touch.

Enjoy the music!

Mental Health Issues and Law Enforcement

On the street, there are easy ways and hard ways for Law Enforcment to help those with mental health issues.

The hard way, yet proper way, is to get a "Green Warrant" or Temporary Detainment Order.  This requires the Officer/Deputy to spend hours and hours of their time attempting to get Mental Health Officials to find a bed somewhere for this individual.  This is the long, hard way.  This often will involve their time and keep them off the street and unavailable for calls for up to twelve hours.  This will lead into overtime, or more likely "trade time" so the counties don't have to pay extra.  Understandably, most of the deputies/officers will tell us that their supervisors discourage them taking this course of action.

Unfortunately, the easy way is to arrest the individual.  It is quite easy to drum up a reason to help arrest an individual whom has an altered mental status.  Once the individual is under arrest, then it is up to the jail to get the new inmate assistance on their mental health issues.  The Officer/Deputy spends no more than an hour (often less) tied up with the arrest, and then they are back on patrol.  However, if you are the son of an influential politician (Say, Gus Deeds) then local law enforcement tend to treat you with kid gloves.  

Sometimes it is easy, such as getting their previous medical history and getting them back on their medications.  Sometimes the inmate needs to be seen by mental health and they will diagnose and medicate them while they are incarcerated.  Sometimes the inmate needs to be transferred to the state forensic facility in order to receive proper treatment...  but there are only a handful of state forensic facilities capable of handling inmates.   This is a long process for most inmates.

We had one inmate who was HUGE!  And he was dangerous.  Any time we dealt with him we had to pull multiple officers, we had to restrain the inmate, et al.  This inmate was assault and destructive.  Mentally, the best way to describe him as if there was no one home upstairs.  His behavior was random, and often he would not acknowledge other people.  We delt with him for a year, yet mental health kept claiming that he was faking the entire time.  It took a year of his behavior in jail (whereupon the judge kept kicking him out of court) before the forensic facility took the inmate.  That inmate is still in that facility.

But we had one inmate who's dad was a lawyer.  The kid was a little snot.  He took a small amount of a medication that I will not identify due to liability reasons.  That inmate refused his medications for a long time, and we knew that he was doing so in order to act out in court.  (This trick is a common trick among inmates.)  Well, he acts out in court and due to him having a well connected father and a well paid lawyer that inmate was in the forensic unit the next day.

Money talks.

What was odd to me was that the inmate came to court directly from the forensic unit, and got a slap on the wrist sentence.  The inmate still got jail time, just not much of it.  It was passed on from the security unit that the inmate tried to spit out his medications undetected in order to "freak out" in court a second time.  The way the news reported it, our facility neglected to give him proper mental health treatment.  We got the blame, because under HIPPA we can't make medical statements.  (I doubt that the media bothered to contact our agency in the first place, or if they did it was a last minute call and we didn't have time to prep a statement.)

Our mental health system is screwed up.  Part of the problem is that people don't want to work hard (or are discouraged from working hard) and do their job properly.  But often the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

There is the money... but I can't get to it.

I'm getting kind of frustrated at life.  I've been trying to knock out my bills for years now.  I'll admit that I wasn't all that "smart" when we started paying off the bills, and we had made some dumb purchases.  A bit of our initial financial advice ended up being pretty dumb...  But I will state that it seemed to be good advice before the recession hit.

We got onto a smarter plan of paying off our bills, but we still had a lot of major issues.  Our oil furnace had a catastrophic failure despite getting regular maintenance and repairs.  (We ended up replacing the whole system, and it does not perform to our expectations.)  We had a car with a ton of maintenance issues, when the transmission went we decided that the cost of the repair would go towards a down payment of a used car.  (And we paid it off in three years!)  My wife got laid off.  Every time I got close to paying off a credit card, we'd have another emergency or...  or something.  It got frustrating when I ended up paying one credit card off multiple times because the other was maxed out and "something" would happen.

Finally I have the car paid off, the new heat pump paid off, and all of my credit cards except for one is paid off!  Less than $1000 to go!

I keep trying to work Overtime at work.  That is good money.  I take all the options I can.  For some reason or other I keep missing out on it.  Suddenly I get the opportunity to make approximately $500 in overtime!  Whee!  I'm signed up for two days of work, even though this made my wife very angry.  (She gets upset at me choosing work over family time...  She is more emotional, I'm more logical but that is how it works.)

So, I come down to this weekend.  I can earn approximately $500 by working Overtime on Friday and Sunday.  Come Friday, Adorable Preciousness is sick thus I have to stay home with her.  I got a call and I was advised that the reason for overtime on Sunday has now "gone away" thus I will not be needed.

/seething

I'm so close.  I see the money, but I can't grab it.

So close.

Working Showers and Gun Stores

My post on mental health and law enforcement is dragging along slowly.  I can't work on it more than a few minutes without an interruption.  I'll have it up eventually.

The downstairs shower is finally fixed.  The original Sears brand faucet was installed in 1950, and the innards had finally rusted out.  Due to the piping, we moved the faucet to the far left of the tub and were able to snag a large plate to cover the original holes.  It looks really funny, but it was done for $200 and it was a lot cheaper than my original plan which was to gut the entire bathroom.  (My wife is in love with the tiled walls, which are another original from 1950.)

I've been looking at getting an AR for a long time.  One store has what I want for a really good price...  But another store has a Daniel Defense in stock for way more than I can afford.  Went to a few local gun stores to get some ideas.  There was a lot of temptation, but nothing I was ready to snap up.

I rarely hear a lot of B.S. at a gun store, but I heard some today.  One store is pushing some off brand revolvers.  The mouth behind the counter stated that "if you pull the trigger and it doesn't fire, then you pull the trigger again until it does."  If you pull the trigger and it doesn't fire (squib) then you keep the muzzle of the revolver pointed down range in case it cooks off.  If you pull the trigger on a squib, then the cylinder rotates and you may have a round cook off out of battery.  Ouch.  They stated that with a pistol, the bad round would just stay in the chamber.  Ever heard of Tap, Rack, Shoot?

They also claimed that you can fire a revolver in any position (IE: upside down) which you could not do with a pistol as it would jam.  Only with a cheap pistol.  Through my agency, I've done a bit of tactical training and I can tell you that my Glock can handle a lot of rough handling and still cycle.

And now I present to you... The Weather!

The title is my attempt at paraphrasing the music intro of the podcast "Welcome to Nightvale."  Quite an entertaining podcast.

So, it finally got warm.  Winter did not want to go away.  The temperature rose and I opened all the windows of the house.  It was wonderful!

Now it's cold again.

I've got the windows shut.  I have the heat on.  I'm miserable.  (Doesn't help that I didn't bother to shut the storm windows, so there is a bit of a chill in the air.)

Of course, in a few weeks I'll have the AC on and I'll be complaining about the heat.  Oh well.

How do I use this cuteness to conquer the world?

I've realized something.  My daughter, Adorable Preciousness, can wrap anyone around her finger without even trying.  I went to a book signing tonight and they were giving away T-Shirts to "the most entertaining in line," whatever that meant.  My daughter was twirling and singing and running in circles, as most little ones are wont to do.  (She doesn't stay still unless she's either asleep or watching Bubble Guppies.)  I could have had a shirt, except I didn't want one.  There was a photographer that took about two dozen photos of her...  and then they asked me to sign a release.

I've got to figure out how to take that cuteness, bottle it up, and weaponize it.

Spring has sprung!

We've been dealing with bitter cold, and the other day was the first day of spring.  Oddly enough, we go from the 30's to the 70's for one day only.  

Thus, we took advantage of our 70 degree Saturday!  

Went out to the local Irish festival, held by a Catholic church the week after St. Patrick's Day.  Their reasoning is that you don't do an all out party on his day, but wait a week to celebrate it.  Yeah, sounds kind of awkward coming from me but I can see the logic in it.  On that note, it has no competition and it raises a ton of money for the church.  

Adorable Preciousness ate her first corn dog today.  She loved it.  Then she realized that there was a HOT DOG under all of that breading.  Next thing I know it's been devoured and she is gnawing on the stick.  Ha ha!  

I had a good day.  Good memories.  The rest of the week is supposed to be cold and rainy, and maybe even snow.  Glad I enjoyed it while I could.  

Chest Compressions

Before I start, a little history on me.  I used to be an EMT.  I was nothing special, low man on the totem pole.  The majority of the members of my squad were certified in Advanced Life Support.  IE: They could run the fancy electronic equipment, insert IV's, and push the drugs.  And a significant number of our staff were older.  Therefore with all of my training, I was pretty much relegated to the grunt work.  Cleaning out the ambulances, hauling the equipment, pulling the stretcher, et al.  I never really shined as an EMT because I was pretty much eclipsed by everyone else.

But on that note:  Due that I was young and strong and not allowed to play with the fancy equipment or drugs I would always be designated to do chest compressions during CPR.  It would be a team effort, one would run the IV, one would manage the airway/rescue breaths, and I would always be on the chest.  So, I've had a lot of practice.  But I've never had a save.

But, I've let my EMT certification lapse.  I haven't run in well over a decade and a half.  But I've kept my CPR certification up to date.

Recently I had to do CPR on an inmate.  (Guess my line of work.)  I can't tell you the last time I did CPR on someone.  But when the medical staff member said to start CPR, I jumped right in.  Just like the old days.  The inmate was packed up and passed on to EMS, and our day continued as what passed as normal at our facility.

Afterward, everyone congratulated me on the job I did.  But it wasn't just me.  I was just in the front when action needed to be taken.  And what I did could have been done by anyone else.  Also, I wasn't the only person doing something.  Another officer did rescue breathing.  The medical personnel did the IV.  It was a TEAM effort.  What I did, I had done before.  So it didn't feel any different.

Well, it didn't feel any different until someone asked me if I was OK.  I had no clue what they were talking about.  When they explained it...  Well, I had done CPR before, so I really didn't "think" about what I had just done.  It was action, not thought.

Thinking about something makes it a lot worse than it really is.  First off, I was coming off of the adrenaline rush.  Second, I had accepted it as something that needed to be done as opposed to something with emotional consequences.

But once I was asked that question, "Are you OK," that's when it kind of hit me.  I had to think of the issue, and about the inmates well being.  And then I got a little shaken.

Pocketbook, or kitty potty?

So...  The wife and I are trying to save money and pay off bills.  Of course that means that I am trying to save money, because every day we get a box of something or other dropped on our front porch addressed to my wife.  

Today, my wife got a box that contained two "pocket books."  Well, one hooks to the car seat so it's more of an organizer.   The second one was a HUGE canvas pocketbook with pockets on the inside and the outside.  And it is even insulated so you can keep food in int.  According to my wife, it would be perfect for travel and vacations.  

Sadly, I looked at them and all I could think was that they were just another container for our cats to pee in when they get miffed at us next.