As advertised, CG and I loaded up Otto Saturday morning and made the run up to Excalibur.

Attendance is measured in the hundreds, not the thousands, so the feel is completely different from TRF, where I've worked and played lo' these many years. A vendor pal of mine told me that they'd had 1,200 folk through the door last Saturday, an all-time record for the faire, and a few of the cast members I talked to confirmed that. As a comparison, TRF commonly has over 30,000 a day.

It may even make it. Most faires don't, as the infant mortality rate is undogly. That particular location was once the setting for a faire yclept Cavalier Days, set in the 17th century, but it went tits up years ago. It all depends on how deep the owners' pockets are, as I doubt they've even reached breakeven yet.

It'll still be an uphill battle. This faire only runs four weeks, and for a reason. They can't extend it much farther into the summer, as they'll run smack dab into Scarborough Faire, which will not only compete with them for customers, but drag away about half of their performance cast and two thirds of the vendors. Nor can they extend it back earlier in the year without running into weather that'll keep the patrons away in droves.

Furthermore, they're stuck in the spring slot, as it's man-killing hot there in the Hill Country of Texas in the summer (and all the top-of-the-line entertainers and vendors are doing much bigger, established shows up north) and nobody is gonna want to try and mess with the 3,000 pound gorilla (that's six 500 lb. gorillas) that is the seven week run of TRF in the fall.

We saw several shows, to include the Renaissance guitar of one of our TRF Saturday Night ChowHound pals, SturmRitter, and a three girl Bawdy Wench Act, whose name I didn't get. They performed the standard songs you expect from the wench acts, One-Ball Reilly, No Balls At All, Roll Your Leg Over, and so on. They were better than the crowd was, especially the dark-haired lass on the right.

So, when it came time for the limerick, I shot my hand up and waved it around.

"Do you have a limerick?" the dark-haired lass asked.

I stood up on the table where I had been sitting.

"Yes, good lass, I do!"

I took a deep breath and started to belt it out...

"Wait! Wait!" cried the red-haired lass. "No Nantuckets! No Nantuckets!'

I laughed. "Indeed, no Nantuckets at all."

"You understand what I mean, right? No Nantuckets."

"Yes, I know what you mean. Nooooo Nantuckets."

Finally, the were comfortable that I wasn't going to use one of the Words You Can't Say Onstage At A Renfest. So, in my semi-famous stentorian tones, I held forth with my favorite guaranteed showstopper limerick...

"There once was a lassie named Alice, Who used a dynamite stick for a phallus. They found her vagina In North Carolina, And bits of her tits in Dallas."

The crowd howled and applauded, while the girls nearly fell off the stage. I doffed my cap and bowed, enjoying, as always, that rosy glow you can only get on stage. It was surely the highlight of my day.

After the show, I tipped the girls a fiver, and talked to them for a minute. I told them to feel free to use the rhyme if they'd like, as I'd stolen it from somebody so long ago I'd forgotten where I stole it. (Later, I did a google search, and found about 300 hits for that limerick and it's variations.)

After the show, I ran into John, another TRF veteran. At this faire he plays some French nobleman of some sort - he told me the name, but it was about five names long, and I don't recall it. At TRF, over the past coupla years he's been a barbarian named Smash, and last year, he was the Goblin King, nearly unrecognizable under his makeup and partial mask. I handed CG the camera to get a pic of us, just so I'd have at least one pic to show I was actually there. :-) I spend most of my time on the back side of the camera, so I end up with hundreds of pics, but none of me. Probably a good thing. :-)

Speekina witch, I took a lot more pics than you'll see here, but my cantankerous Agfa digital decided to act funky. It ate the rechargable batteries in it right off, then devoured the only set of alkaline backups I had with me. It is sometimes capricious. It acts as if everything is fine as you take the pics, leaving you to find only later that since it didn't like the flavor of batteries you fed it, it tossed a tantrum and didn't actually bother to write the images to the memory card, even though it appeared to. :-( It has something to do with the delivered voltage and the automatic low battery shutdown or some such, I've been told.

We talked for a bit with a lady that sells handmade angora wool items - rugs, scarves, vests, and yarn from her booth. It was most interesting, as while I had read about the process, and seen pictures, I had never before actually seen anyone spin wool before.

She had a scrapbook with pictures documenting the entire process from shearing the goats (which they raise on their own ranch) to the weaving of the yarn to make the finished product. She explained to me the difference between combing and carding wool, something I'd been unclear about, and the difference in the sort of thread produced by the two processes. I'd joked before that we oughta make a sweater from all the hair my wolfhounds shed, especially Caesar, and now we know somebody that can spin it for us :-)

The show at TRF has lightly armored (chain-mail coifs and hauberks only) cowboys on little cutting horses (they really are, in Real Life, working cowboys on the quarter horses they use to work cattle the rest of the year) playing "shield tag," busting light balsa lances on each other's shields. The show is fast and furious, with the jousters barely slowing down to grab a new lance before they turn and charge for the next tilt.

While at Scarborough, the jousters are clad in full plate mail, barrel helms and all, and are riding monster draft horses. It looks a lot more impressive, and it certainly appears more authentic, but they run at each other a lot slower, no faster than a canter, and there's a complete stop in the action after each tilt.

By mid-afternoon, CG allowed that she'd had her fill, and was ready to leave. I think she likes working at faires a lot more than playing at them, and considering the money she makes at them, she may have a point. (As it turned out, she had an ulterior motive.) So, we said our goodbyes, and laden with a bunch of stuff she'd manged to buy while I wasn't looking, we left for home.

We didn't manage to make it there very soon, but that's a whole 'nother story.

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It's been well over a decade since I've exercised regularly enough to maintain a decent level of fitness; I've been in a slow decline since, and I've had about all of that I can stand.

I joined the Marine Corps at age twenty-one. I was in fairly good shape then, and it only got better after I enlisted, of course. After a few years in the Corps, I could run for miles, fuck for hours, and go days without sleep if I had to. I was strong and agile and dumb enough to take it all for granted.

It has been only in the last few years, as I entered into my forties, that I've noticed a marked decline in my strength and endurance.

Those eight years I served put a goodly sum of fitness in my body bank - enough that I survived the next decade of largely abusing it with booze, bad food, late hours, and the stress of life in the nightclub business.

My "fighting weight" should be somewhere between 175 and 185; at one point a few years ago, my weight had ballooned to almost 240. I was FAT.

I've since lost that, I'm about 193 as I sit here, not that far off from my ideal weight, but the 180 I carried twenty years ago (damn, has it been that long?) was a barrel-chested, thick-armed, thighs like tree trunks 180, not the potbellied poundage I'm sporting now.

Here's what I wonder: can I get it back? With enough hard work, can I reach again those levels of fitness I had in my mid twenties?

Only one way to find out.

The voyage of discovery started a bit back. I'm still not drinking, and a few weeks ago I started eating off a healthy menu of fish, chicken, fresh fruits and vegatables, high in anti-oxidants and low in fat. Last week, I started to ease my poor shocked body back into the idea of exercise by walking at a brisk pace for an hour each day.

Starting this Sunday, Easter Sunday, as it turns out, (and I suppose the Resurrection of my body would be an appropriate and ironic date to start this, if only I were a Believer) I'll begin to exercise twice each day, tossing some light weight work into the mix. I'll continue that for thirty days by the calendar, then the workouts will start in earnest.

I'm still deciding exactly what those workouts will entail, so far as the exact program, but it wll be a combination of several types of aerobic work, along with weight training for power and endurance.

Here's what I'm shooting for:

Body Composition Goals

1. Get the weight down to 175-185
2. BodyFat < 10%

1. Bench Press 2x body weight
2. Bench 1.5x body weight 10 reps
3. Do 25 strict pullups
4. Squat 2.5x body weight
5. Squat 2x body weight 20 reps

1. Run one mile < 4:40
2. Run 3 miles < 18:00
3. Run a marathon < 3:20
4. Swim 2 miles < 1 hour
5. Cycle 100 miles < 5 hours

Those goals are roughly what I could do when I was in my mid twenties.

Here's the really hard part - I want to hit just that right blend of strength and endurance, and perform all those goals in one calendar month.

Here's what might keep me back.

My knees are in poor shape from years of running on concrete, thinking I was bulletproof or something. They're full of cartilage particles, and I probably need to get scoped.

My right ankle has never fully recovered from a ligament tear when I rolled it over playing volleyball Way Back When. I was never able to run more than 25 miles a week after that before my knee and hip, affected from that instability, acted up.

Finally, about three years ago, (when I was at my heaviest) I was diagnosed as a Type II diabetic. My blood sugar is under fairly good control now, but my feet do pain me from time to time, and I don't know how well they're gonna hold up to all the road work.

Well, we shall see what we shall see. I'll post on it from time to time, but nothing like a daily training diary. I wouldn't subject you, dear reader, to that.

Wish me luck.

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Well, maybe it is. I've found that though I love having written, I hate the actual physical process of writing. I keep wanting to add and change stuff, tweak and tweak and tweak ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Carpal and cruddy typing skills don't help.

I was watching Charlie Rose the other night. He was interviewing a writer, I forget who, it's not important.

Rose asked the guy, a reporter that had to write a regular column, how he managed to be so prolific. The guy said that he just had a goal of a thousand words, four miserable pages, every day, no matter what.

Discipline yourself to do that, he said, and in three short months, you have a book.

I was astounded to think of it that way. Are modern novels truly that short? Just 80-100k words? Hello? Anybody?

I can do a thousand a day, I think. That's gonna be my goal from now on. 1,000 a day. Even if it's crapola, 1,000 a day. You Have Been Warned.

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