I hit the target!

August 28th, 2007 by Ascelyn

Apologies for my rant yesterday.  Well, not too many apologies; it needed to be said.  But I do apologize nonetheless.

By the time the workday was over, I was mostly hanging in there and begging Jason to come pick me up and take me home.  I’m sure he could’ve stayed longer and gotten more done, but he stayed late most of last week, came in all day on his day off, and is staying late again tonight.  Since we rode together yesterday, he was my only way to get home and lay down, so his job can just stop harassing him and let him leave on time, dang it.

That’s a great mess of verb tenses, isn’t it?  But you get my point.

Things improved as the evening went by and I got to lie down for a while.  The wool roving I’d ordered for the felt balls arrived, and is absolutely gorgeous.  The dyed bundles are so rich, and it’s all so soft and warm.  One little roll of it was a beautiful dark blue with other colors throughout.  It was the only non-solid color and came in its own separate little bag, so I’m not sure if perhaps it was a sample or if it’s just different.  Either way, I’m going to see if someone can spin it for me.  It’s too pretty to waste on toy balls, and I don’t know if there’s enough to felt a pouch or something out of it.

After dinner (more pizza…I’m so sick of pizza…but at least it was homemade and not leftover from the party), I took my bow outside to try my new arrows.  Aside from the half dozen that came with the bow (wooden, feather fletchings), I now have three carbon shaft arrows with solid foam flights.  Not SCA-legal, but I haven’t been able to find wooden arrows locally.  The good thing is that I’m small enough (and weak enough—boo!) to be able to use youth equipment, when tends to be less expensive.  The bad thing is that I’m small enough to need to use youth equipment, which is harder to find with any quality.  Wal-Mart had a small stash of youth arrows, but they were bright and hideous colors and made of plastic.  Bass’n Box had those, as well, but also had the arrows I bought—black shafts with white and yellow flights.  I wouldn’t be able to use them in competition, but they’re easy to find and won’t break as easily in practice.  I’ve already destroyed the feathers on about half of my original (wooden) arrows, which were rather cheaply made.

So, I dumped my paper-box target on one side of the yard, strung up my bow, and tied a couple folded-up bandanas to my forearm to avoid the nasty mess of a bruise I received on the range at Pennsic.  I took aim…loosed the arrow…missed the box miserably…and then Jason, dear husband of mine, told me to try putting the arrow on the left side of the bow.  At first, that was nothing more than frustrating; the arrow kept sliding off my knuckles like it didn’t do when I let it sit on my extended thumb.  After tilting the entire bow to the right somewhat, though, the impossible happened:  I hit the target!

No, let me say that again:  I HIT THE TARGET!!!

This might seem silly to you.  After all, I was only perhaps twenty to thirty feet from my little box.  On the other hand, I’ve never actually hit anything I’ve aimed at before this.  Never once.  And for the remainder of my practice time, I did it over and over again!

There are a few pertinent observations on the Pain and Injuries side of this.  First of all, after shooting dozens of times, the string only slapped my arm a few times.  On the other hand, the arrow itself sliced the side of my index finger knuckle several times.  Gwylym had tried to warn me about this at Pennsic, and had apparently had the scars at one point to prove it, but I hadn’t understood what he was talking about since I’d only ever rested my arrows on my thumb, to the right of the bow.  They never came near the rest of my hand.

And I hit the target!

Now…why couldn’t I just have done this at Pennsic and helped Atlantia (and the Middle, but we all know who really won the war) just a wee bit more in the populace shoot?  Why couldn’t I have saved myself the pain and embarrassment of a bruise that covered my entire forearm and more?  Why?  Because I’m stubborn and confused, of course, but that’s beside the point.

Now, since I’m well on my way to being a capable archer (because I hit the target, don’t you know), I need a new and expanded goal.  It’s not like I have enough to keep me busy already, right?  So now I need to work on making armor for myself and getting authorized as a combat archer.  Besides, the English never really focused on accuracy—just blacking out the sun with sheer numbers…no?  First, though, I need a passable set of armor.  I think that, with help, I can put together a set that’s not forbiddingly expensive, but I doubt it will be pretty.  The one thing I really want to do, just because I like it, is perhaps make a breastplate like this.  I don’t know if it’s proper for 14th century England, but it looks nice, and it would appear to be flexible enough to move about in freely.  Also, I might be able to get leather scraps bit enough for most of it fairly cheaply.  I’m not overly worried about having super-heavy-duty armor because frankly, I don’t plan on getting hit.  If they get close enough to hit me, I’m useless anyway.

My other reason to get authorized?  To man a siege weapon, you need to be authorized in either heavy or combat archery.  I don’t plan on fighting much outside of War or other big events, which is precisely where a siege engine would be the most use.  I have too much fun wandering about and babysitting Aaron to want to spend all my time hot and sweaty and injuring myself.  Plus, anywhere that archery and siege isn’t allowed, I couldn’t fight anyway.  Running around at all, much less in heavy armor while hitting people, is not what my body needs right now.

Besides, I think it’d be pretty shiny to be able to build and help run a siege engine.  I’m working on planning and playing with a trebuchet right now, since it seems like the easiest.  I hope to have a ballista later, too.  I blame my campmates at Pennsic for getting me excited about it.

One of my concerns about getting into armor for the time being was pregnancy.  I would refuse to do anything while pregnant, of course, but I could potentially work on making the armor itself.  The problem would be fitting it so that it would still work after I’d given birth.  And even then, since I plan to breastfeed, it seems like it’d hurt way, way to much to get hit in certain places for some time afterward.  And then there’s the shape changes again….  Too much information?  Well, this is my journal, and I can write whatever I bloody well please.  If you don’t like it, then stop reading.

After being tempted yesterday to take another test (luckily, I didn’t have one in the house after wasting two earlier this month), I finally officially found out that I’m not pregnant.  At least that perhaps explains the headaches and general ickiness yesterday, but I’ve been sick and crampy and miserable for at least a month now.  No one warns you about the bad side effects of coming off The Pill.  Everything online talks about the horrible effects of taking it, and how you can get pregnant immediately as soon as you stop, and the only reason to wait is to help in formulating an accurate due date.  Right!  Forty-four days, fifty-one since I took my last pill, half of them spent feeling like I was going to be getting my period any second.  But hey, that’s supposed to be a pregnancy symptom, right?  As is not getting it at all?  Or, it could just be your system trying to readjust to having two and half years of daily fake hormones suddenly disappear.

There are good things to it.  When I first came off them, I felt better than ever.  I was happy, healthy, and generally doing well.  Of course, my skin immediately broke out (I certainly hadn’t missed that for the last few years), and my hair went back to being oily and frizzy by turns.  If that’s the price I had to pay for a child of my own, though, I wasn’t about to complain.  The constant waiting and worrying, am I pregnant or going to get my period or just sick…that’s no fun.  If I’m going to be crampy, headachy, and nauseated, though, I want either a baby or another chance to have one.  I don’t like pointless misery.  Time to get on with things.

Enough of that, though.  Sometimes I still wish I could just be male and be done with all this.  That might cause some slight problems with my marriage, though, so onward.

More later.  I keep getting distracted, and I should really do some actual work.