I wrote a post about the 2008 midwest morris ale as a series of vignettes of great moments and memories from that ale.

This year I don't have quite the same kinds of stories, or new stories, really: /home/tychoish/websites/tychoish.com/_drafts/ ~/writing/ - There was a killer cool ad-hoc set of "Queen's Delight," (Bucknell) my ongoing favorite dance. I handpicked the set, after the organized portion of tour ended, and we did well. Very fun.

  • During dinner Sunday night, there was a little ad-hoc moment were a bunch of people sang some songs in a hallway with good acoustics. This is one of my favorite things to happen on, and it's hard to plan, and you just have to be lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Songs sung included the ever favorite "Let Union Be In All Our Hearts," and (at my request, mostly) "When we Go Rolling Home/Round Goes the Wheel of Fourtuine." Brilliance.
  • There a dance called "Flowers of Edinburgh" (something more or less like this, except we do double time and current midwestern trends in the Bampton tradition are a bit different.) Anyway, while the choreography is simple, the dance is physically challenging in the extreme. It's one of those dances that doesn't get done much in daylight. In anycase, someone came up to me and said "Sam! we should do flowers!" and I of course said yes, and both did the dance and called it. My legs are still sore from the experience, as I think there are several muscle groups that humans only need to do this dance, and to do nothing else. In any case, I find this disturbing/hilarious mostly because I've become the guy you go to when you want to do this dance. Sigh.
  • On the injury front, I think I'm doing pretty good, and I definitely think that all of the exercise and stuff I did this year has helped my ability to dance better/longer, in pretty noticeable ways. I wasn't totally unharmed: I basically used up my voice too quickly (calling dances, singing), and I sprained my knee (or something) fairly seriously on the last night doing Queen's Delight (again), which put the kibosh on my dancing. Thankfully that happened near the end, and I hope a few days of rest, stretching, ice, and anti-inflammatories will have me back in dancing condition.

Spending a weekend away with "my people," people I don't get to see very much, was (and is) an incredibly powerful experience. I think that many folks have "going and hanging out with our peeps" moments (academic conferences, science fiction conversions, various retreats) and beyond this comparison I don't have a very good way of articulating why this Morris Dance gathering I do is so amazing for me.

In other news, I'll be putting some videos up on YouTube and flickr in the next few days that my mother took. So stay tuned for that, and I'll get back to (and continue) to post things here.

Cheers!