Saturday was an SCA event, designed around arts and sciences classes. I had a specific plan: take some classes, especially from people I didn't know, so as to familiarize myself with their work and teaching styles.

Instead, I worked at the registration desk, which was interesting in itself. Apparently, my anal-retentive nature made me perfectly suited to happily perform the tedious tasks of sorting the NCR forms and writing down their information in the log book.

It was amusing to hear people in line talk pleasantly to each other and then make catty, sometimes vicious comments once they'd left. For a club which makes a lot of fuss about concepts like honor and honesty, there's certainly a lot of duplicity and backstabbing going on. But that's not news to anyone who's been in the SCA for more than five minutes.

One of the other people working registration had been apprenticed to a former friend of mine. He and his wife recently discovered that they'd been fed a pack of lies, and at one point in the day, left to seek out Karen, Lisa and Severin in order to apologize for thinking and speaking ill of them based on the things he'd been told by our erstwhile household member.

Prior to that, he asked me if I knew whether Karen was at the event. When I indicated that she was, he mused, "I wonder where the Master of the house is." "He's working at registration," I deadpanned, and enjoyed his reaction. I should have followed up with "I know I'm hard to recognize when I'm not eating babies and kicking puppies." Ah, l'esprit d'escalier.

Alas, when we closed, we discovered we had one more dollar than we should have had. I went through the book to find out why, and noticed that some of the pre-reserved people, who'd been written in on the first page, were also written down later as they'd arrived. With Quintana reading out the information, I re-wrote all the log sheets to fix the problem — whereupon we discovered we were six dollars short. We went through all the receipts, added all the numbers up again, and still found ourselves missing six dollars. Arrrgh.

After closing down registration, I helped set up the feast hall, did some gruntwork in the kitchen, and volunteered as a server, and also found myself drafted as hall steward. Excellent feast, and we managed to scrounge together enough plates and utensils for the servers and kitchen staff to sit down and eat after the main feast was over.

Then it was cleaning time, which went amazingly quickly. We were able to get out of the site less than an hour after it closed.

And though I didn't get to really do much, at least I got to hear some of the things our former friend had told her apprentices about us, and some very interesting tales of her behavior. Very interesting.