July – where we miss fireworks, do a bunch of stuff and maybe launch a new career

I’m writing you from our parking lot home, high summer, in Wisconsin

Today is Tuesday August fourth as I write this. Tuesdays are Advice Column writing days but since I have been working ahead, getting columns done early, I can take a few minutes out of Advice Column writing and fill in you guys my first, most devoted fans on what’s going on in my life.  I’m in shorts and no shirt because – white trash. Scarlett is watching My Little Ponies on the big screen. This Journal is either four or nine days late depending upon which deadline you’d like to count. Heather is off to do some banking and bring us some Mexican food…

One Month ago – we missed the Fourth of July Fireworks.

It’s not like we wanted to deny our daughter. She hasn’t completely bought into fireworks yet. She certainly doesn’t have so much enthusiasm that we felt like we deprived her. When the fourth rolled around last month we were quite-frankly too busy to be able to go watch the show in the sky. Too busy scurrying about getting the booth finished and the show opened. We all pitched in and did our part. It wasn’t only Scarlett who had to miss something cool. My newest favorite band Steam Powered Giraffe were playing south of Chicago at an anime festival. One of my friends got to go and I missed it. Sigh. Some days being a grown-up stinks!

Bristol has become an integral part of our yearly circuit and what a lovely show it is

With only three weeks off in the summer now we barely have time to fall into bad habits or debt before we go right back to work again. Bristol is still a bit more work than any of our other festivals. People don’t know who we are yet but they’re learning. It is also one of our favorite periods of the year surrounded by a magical festival, comfortable living conditions and people we adore. I love this show more each day and it is absolutely Heather’s favorite.

 

Looks like Daddy’s little girl is getting into the family businesses on her own!

I’ve joked for years that I want all of my skill-performer friends to teach their skills to my daughter so that she’ll become bored with the entire performer shtick and not want to be onstage. Ever. Heather and I have a playful competition however on which one of us Scarlett is going to end-up working for first. I’m sure she’s going to spend a portion of her young life pedaling dresses and whatnot for mommy as well as hustling roses and games for daddy. We never saw the true threat coming. The new kids on the block Draiku; aerialists, acrobats and babes have hired my tiny daughter to be their tip-hustling babe for their show.  Scarlett loves it and she’s SO adorable. Now I’m working on helping Draiku into more shows so that Scarlett can continue to work (and train) with them.

It’s become a tradition. Another visit from my brother’s family

Richard and some of his kids (nine, remember?) drove out to visit us once again here in Bristol. I LOVE that we see each other three or so times a year now. It was all pretty standard stuff. We dined out a lot – Richard and I each scrambling trying to buy the other’s dinner. We hung out and talked business a bunch and we did some stuff for the kids too. We included a trip to the local “Action Territory” park where Scarlett got her first experience with riding go karts, bumper cars and putt-putt golf. We also had our first-ever two family Marco Polo match at the hotel pool. Fish out of water!

We’re in the market for a new Trailer. We made a crazy trip to the heart of RV manufacturing in America, Elkhart Indiana!

We’re looking to upgrade our trailer, bigger, newer and with a room for our daughter.  We’d take an off-the rack job but since most fifth Wheel trailers are built either for an empty-nest couple or a bigger nuclear family with many children – we are most likely going to have to go custom.  One out of every two RVs or Travel Trailers in the U.S.  is built a mere three hours away from Kenosha in Elkhart. Shortly after Richard’s family left town we did too – on our way to Elkhart. We didn’t do it right. Heather was smart enough to secure a reservation on Hotels .com. It proved to be quite difficult. In fact it turned-out to be far more difficult than we thought.

More on that in a bit

Since we anticipated a leisurely drive, and early night in a hotel and then a solid day shopping factory direct right there at the source… we took our time on the drive. We even stopped at one of my favorite buildings from my earlier life here in Bristol – the Baha’i Temple. So pretty.  Unbeknownst to me Heather had disabled the voice prompts on the G.P.S.  AND had set the system to avoid tolls. Between that and a few other oopsies that were absolutely my fault -  we didn’t get to the hotel until midnight or later. – Sadly, the closest lodging Heather could secure was thirty minutes away from our destination.  With a confirmed reservation in hand we certainly didn’t anticipate being told that there was no room at the inn. There was no room at the inn. A perfect storm of state fair, a weird baton competition called American Youth On Parade and some other conference had wiped-out all available rooms for hours in every direction. That reservation from Hotels.com? Useless. We were only one of TEN people who had been overbooked just in this hotel. The night clerk was a champ. While Heather and Scarlett pouted glaringly (or slept) on the couch the young man on the counter and the guy at Expedia (the parent company of Hotels.com) worked the phones to eventually find us a room twenty minutes away. It only took an hour and a half. The only good thing about the whole deal was that the hotel we eventually ended up in was literally across the street from one of the manufacturers we most wanted to explore.  The whole trip was a disaster even discounting the hotel fiasco. We only got into two plants. We could have toured either one but neither was set up to display a bunch of coaches - showroom style. None of the manufacturers we located did custom work and the woman in charge of the salesmen at the Jayco Plant – the one we were most excited about – was a raging WITCH with a capital B. She was rude, short, dismissive and repeatedly told us “No you wouldn’t want that trailer, it will be too much”. Apparently we looked too poor to buy the thing we travelled all this way to buy.

Bad assessment bitch.

We did manage to see a bunch of new coaches eventually including the one that Heather would have settled for prior to this trip. In the end we found nothing that exactly fit our specifications. Annoyingly we finally DID locate a company that builds custom rigs in our price, size and floorplan range.  We found it by searching the internet when we returned home. Doubly annoying? The showroom for this particular dealer – one we never found – is in Elkhart.

The Breakfast Scene.  A Social scene and Our Blue Man Anniversary

Undeniably one of the best parts of our time at the Bristol Renaissance Faire is the Monday morning breakfast. There are breakfasts in Georgia, Carolina and Arizona too – but often I go and pick up food just to bring it back to the trailer. I dunno know if it’s the scenery, the food, or (most likely) the company. It might even be that we’re just less busy on Mondays here in Bristol but at this faire our Monday AM breakfasts are a real treat – especially when we’re surrounded by a crew as  great as the group in the photo below that Riki called “Table of Awesome”.

Honestly this is rapidly becoming our most social faire. With Christmas in July and movie nights (see below) and all of our super cool neighbors and friends– we’re just surrounded by great bunch of folks most of the time we’re here. Honestly sometimes our social life borders on the exhausting! Wanna know what’s NOT exhausting?  Heather and I celebrating our seventh anniversary of our marriage together. Crazy, right? Even crazier – on the 13th of this month we celebrate our 9th year together. Whoa.  As I have mentioned before Heather and I tend to give experiences more than gifts and we usually go to a show for our anniversary gift to one-another. Oh, and guns.  We give each other lots of guns. This year we revisited a great show we have each seen before – just not together. We saw Blue Man group! I enjoy spoiling my baby for our mutual shared holidays – and even though I forgot to get a card – I think she got the pretty obvious message when she came home after midnight on our actual anniversary.

 

 

In the Renaissance World we get TWO Christmases one in winter and one at Bristol

I remember enjoying the magic of Christmas in July 25 years ago when Bristol was the very first “On-the-road” show I worked as a juggler. I wrote about how much we enjoyed the Posada and all of the old-fashioned Christmas celebrating we get in last year’s journal.  Heather has become an integral part of the Christmas in July organization – which is pretty cool. Due to a lapse of the festival management, the celebration was moved from the proper July 25th date right into the middle of our anniversary. We shuffled some plans, decided not to get a room in the city and though we missed the amazing Christmas Eve tradition, we were ready to dine with Santa and the kids for “Christmas” morning.  There were pancakes, coffee, eggs, presents, ornaments on the tree and I cannot stress this enough Santa Clause! Heather and I had a good time. Scarlett had a GREAT time.

 

We’re living a pretty good life – now with FURNITURE

Okay so we’ve built this MASSIVE new shop with a huge upstairs. It is an upstairs that we will eventually turn into a finished living space. For now it’s a “break room” – at least as far as the building inspector is concerned. We call the space “The Opium Den”. The room is currently unfinished. The walls are exposed studs (giggity) and there’s clothing hung everywhere – BUT my amazing wife has already begun waving her magic decorating wand at the space and is transforming it slowly, beautifully and sometimes with GREAT INCONVENIENCE! Heather located a giant, leather sectional with an (unused) pull out bed and bought it for a quarter of what it should have cost – especially since the thing is practically brand new.  I was happy to pick the thing up in the truck and we enlisted the help of our Jouster friends to carry the pieces upstairs… or so we thought. As it turns out I  should not have made the “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency" joke about getting the couch stuck half way up the stars because we couldn’t even get it that far. Due to the lines of the stairs, the fence concealing the stairs, the door and the low roofline we literally could not get the “Passion Pit” sofa into the booth through the door. In the end we were forced to remove the railing on the front balcony and utilize the freakish height of Matt and Jimmy to lift the sofa from the back of my truck, over the balcony and in through the balcony doors. I literally could not have done it without their help.  Heather has done quite a bit of decorating for an unfinished break area. There’s a bar, tables, chairs, bookshelves… ya know – “Comfy”. I did my part and now there’s also a surround-sound home theater with wireless rear speakers, wiring and a stand for the projector and a screen in excess of 100 inches. We’re ready for movie night and in fact we get the first one tomorrow! We’ve also been enjoying catching up our friends on the back episodes of “The Walking Dead” and used that as a test showing already.  Good times! Meanwhile we’ve also finished all the regular season run of Doctor Who. (spoiler) John Hurt! We’ll catch up on the specials next week and be ready for Capaldi as soon as the rest of the world gets him too.

 

Let’s call it a wrap

Our time here – both at Bristol and in this month’s journal is coming to a close.  In three days we’ll work our six-and-final weekend here.  A week from Friday I’ll be commuting from Kenosha to Shakopee every Friday and returning every Sunday or Monday. Heather and Scarlett will stay comfortably ensconced in our trailer finishing up the final three weekends here and then we’ll move the whole shebang out to Minnesota. Scarlett has two or three more Monday ballet classes left. She loves them and we’re already looking to continue her training in Carolina and beyond. My baby is also wearing glasses now too! Wow. For your pleasure I have even included  some pictures of Scarlett’s Acrobatic training in this month’s journal. Adorable!  In “Ronn projects” I have leapt back into writing my column more regularly. I’m still planning on launching a Kickstarter project in October to turn the Advice Column into a book. I promise that I will let you know when it goes live. In other Kickstarter news we have had to temporarily shelve our Tortuga Twins Kickstarter project to shoot and upgraded version of the R-rated show. Not our fault. Our photographer didn’t understand how serious we were and let himself get too distracted and too busy.  He knows better now.  We do have a bunch on our plate – we Tortugas – besides all of the new products we’ve rolled out recently we’re now working on a new stage show – probably based on Three Little Pigs and a graphic novel about the Tortugas. Cool no?

Let me leave you with what I almost hope is the last thing I see before I depart this earth… in 120 years or so!