It’s only SEVEN DAYS before “next month’s†journal is due.
It’s a rainy Friday afternoon right before the second weekend of the Georgia Renaissance Festival. I’m fully dressed here in the late afternoon. A movie named “Goon†is playing on the big screen, Scarlett is eating a late afternoon snack of yogurt and Heather is off to the grocery store to buy for both the household and for our unwashed horde of employees. Normally this is my job but since I am SO far behind in this journal – and a host of other projects she took the load (hehehe) from off my shoulders and left me here to write. I had to scare up and bunch of photos from the past six weeks and I can almost guarantee that April’s journal will be late AND that it will be another Zombie Journal.
My journal last month found me enjoying the final days at the Arizona Renaissance Festival
I’ve come to the conclusion that ALL ot the major four festivals are fun in different ways and it’s pretty hard to pick a favorite. There’s so much to love about Arizona that even when I was already living in Georgia in my mind – I still loved the final weeks in the desert. It’s such a well-run festival and such a nice environment to live and work in. Arizona – both the Festival and the state - has got some of my favorite people all year and it’s got great crowds, scenery and audiences. There was a promotion with what I can only assume was the local PBS/BBC America broadcaster that brought the TARDIS, the M-F-ing TARDIS to the front gate of the festival. I won’t even try to hide the fact that we Tortugas –and my uber-hot, uber-nerdy wife made a beeline to it to “get our pictures tookâ€. Our morning meetings in AZ were made more palatable because of the lovely ladies (and sexy boy-stud) of a local act from Minnesota who has just embarked on their first year of touring Renaissance Festivals professionally. They call themselves The Vodca Family – apparently they don’t know how to spell VODAK – and besides being easy on the eyes, they are all funny, charming, nerdy and put on a darned fine show.
We also had a lot of fun social engagements including one with someone we hope to see around a lot.
We have a rich social life at all of our yearly waypoints. In Arizona we share a babysitter with the Millers – so there’s a whole lot of hub-bub when I come home from work on the weekends. We get to see our friends and fan club members June and Dave who host an annual cook out at their house. This year we even had a special visitor – Riki’s honest-to-goodness girlfriend. Scarlett and I even matched our hair accessories for the evening!
Though I was too busy to get in even a single kayaking expedition this year - We DID once again take advantage of the kind hospitality of Wendi and Ryne and visited (again) our “Zombie survival retreat†outside of Jerome. We were joined in the mountains by Lillia and Mark and the whole group visited (again) the “Out of Africa†park where I was recognized as a Tortuga Twin by freakin everybody! Of course they all stopped me to tell me that Barely Balanced had been out the week before. *sigh*. While at the Reed’s we shot everything from Heather’s new gun to recurve bows. We swam in the warm spring, avoided the ice-cold snow-melt swollen river and had a relaxing and needed vacation.
We tried something new at the meet and greet – Don’t worry we’ll do something similar at all of them from now on.
We have received some feedback from some of our Meet and Greets. In some of them – a few of them, the complaint is that when there’s not a Tortuga Twin at the table – our fans wait impatiently, doing nothing until another one of us makes it around. We shook things up this year in Arizona – where the complaints were most prevalent and we changed-around both the seating arrangements and we added and extremely fun and interactive Trivia game! It was a rip-roaring success. We plan on making this and perhaps a few other neat events a prominent part of our fan club meet and greets from this point on so: Study your Tortuga Trivia! We also really want to thank all of fans, friends and most especially our amazing Fan Club Support Crew for helping us have such a swell time.
At least one of the photos at the end of this paragraph is very disturbing… you might want to avoid it.
We wrapped up the Az season with a charming little pot luck at the house of my favorite Renaissance Festival producer/owner/director. We also attended another incarnation of the Almost Homeless Comedy tour where my wife quite-honestly had the best looking legs in the place. We laughed at our friends and enjoyed a rare night out on the town. I did even more construction with Jamie Harvey and we finished our final weekend of our 19th year in AZ. This year Easter actually fell on a Festival day. We had a slow but no-less charming final Sunday at the fair. The Sparse crowd didn’t bother me one-way-or-the other since we –Heather and I – had so much on our plate getting ready for Georgia. Easter has to be my least favorite holiday even when you DO include the Easter porn… Scarlett loved it though – Easter, not the porn. We continued our tradition of a secular, post-Easter, Easter egg hunt. Thankfully Arlene Miller and Amber Dodd coordinated the whole thing this year, all we had to provide was the space, and an enthusiastic little girl. We also once-again shot a video of the egg-hunt… but I’m going to upload it as a password protected YouTube video so only my mom can see it. Sorry guys!
My gun connection is in Arizona.
Don’t ask me any questions that may involve legal entanglements – suffice it to say that I get some pretty cool “gifts†while I am in the desert. My main gun - a .40 S & W 1911 made by a Texas company called STI - is a model named Trojan – so I named it “Parisâ€. I LOVE this gun. I even tricked it out with some swell/silly custom grips that I received last year as a very thoughtful gift from our fan club president and my dear friend Sharyn. This year in AZ I acquired a pocket model 1911 made by Sig Sauer. I’ve shot the model a bunch of times and I feel very confident in its capabilities and concealability. There are lots of style variations for this model – I picked one that matches the finish and features of Paris. Going with the Trojan War theme, I call this one Ulysses. He was the smaller, trickier warrior after all. I have even found out that they make the matching Watchmen grips for the smaller gun… Just so you know - I DO have a birthday coming up!
We had another Loooong but thankfully uneventful trip to Georgia from Arizona
I had to do some last-minute scrambling. My hydraulics for the trailer slide are leaking and I will have to fix them before we depart Atlanta for Kansas City. I was able to jury-rig them to get the slide closed in Phoenix and open again in the dirty south. The trip took for freaking ever – and felt like it took longer because the cruise control on the truck went out. We stayed at Wal-Mart parking lots three different nights. This was as much a function of the cool weather as it was determined by not being able to find an RV park when we most needed it. The hardest part of the trip was that we arrived just-before sunset in Georgia, and though we have gotten pretty good at parking our rig, it somehow took “Team Bauman†two hours, two frustratingly annoying hours. Two “please stop griping at me and I’ll be more patient with you†hours. We finally did get parked, leveled and after I ran to get some of our favorite pizza all-year-long and apologized profusely for not understanding her parking directions and the failings of the Truck and trailer to turn on a dime, I soothed the great bear that had taken over my dainty wife. We had LOADS more work to do this year because on top of the two souvenir shops Heather runs for her boss out here in GA, she also got her clothing line in here AND we got the Garland business too. Clearly we are ambitious. I also got the rose concession here in Georgia for the Tortugas – I’ll manage this one too like I do all of the others. A lot of my job was to also set up and maintain our household and keep our industrious and energetic daughter entertained. Scarlett and I got lots of time together and I loved most of it. She absolutely insisted in helping out with cleaning and set up – which only set me back a little, I view it as time well invested. She put on her gloves like daddy, grabbed a broom, and swept – or rather “Sweptâ€. We spent a lot of time shopping too – mostly for shop supplies but also for purple sandbox sand. Ask me anything Scarlett – you won’t get all of it, but you’ll get a lot of it. I took Scarlett and her little friend Lilly to see “The Croodsâ€. It was great and I was doing a favor to both Heather and Lilly’s dad by doing so; Win Win!
So that brings us to a close for this month’s very late journal.
It is now Saturday of the second weekend here in GA. Our social and amusement calendar has already started as we have settled in to our normal spot and our normal – to us – routine. I’ve sold the drum shop here to our long-time management team of Justin and Meghan but we made arrangements to live behind the booth anyway and are sharing the use of the deck for cooking out and for MOVIE NIGHTS! We have horrible phone and aircard reception here but we DO have a DSL line in the drum booth – and I’ve begun downloading like a fiend! Our opening weekend was incredible on Saturday – we actually set a record for the one show a day that we pass the hat – well, a record for Georgia. Even with the rain on Sunday we still had fun and made moolah; the guy who dropped the hundred dollar bill in the hat certainly helped. I’ve had my first outing shooting and dealt with the unexpected loss of our newest Blue Team member – these two things are not related. I think we may have found Dante’s replacement but damn he was a great kid; he will be missed. We’ve had our first very fun movie night AND we spent most of last night in the studio finishing up the DVD for our Xmas show. I’m going to sign off now – it’s almost time for our third show of the day. In two journals (You know MAY – since I’m pretty sure that the one due in five days is going to be all Zombies, finally) You can look forward to hearing about More tattoos for Heather and I, more Movie nights, Another Disney trip, a corporate party in our old stomping grounds, I hope to finally visit Georgia’s Guidestones and my upcoming Birthday. In fact I even put out a Amazon Wish List Each Birthday – you don’t have to get me anything but if you do – here’s the things I covet.
http://amzn.com/w/3F6VJP77Y2A1T
As a special bonus
Here’s that Interview for the TV show Heather, Scarlett and I did in AZ
See ya back here soon!
