Coins and swords

[fbhjr]

This morning we didn’t have any breakfast food around, so we went off to the store to get some. I grabbed my bag of loose change and fed it into the coin machine there as it gives Amazon gift certificates for coins.


Then, off to sword practice. My wife thought we should bring back some sword work exercises, so we devoted the first hour to that.
Mostly doing some very basic sword moves while getting your partner to back up where you want them to go.

And, of course, doing this while everyone else watches and tells you what you’re doing wrong.


This worked for a while, but in a small practice space people defaulted to going in a rectangle. This let the person backing up known when they would need to rotate and do it even if the person driving them wasn’t giving good signals.

So, I took a couple to toy lightsabers we have there and used them like those folks directing planes to the gates. The person who was supposed to be driving the other person could see me and not the person being driven, so they had to rely on the other person’s signals to move the right way.


Of course this theory didn’t always work. Some folks move faster than I could circle around on the outside giving directions.


And, I did take a turn in both directions with blue_micha doing the landing guide part.


Then we went back to studying the German rapier manual that we’re planning on presenting at the sword symposium in April.
This week Tom was reading so I got to do more of it.



Of course, he couldn’t resist doing some of it.


The big question is if we’re doing the 12th annual Gulf Coast Renaissance Faire in March. We’ve done all of the previous 11.
But, it’s less than 2 months away and haven’t heard from the organizer. And, their pirate faire last November didn’t seem to go as well as planned.
So, we’ll see.
We did plan out a lot of what we expect to do if we are hired to do the show.
Let’s hope it happens.

Comments

[endlessblush.livejournal.com]

ok .. you're going to have to explain the coin thing to me - never heard of such a thing? So rather than spending your coins .. or cashing them in at the bank, you put them in a machine and it spits out an Amazon gift card??

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

That is it exactly.
You put your coins in, it gives you an Amazon card (actually just a slip of paper with the code number on it) for the amount of the coins you put in.

They have these machines at a lot of supermarkets in my area. But, not all give out the same cards. Some only give you a cash voucher for that market. And, usually when they do that it takes a percentage off of the value.

So, if I have a lot of coins I drive over to the market in the next town that gives the Amazon ones at full value.

[endlessblush.livejournal.com]

THat's a bit cheeky taking a percentage for themselves when you're using that stores voucher ... but it's a great idea to get rid of all your spare change.