Palespyder’s Web

I am planning after Valor, Vacation, and Renfaire to start tooling my shop as an armoury. I have always been interested in armouring and given the right tools and some practice, I should be able to make a bit of money to play with my own kit and tweak it to acceptable levels. I have some ideas on the types of things I need, among the list are:

• Hammers (Need a raising, planishing, and a leather mallet for sure)
• Better Dishing Stump
• Grinder

This will be a good start, I would like to do mostly 14th and 15th century stuff to begin with up to and including helmets. I would prefer to work in brushed stainless, but I think it would be prudent to start in mild and go from there.

Anyway, this is my current plan, we will see how things go.

I have said these words to myself on more occasions then I can count, giving them lip service and never truly beliving it myself. I liked to believe that I was somehow different from the masses of sheep that mill about in their pitiful, day to day existances and do exactly what they are told, eat what they are told, and wear what they are told.

Today, I am a warrior. I am responsible for the safety of my family and I am the sole keeper of my own honor. The honor of my wife, my daughter, and my friends are also my responsibility to a lesser extent, but do not think I will not protect their safety and honor as if it were my own. I am loyal, I am just, and I am compassionate. I will temper my justice with mercy, and I will weigh my desire against generosity.

I am a Warrior, my training, both mental and physical, are my responsibility and I must condition myself to best of my ability everyday so that I might protect those I love. I must fight as a Warrior to get that last rep every single time, I must ignore the pain, and persevere to ensure the survival of myself and my family.

I am a Warrior, I must nourish my body to ensure the training I need while not giving in to baseless self indulgence. Just because something tastes good does not mean it is good, in fact it is most likely poison. I must ensure that I put the proper fuel into myself so that I am able when the call is made to protect my family and condition my body.

I am a Warrior. I must amass knowledge of my art, my conditioning, and my diet so that I am as informed as possible. It is my duty to myself to learn as much as possible about the topics I need to be versed in.

I am a Warrior. I must condition my mind and forget the petty matters that mean very little. I must listen more and say less as I surely cannot learn if my mouth is open and my ears are closed.

I am a Warrior, honor, justice, mercy, preaux, largesse, courage, nobility, and hope are now my brothers. I shall hold them dear as I hold myself dear.

I have always thought I had a book in me. I know that it is not an easy task or more people would do it. I have a couple of ideas, none of which are very appropriate, but I think given enough time I could put at least one of them down into a decent format and start fleshing it out.

My wife’s #1 hobby is reading and I think she would be more then happy to proof, edit, and offer suggestions to me. The problem is motivation to write. What motivates someone to sit down and write out a 30 page chapter or is it more of a disjointed process of write a smallish (10 page) story and then start to flesh it out? Having never done this before I am kind of at a loss for where to start.

I guess I should just start doing a bit of research and see where it takes me. I am thinking historical fiction or maybe some fantasy. I would love to write something tailored for my wife’s tastes, that would be awesome as hell. She has a very eclectic taste in books so that might actually be kind of difficult to pull off.

Kindra and I have a really nice day planned tomorrow at Tanganyika Wildlife Park as well as shopping for fabric, hitting a couple bookstores, the library and a butcher shop. I am really excited at the prospect of spending time with my wife, it has been a long time since I had this feeling. She brought to my attention that she wanted this type of thing and I had not really thought about it in a long time. After our talk I realized that I had missed spending time with her so much and yet let it fall by the wayside as we “settled” in to our marriage and relationship.

We have also been talking about building a porch on the front of the house as well as repairing the fence and doing just general maintenance on the house that I have let go due to my obsession with things not real life related. The house has fallen into a sad shape and that is a dereliction on my part, which I plan to remedy as soon as humanly possible. Work first then play.

We have also been discussing finding other couples with which we can get along, that have no affiliation to the SCA, again keeping both her and I a bit more grounded in the real world. We have discussed also mini vacations to St. Louis, San Antonio, Denver, etc with Jennifer and Jason as a way to get out there and live life a little.

I have to admit, the prospect of all of this is a little exciting to me, maybe I am getting older, maybe I am growing as a person. But honestly, one can only be negative about life and down about the way things are for so long before you start to become jealous of those who embrace life and who take each day as a new beginning. I think that good things are on the horizon and know that now that we have discussed, things will continue to get better and better.

She is my everything, it is my job to make sure she knows that she is the most beautiful woman on Earth, that she is the most important thing in my life, and that there is nothing that I would not do for her. She moves me.

So sometimes in a relationship you must face adversity to move forward. My wife and I have always had a “let it be” relationship and apparently neother of us were really happy. Yesterday morning, it all came out in a very painful and very vivid argument. I spent the better part of yesterday concerned about things and last night when I got home, she told me she knew where I was coming from and that yes we needed some changes. After much discussing and laughing, a bit of crying, and a hug or two, we figured out together what the problems were, how to start working on them, and how to get to a place we should be in our relationship. This makes me incredibly happy.

So from this day forward, I promise to be much more mindful of my wife’s wants and desires. To listen intently to the things she says and een more intently to the things she may not say directly. It is up to me to be the best husband I can and to show her that SHE is the most important thing in my life and to show her herey day just how very much she means to me. She is my eveything and now is the time for action. A new dawn has come for me.

We also discussed religion. We are both pagan, I have been since I was 16, she has since she was about 25. We are not “good” pagans by any means, but we hope to change that. I am now looking for ways to get restarted in connecting with that part of me and sharing that with my wife. I cannot help but think this morning that the God and Goddess intervened and slapped me in the head with a very big hand to ensure I did not lose the one person in this world that was created just for me. I WILL FIND A WAY BACK TO THEM!

Had an okay fighter practice last night. Lot of people showed up and we had some really good fights. My training seems to be paying off a bit and I feel real good. I think changing my armour will help throw me for enough of a loop that I can bypass the next plateau. I think if I continually challange myself by fighting tired, hungry, irritated, annoyed, happy, sad, and in extremes of temperature that I can train my body to fight better in perfect conditions. I will be training with a sword and shield that are both to heavy and pushing myself beyond the point of tired to raise my stamina. I will gain the skills I want…

I have been trying to impress upon my “student” that you have to work pell work slowly. I am only trying to show her proper technique at the request of her actual trainer and I want to make sure she gets the techniques down solid. I told her last night that you have to visualize the fighting and the shots from start to finish, walk through it slowly and make the shot count. The only thing she should be concentrating on with that is exact and perfect form. She is coming along.

My mind is not where it should be, I need to focus on the inner self and stop concentrating so much on the things I cannot change. My mind is starting to try to betray me and I refuse to let that happen. I am master of my own fate. I am master of my own choices. I am master of all the things that do and do not happen to me. I need only apply that principle to my issues and move through them as though they are made of nothingness.

I have been spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about happiness and what that means. Happiness as defined by websters is as “the quality or state of being happy”. My thought process has led me to the end that whilst on the surface many of us seem like happy enough people. On the underside while we may be happy in one portion or another in our lives, we may harbor and unhappiness in others that causes the whole to fall to a point where we are forced to lie to ourselves and tell ourselves we are happy.

As an example, while a person may be socially, physically, and financially happy in a relationship, on an intimacy and emotional level they could be unhappy. Does this in turn cause the “WHOLE” to not longer be happy? The thing bothering me about this is that at what point does one become so enraptured in their own unhappiness that something “snaps” and they ake life changes nescessary to make themselves happy?

I will be the first to admit, I am emotionally handicapped. Most people figure this stuff out early in life and are more then willing to face their issues head on. I grew up in an abusive home, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I was a “pussy” or a “girl” if I expressed my emotions. My mechanism for dealing with this was to hide my true emotions and not tell anyone anything that might make them angry or upset even if that meant sacrificng my happiness to make that happen.

Fast forward 20 years and you have an emotionally stunted non-confrontational adult male who would rather just swallow his feelings of inadequacy and that he is undeserving of happiness. Seems to me for the things I have witnessed and been through in my life, the least I could be is happy. I mean really, do I get to have all of those little horrible keepsakes and be a huge bucket of crazy on top of that?

I guess I don’t know where I am going with this rant. Suffice to say my happiness is not where I think it should be and I am almost at my breaking point. I deserve happiness in all aspects of my life and relationships and should never have to settle for anything.