Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

Yup, I remembered.   I suppose it wouldn't be a bad idea to share a number of insights I've gained from all of these years attending the place.   So should you be of a mind to attend the Minnesota Renaissance Festival in Shakopee Minnesota, I'd like to drop the following suggestions into your brain hopper for things to think about. First off is tickets.  Renfest is pretty spendy at the gate.  This year, it's something like $27.95 to buy a ticket at the gate booth.  If you're coming from a few miles away, check out a number of local options for discounted tickets.  If you buy them before you get there, this year, they're about $4 cheaper.  Each.  Which is a good deal.  They also offer on-line sales, and they do have weekend passes.  I'm highly prejudiced here, and I live not all that far from the grounds, so I'm lucky.  I would recommend, if you like to go and go often, the "Season Pass" is an excellent deal.  This yea...

Well, I suppose it's appropriate.  Two weeks ago yesterday, 09/04/2022, I celebrated my fourth anniversary of my hire date with my current employer.  It also marked 29 days until my very last work day, per the agreement I was working under since 06/01/2022, which was when I was informed that, like most of my team, my job was being eliminated due to a restructuring, an elimination by my employer of a number of lines of work which I had supported, in multiple locations.   How many?  I don't want to give you a specific number, but I will say that, regarding the division I worked for, I was tasked with specifically supporting a small number of locations, and we are eliminating services from over half of the locations - not just the ones I supported, but a number of others.   So as you might imagine, there were a lot of people scrambling for the jobs that remained available. Given my very limited experience in the industry in which I am now working, I did s...

I guess I should probably be taking this a whole lot more seriously than I do at this point in the day.   First thing this morning when I found a couple of photocopied "Democrat Nazis" with swastikas scattered on my lawn (total of 3), I was upset, angry, and somewhat concerned. I guess in the real world, the whole Reductio Ad Hitlerum rule is not ... common knowledge.  I mean, Godwin's Law has been out there for a while, but I do recall in the late 90s hearing "Invoke Hitler/Nazis, lose the argument."  Granted, that was in the long-ago innocent days, before the majority of the United States decided to vote for a facist populist who said he wouldn't leave the White House when he lost the election.  Then he decided to lie about it.  Or maybe it's just a mental defect - please note that I am specifying "Mental Defect" and not "mental illness" because as we've learned in the past few decades, there are many conditions which can be dia...

I had those weird, premonition-style feelings last night when I heard the words "resting comfortably" regarding Queen Elizabeth II.  I'm no genius, but my gut said "assuming she'd been resting comfortably many of her 96 years worth of nights, why is this one different?  UH OH."   Then the news earlier today was ... well, I get it.  As a child, if you are fortunate like I was, your parents are indestructible.  Sure, the rest of the world falls apart, but Mom and Dad are just there.  Anchors of your life, as it were.  And then, as you get older, you realize they're just plain old regular human beings, like we all are.   When my father went into the hospital for the final time, I noted it was another holiday he'd spend in the hospital.  I mean, growing up, my father managed to land in the hospital for the weirdest things many holidays.  There was the Memorial Day stay when he got some sort of infection from a tick bite.  Ther...

Once again, my Happy Place is open. Siddown, kids, let me share a story with you. Back in 1979 or 1980, I believe, one of my best friends and I made our way, with some of his siblings, to the area west of Shakopee where The Minnesota Renaissance Festival, or RenFest, is held.  Back then, and for many years, we pulled into what I call "West Main" parking.  It is a huge area, probably some 30-40 acres, of flat, grassy land.  It's only the parking lot.   It was marked with signs that, the closer you park, marked earlier years.  As I recall we counted down to the 1400s, perhaps earlier, before we reached the main gates.  This rather impressive structure looked a lot like a castle, with a number of people lounging on various balconies and peering or hanging out of windows, calling down to the folks waiting in line.  The comments varied from welcoming to joking to downright bawdy.  Mind you, I was a high school kid, coming from a relatively shelter...

I must state here that I am not a Tolkien Scholar.  That is, I have not written books about the man.  I have read a rather significant amount of the man's work, and a bit more about the man himself, and his experiences. And I would submit that while I have produced a fair evaluation of the man's work, it was some ... almost fifty years ago, when I needed to produce a book report in sixth grade.   But to see that some dipshit who claims to know the Lord of the Rings fairly well is disturbed by the latest venture into Middle Earth , it is abundantly clear that said dipshit does not understand the core of Tolkien's work. Yup.  I went there.  I'm no Tolkien Scholar.  I've read the books so many times I've destroyed two sets - so far.  And while this Morse fellow feels he can quote stuff at you, there are plenty of others who can do the same, myself included.  But the bottom line if you read and think about the books is that the story is about lov...