#makeawand

Oh man, I so needed that vacation. I’ve been back in the mundane world for about a week, and I’m still on a slight high from the camping trip for a week.  We went with the local SCA group, Mooneshadowe, to Lumberton, Mississippi for a week long medieval camping trip. I spent much of my time out in nature. It felt so good to recharge. The part I loved the most was the lack of a good stable cell signal, so I could just about completely disconnect! I would have completely disconnected but I had people I promised to check in with throughout the week. I was able to spend time reading, finished my books on Runes, and part way into my new spell book. The drives were long,  but it was nice to get lost in the highway hypnosis. Ian was a champ and drove 80% both ways of the trip, even though he is a horrible traveler. He can’t stand sitting still for so long with nothing to do!  Now that I’m back in the real world it’s time to jump back into my studies, both mundane and magical. I’ve been spending much of the week sewing on projects for work on an upcoming convention we’re attending next weekend, which means less sleep for me. Work had me scheduled several days this week to make up for my time missed last week. This has given me much time in the office to sit down and meditate while crocheting a new project called F-bombs. These little “bombs” are stress balls, about 6″ in diameter and look like an old Acme bomb with an F embroidered on the front. I’ve decided to be silly and not go the classic route and make these little “bombs” colorful instead. Hopefully they sell well next weekend at our next convention.  Anyways, I got off topic talking about crocheting, although its a form of my meditation so not completely off track. But besides the point...  My classes are going well this morning, I finished up my last essay for Intro to Healing Stones, I should be getting the grade for that back soon. I failed the final test for vGSW, oops! Some of those questions were rather hard, and required you to have much dabbling knowledge of SecondLife. They weren’t in the normal lesson plan and were rather difficult to understand the actual answers on. Hopefully I can retake that test and get both of those classes finished.  I also finished an essay in Magickal Tools about creating a wand. I found my oak branch while out at GulfWars last week with the SCA and it called to me. It’s about 20″ long, and about 3/4″ thick, a little narrower than I would have liked, but it has a good feeling to it. I whittled it down slightly to get some knobs off it and wrapped the handle in red yarn. It’s consecration meditation with me told me it wanted to be used for healing and was a warm campfire like feel to it. I found this to be a good sign. Speaking of oak, I need to tell you about what I did for Ostara. I’d completely forgotten it was the holiday, but I ended up doing something nature like which worked out perfectly. The plot of property next door to my parent’s house was bought, and the new owners hired someone to come cut down several trees so they could start building a new house. I was very upset this week that they were cutting down all these trees while they hibernated. After the tree trimmer left, I went out and collected several branches about 2″ thick and several chunkly logs easily a foot long and wide. I plan on cutting these into discs and either etching runes into the branch discs or painting landscapes on the larger discs. I’ll let the tree tell me what it would like to be used as, but I think these projects are a good idea.  Anyways, I think this is enough for now. If I remember anything else I’ve done in the past week or later today I’ll make another post.