Michelle

I love this footnote from his Manifestacion al Público so much...

...that I got on Canva and designed a t-shirt about it.

Thanks for the ask!

As a nerdy homeschooled kid obsessed with the Texas Revolution since I was 11, I started off attending events with my family as a spectator. Eventually when you've been to the same events year after year, you get to know people in the hobby, and participating on the reenactor end starts sounding more and more fun.

The very short version of how I got into it is: Texas Rev events are always in need of more soldados. Moreover, Mexican Army reenactors are some of the most friendly, welcoming, helpful people you will ever meet in the hobby. I ended up getting recruited by a couple dragoons I met at Washington-on-the-Brazos one year, they introduced me to their friend who had some infantry loaner gear that would fit me, and I got hooked pretty quickly. (Esprit de corps, historic sites, and black powder make for a heady combination.)

I'm working on a little comparative study of execution accounts/narratives to inform a biography I'm writing, and I figured this would be a good place to cast a wide net.

I'm especially interested in deaths with these elements:

Any touching last requests.

Asking the firing squad to aim for the heart.

Any last requests that were denied/ignored. 💀

Specific acts, gestures, or bearing of courage, stoicism, etc. on the part of the condemned.

I was rolling blank cartridges for an upcoming event and realized that the scraps left over from cutting my cartridge papers were the perfect size for an American Girl doll.

I have become consumed by the desire to write a fanfic sequel to Waverley in which the elderly Benedictine nun formerly known as Flora MacIvor moves from Paris to Brittany when her community is dissolved, falls in with some non-juring priests, and takes up the white cockade once again.

She's going to end up running a Chouan safe house and doing some intelligence work for the Chouan General Georges Cadoudal.

I'd have her become a surrogate mother of sorts to Georges and his brother Julien Cadoudal. Drawing on her time in religious life coming to terms with her brother Fergus' execution in 1746, she counsels Georges through whatever survivor's guilt he may be suffering with since his mother, newborn sibling, and uncle died as a result of the family's imprisonment in 1794.

I'd have Flora die peacefully of old age sometime before 1800. (Honestly, I don't have the heart to make Georges live through another super-traumatic death of someone close to him, given that his BFF Pierre Mercier and Julien will both be killed in 1801.)

At some point while in England, Georges Cadoudal takes a side quest to Tully-Veolan in the Scottish Lowlands to return some of Flora's mementos to her old friends Rose and Edward Waverley, who I imagine are still alive with plenty of children and grandchildren.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Among other things, one of the main characters, Jacobite true believer Flora MacIvor, is described by her brother to would-be suitor Edward Waverley thusly:

"...since she could spell an English book she has been in love with the memory of the gallant Captain Wogan..."

and

"for, to tell you the truth, I think her more in love with the memory of that dead hero than she is likely to be with any living one..."

He drops this tidbit of information in the May 12, 1828 entry of his Boundary Commission journal, in between describing the astronomical calculations he had to perform and complaining about the swarms of mosquitos.

A couple pics of my annual chiles en nogada!

Happy Consummation-of-Independence Day, Mexico!! Much love to the Ejército Trigarante; Happy Birthday, Don Agustín.