Woah! How cool is THIS??!

(click for bigger images)

The organizer for this weekend's SCA event and her husband real quick like built this drawbridge to be part of the equestrian challenge. It was fantastic! So much so that when the competition was over and the course was opened up to let us all just play - most of us went back for the photo op. Heh.

(Ohh, and we finished my lance this weekend - complete with the leather hand guard that I'd made with the help of the Leather Guild folks.)

It was another fun event - this was a Toys for Tots drive, so the fees for participating in the tournament were toys. There were equestrian, archery, heavy and light fighting tourneys. The table holding the astonishing 700+ toys gathered that day was an amazing sight!

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On a somewhat related topic, we did have a nice relaxing weekend for a change - seeing as how we had ZERO dogs in the kennel. Huumm - not a great thing for business, but on the other hand it has been over a year since we had a whole weekend with an empty kennel. We've had a rather dramatic down turn in our kennel numbers since the end of summer. It's been bizzare several months, June, July and August were all record high months. September has typically been slow as kids go back to school, etc. But October and November have utterly failed to rebound as they have in the past 2 years. Even our holiday reservations for Thanksgiving are showing the effects. We're slowly creeping up, but we are still only 1/2 full. So, we've scaled way back on the staffing plans, but I hope we don't get that last minute rush that finally fills us up and we aren't ready with people to work...