Rumor Has It....

Heyo! I know I haven't blogged in forever, I've been uber busy. Anyway, it has recently come to my attention that within the Civil War reenacting group to which I belong there has been some chit-chatting behind closed doors regarding my personal spin on decorous behavior. According to some standards I have not been conducting myself in a respectable (which here means prudish) manner. I am entirely to free-spirited for their conservative tastes...maybe it has something to do with being a hippie/flower child. My mom told me that my dad had told her about the rumors in the first place. According to her, he was really upset by the rumors....me? i think it's hilarious. Apparently he went all gung-ho and ripped the gossipers to pieces about it. Gotta love someone who'll stand up for your "honor" lol. Anyway, my take on the situation is that my knowledge of their disapprobation makes it my duty to piss them off as much as possible!! Haha, that's all lovelies! I will write soon!
B

A Rose in My Hand

You held my hand as the world fell down, the life I knew,
crashing to its knees. The light went out ouf our lighthouse, crashing our
ship on the jagged spires of grief and loss;
but your hand stayed firm in mine.
Together we rebuilt the world:
smile by smile, memory by memory, laugh by laugh.
We entombed our pain in paper and glue,
and slowly our rose began to bloom again.
We carried eachother, through dark valleys,
across high mountains, through verdant fields past pools of unmoving water.
The sun rose anew, but the clouds still hovered.
When your hand let go of mine,
the ground disappeared.
Now alone,
I begin to build once again,
the clouds suffocating the sky.
Six rays of light stream across the floor;
the promise of new life and hope.
And from my heart, two roses grow.

♥ B

All this past week, I have had the urge to sit down before my laptop and "pen" a blog...but every time I have sat down before my computer, I have suddenly become blank and disinterested and turn instead to more amusing web pages. I have no idea why this is, except maybe the fact that I seem to be most often inspired to blog during Philosophy, and I obviously can't blog at that time and have to wait until later thus ageing the juices.
Anyway, the first five days of Junior year have been survived,  with a fairly positive future lingering in the distance. It scares me to think that I am really in my second to last year at Central. When I started high school, I think sub-consciously i thought that high school would last as long as grade school would, and therefore I would know the people for the same length of time. It has been somewhat of a shock realizing that no, it is in fact really only four years of schooling, and in a little over a year and a half, I will graduate and I won't see the same people that I've known since freshman year and there's no guarantee that I'll stay friends with people I've met since I started here, if only because we all go to different schools and become too busy to get together much of the time, thereby decaying connections; something that has happened with a few people from my grade school and junior high. I wish time would slow down and these next two years will be awesome and the end will never come...but time always has a way of speeding up when you really want it to pass in a stately manner...as everyone well knows.
I would just like to say that I am proud of myself (in a not too egotistical way) because I actually went to my first Central football game last Friday. It seems like a small accomplishment, but I had soooo much fun! It was especially cool because it was the annual Battle for the Musket which is a yearly game against our arch-enemy over an actual musket. I really felt like I was part of the school, standing there in the rain shouting and screaming, and cheering our team onto VICTORY! I actually stood for over two hours straight without getting tired...part of which because I was running high on adrenaline ;). I plan to actually go to Homecoming this year (yay!) and I really hope to get to at least one of the soccer games this season...seeing as soccer is my favorite sport.:)
Ok, well this blog didn't go exactly as I was thinking it would, but that's ok.
<3
Slán go fóill
B

T'is the last rose of summer...

Hey there!
So, it's has finally come, no matter how hard I've tried to push it away, the last weekend of summer. In two days I have to wake up at 6 and get on the bus and walk into that prison school by 7:30. No joke, the school was built in the untilitarian style of  prison. Anyway, aside from seeing friends that I havn't seen in three months, I am not looking forward to starting junior year. At least, my last week of summer has been fun even if it's been less than relaxing. For the last 11 days, Minnesotans and other Mid-Westerners have been experiencing and tasting the delights of the Great Minnesotan Get-Together, or the State Fair, one of the biggest in the country. :) I love the state fair, and I go every year, almost always more than once, an I plan to keep going until I die...maybe from  cardiac arrest caused by excess grease intake. ; ) One of the best (and the most annoying) things about the fair is that on each excursion to the grounds, I always always see someone, usually more than one person, that I know. It was really cool on tuesday, because I got to see one of the guys that I went to grade-school and junior high with and I hadn't seen in over two years. It was a little awkward, but it was still great to see him. The one downside was that for the next few days, I kept thinking about 8th grade and all the preceding years and all the experieces that my class shared. It was really sad to think that we'll most likely not see eachother all together again. :( I was thinking maybe I'd put together a reunion but I don't know because it's a lot of work to put one together. Anyway, the rest of the week was pretty fun becuase I got to go to the fair again and we went up north and visited Glensheen Mansion, Gooseberry Falls, and Split Rock Lighthouse. I love it up by Superior, it's so beautiful even if it was pretty chilly for August.
Hasta la vista!
B

Our Fathers Brought Forth, Upon This Continent, A New Nation

Do you know what it feels like to be a part of something? One of the reasons that I love being a part of LHS and going to Pipestone is that I feel like I'm a part of something. It's like a dream down there, what with all the tourists around and being surrounded by a rustling cloud of hoop skirts and such. While at an event, I feel like I belong, becuase the people are gaping at all of us :). We don't just put on a show for an audience; essentially we live it. Period conversations, period food, period almost everything! Victorian Society (which I'm also part of) feels more like just dressing up and gong out...LHS is a group that teaches. The period accuracy might be a pain in the butt sometimes, but it makes it real.  I mean, I've been going to these types of events ever since I can remember, and although I got tired of them and took a break for awhile, I really do enjoy it. I've known some of the other members for my entire life and in a way, LHS is almost almost like a second family....well maybe a third family.
 Fashion Program Picnic on the egde of the battlefield Watching the battle August 14 Battle August 14 Tea with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln August 15 Watching the battle August 15

Enjoy the pictures!
♥ Bridget

Four Score and Seven Years Ago

Tonight my family an I returned from a weekend long Civil War reenactment. This Civil War Days festival takes place every two years an we have been going since I was four...so essentially we've been going for twelve years even though we've only been there six times. This time was different slightly for me because I am now supposedly "out in society", therefore I can't be running around with my bonnet hanging down my back like I used to; that's not to say I didn't try though :). This means that I had to be chaperoned anywhere I wanted to go outside the LHS (Living History Society) tent, and if my dad wasn't around, then my younger brother had to take me...even if it was to walk the fifty feet to the shop where my dad was browsing. This dependence was kind of annoying, but it also gave me a chance to drag my brother around and make him pick up things that I dropped and couldn't bend to pick up because of my corset. It was really fun in Pipestone because someone that we kind of grew up with (doing this reenacting) was there and so we all kind of "hung out", in as much as we tried to have as much fun as we could while still being pretty period accurate. On Saturday it was pretty hot, but I had on a silk sheer dress, so what breeze there was floated through the sleeves and skirt which kept me relatively comfortable. Saturday night there was a dance on the lawn of Pipestone City Hall. It was pretty fun but I wish they'd done more dances rather than stopped after 5. Anyway, I did a reel with my dad which was rather difficult because my dress somehow ended up floor-length, so it was rather difficult stepping backward and sashaying. Then later this like 7 year-old kid asked me to dance. He was so cute that I had to say yes, even though I'm terrible shy especially near a dance floor. Unfortunately there weren't enough couples to make another square in the quadrille so we had to wait for the next dance. When the next dance started, Katurah switched out with me and dad switched with the little kid, so we weren't actually partners but we were in the same square...i got a tall, awkward soldier. I noticed that subconsciously I have matured since the last Pipestone. While consciously I shy away from the idea of dancing with a stranger, subconsciously though, I think that if some other guy had asked me to dance, I would most likely have said yes. Getting me to dance is like pulling teeth, but once I'm dancing, I have a ton of fun... I love to dance ;P. Well, it's almost three, so I'm going to have to finish this another time.
♥ B

After all, tomorrow is another day!

And so, this well known final line of a great literary work, begins my post.
Today, August 3, 2010, at 3:35 am, I finished what I believe to be an amazing if bigoted piece of literature; Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I have seen the movie numerous times, but lately I had an inclination to read the original work from 1936. Having participated in Civil War reenacting since I was quite young, this story has always held some allure for me, let alone fulfilled the needs of my Hopeless Romantic Syndrome. :) Anyone who has seen the movie adaptation of Gone With the Wind must agree with me that Scarlett O'Hara (Hamilton, Kennedy, Butler) is not a lady under any circumstances. In fact she is quite adequately labeled by other names which decency prevents me from typing here. ;) In the movie Scarlett is a spoiled brat who, due to the Civil War, is thrown with the rest of Georgia into the throes of poverty and is burdened with the almost certain death sentence of starvation and despair. Although only nineteen when she is loosed to survive by herself and presented with the care of her beloved plantation Tara and all it's occupants, Scarlett manages to pull through, although the hardness she developed during the hard years was never to truly leave her. She later becomes a wealthy snob and lords over all her old friends in their prideful poverty that the war left them in. The movie stayed pretty true to the book (which is, as all book lovers know, quite unusual), but the one thing that sets the book apart and I think makes it more appealing in some ways, is that in the book you see what goes on in Scarlett's head; you truly understand the hardships that make her the character that she is. You also begin to sympathize with the Confederates and realize that the Yankees were not all they were cracked up to be...but that's for another post. Anyway, while reading the book, I actually felt genuine sympathy for Scarlett at times because of the cruelties of life that she had to endure at such a young age. That sympathy of course turned once again to disgust and hate when Scarlett begins her marriage with Rhett Butler, since as all my close friends know, he is my favorite character....the poor sad fool who was the only man who ever really loved Scarlett and had his heart broken and trampled on because of his useless ardor. My fascination and preference, stems mostly from the fact that I am in great admiration of Clark Gable's performance as Captain Butler, but I do actually like the character, for all his bad traits, if only for his hopeless love....thus crying out to my Romantic soul. :) Although the lack of conscience in Scarlett sometimes makes you shake your head in disapproving amazement, I don't think that she is quite as unfeeling and bad as the movie portrays, because like I said, you don't see her internal/mental struggle. Besides, if we were nineteen and had more than ten people looking to you for food and comfort and the Yankees had stolen everything from you including your mother, and we had been brought up in a sheltered life without being taught the necessary survival skills to bear life on our own, what would any of us have done? We would have made the best of it and done anything we could to provide for our families, no matter how scanty the provisions. This is exactly what Scarlett did. So despite her selfishness and her cruelty, I have to admire her spirit and her strength...and her Irish refusal to be trampled on and destroyed.