Happy June, Altavia, and WELCOME BACK!!!

His Excellency and I are thrilled beyond belief that this month we get to start meeting again in the real world. Already, we have had a safe get-together to start putting together largesse for Their Royal Majesties and, just last night, we had our first fighter practice in over a year and three months. We want to thank everyone for their patience with all of the new rules and safety precautions we need to follow to ensure we are meeting safely and urge you to follow both the baronial and kingdom Facebook groups for all of the latest updates from the Kingdom Seneschal.

The very first kingdom event of the post-pandemic era is Carrag Wen Anniversary, coming up on June 19^th. His Excellency is planning on going up and I am sure he would welcome any Altavians would also like to attend. Please remember that you MUST pre-register for events and that, until July 1, there is an attendance cap of 150. If you want to go, I suggest pre-regging as soon as possible.

Speaking of things we normally pre-reg for, Great Western War is a GO! We learned this wonderful news earlier this week and are already making plans for Camp Altavia! The Honorable Lady Monique has graciously volunteered to be camp mistress and general pre-reg should be opening in early July. Please keep an eye out for posts from the GWW Stewards and Publicity team with all the latest details. It’s going to be a great war with a very special celebration for someone we all love happening during Grand Court!

But before we go to War, we will officially coronate Their Royal Majesties, Panza and Katherine. This special coronation ceremony will take place on Saturday, July 10 in the Barony of Winternmist. With the new July rules, there will hopefully not be an attendance cap so all who want to attend may. I have heard that they are working on ways to broadcast the ceremony online as well for any who don’t feel quite up to a large in-person event yet. Altavia will be at the coronation, hopefully in full force, with and awesome group largesse project for HRM’s largess derby. We are putting together a period game set for each territory and I wish to thank Dame Lynnette, THL Edith, Lady Allesandra, Lady Sibylla, Lady Saystine, Dame Selene, Lord Christopher, THL Anne FitzAlla, Aðísla, Rivkah, Baroness Cecila, Condessa Battista, Theresa, Valerie (and anyone whose name escapes me at the moment) for helping out on this project on Sunday. In addition to the game sets, if anyone has largess that they have been working on over the quarantine that they would like to add to the Altavia presentation for coronation, please contact me to arrange a hand off.

We’ve said it before and we will say it again many times before our tenure is done, but thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all you have done and continue to do to make Altavia a special place. This past year was one of unprecedented pain and challenges, but you found new ways of navigating and new reserves of strength to make it through. We are so proud of the way Altavia and Altavians rose to those challenges and can’t wait to watch the barony bloom again as we emerge from the Long Dark.

Laissez le Bon Temps Roule!

Greetings, Altavia!

We would like to wish everyone a happy April and hope everyone had a nice Easter, Passover, Equinox, spring holiday of your choice 😊 Things continue to move in a positive direction for the Known World. By now, you should have seen the BoD announcement on the lifting of the in-person event suspension as of June 1. This is very exciting news indeed! Our tireless kingdom seneschal, Sir Tiberius, and the Caid COVID committee are hard at work determine exactly what this means for our kingdom and our events. We ask for and appreciate your continued patience as they work out all the details and will be sure to post/send all the latest and greatest official info your way as soon as we have it. In the meantime, if you have specific questions, please email them to seneschal@sca-caid.org or let His Excellency or me know and we will work to get you answers.

In just a few short weeks, on May 8, it will be time for our second (and hopefully last) virtual Anniversary celebration, Commedia dell’Altavia. Our mighty planning committee has lots of Italian Renaissance-inspired fun planned for the entire kingdom; check out the event page on Facebook for details. If you are interested in helping with last-minute planning, we are having an event meeting tomorrow night, thank you to everyone that has already given their time and creative energies to help plan a lovely virtual event!

Of course, with Anniversary coming up, we need your recommendations for baronial awards. Information on Altavia’s awards and our recommendation form can be found at: https://altavia.sca-caid.org/awards/. While we haven’t been able to meet in person for over a year, there are still plenty of people doing plenty of award-worthy things out there so get your recs in today!

Another online event that is coming up soon is the Technical Symposium for the Digital SCA, an event being spearheaded by Her Excellency of Dreibergen. This is now a two-day event on May 1 and 2 and will feature excellent classes on many tech topics such as Zoom, Google Docs, Discord, Facebook, website upkeep, Caid wiki page creation and more taught by Altavians such as Dame Lynnette and Master Laertes, Caidans and friends from throughout the Known World. Class proposals are being accepted through April 16 and a schedule of classes should be available real soon.

Finally, we wanted to tell everyone about a cool project going on in Altavia and thank those that are making it possible. Thanks to the urging of and coordination by Dame Lynnette, we are going to have Altavia populace badge face mask. These would not be possible without THL Edith acquiring the materials, Mistress Cecilia for providing the pattern and for sewing the masks and Lady Sibylla for getting the embroidery pattern of the populace badge digitized and for embroidering the masks. I’m so proud of this team effort and can’t wait to see the finished product. We’re starting with a small number of masks to see how long they take and to gauge interest but hope to be able to make one for everyone in the barony that wants one eventually.

As always, thank you to everyone that has stuck by Altavia through thick and thin, especially this year. We have hugs (for all who want them) penciled in for the very near future.

Until that most excellent day, we remain, as ever…

Yours in Service,

Baron Nikolaos Phaistos

Baroness Briana MacCabe

Happy March, Altavia!

Spring is almost here and with it, new hope for a return to “normal” is on the horizon! We are so happy to see everyone’s vaccination pics and are looking forward to the day when everyone in the barony is able to receive their vaccinations. On the Caidan front, kingdom officers and the COVID committee is hard at work to figure out how we can safely play in person, hopefully as soon as the beginning of June. In the meantime, please be patient and understand that in-person SCA events, including fighter practices, cannot take place until after May 31, 2021, no matter what tier California/Los Angeles might move into before then.

Plans have begun for our online anniversary event on May 8, Commedia dell’Altavia! We have many fun, Italian Renaissance-inspired theatrical events planned for the day on Zoom and some lead-up events the week before on Altavia’s Discord channel. For all the details on the event, see the FB event page or attend an upcoming planning meeting to help us plan more fun and frivolity for the barony and kingdom. We want to thank everyone that attended the first planning meeting for the event. We also want to give shout-outs to Sybilla and Saystine for their great ideas for both lead-up and day-of events for Anniversary and to Battista for once again agreeing to run the ever popular themed scavenger hunt!

For those that are working on largess projects for the barony/shire-themed largesse derby at Coronation, a reminder that some of us are meeting every other Wednesday to work on projects together and get ideas for future projects. At our next get-together on March 17, Her Excellency would really love to come up with a project we can do together as a barony. If you are interested in being a part of this, please join us! Details will be posted on the Altavia FB group and Discord.

Another online event that is coming up soon is the Technical Symposium for the Digital SCA, an event being spearheaded by Her Excellency of Dreibergen. The purpose of this one-day event is to help Caidans and the rest of the Known World take better advantage of tools like Zoom, Facebook, Discord, Google Docs and more. If you have any special knowledge in this area and would like to share it with the SCA, please let Baroness Briana know so I can pass your information on to the organizing committee.

In the coming months, we’ll start working on plans for in-person events. Right now, we are on tap for hosting Queen’s Champion Target Arts in July and we are hoping to be able to host Agincourt Archery and Thrown Weapons and Agincourt Feast in October as well as Yule in December. We’ll be on the lookout for event stewards so let us know if you are interested. We know we sound like a broken record, but hope is coming and with it, a return to in-person events. Things will look different and we don’t know the precise date when the floodgates will open but it is so nice to see that light at the end of the tunnel get brighter and brighter. Both of us are so grateful that you are all still here with us and that we have made it through the last year as we always do, together.

Yours in Service, Always –

Baron Nikolaos Phaistos

Baroness Briana MacCabe

Greetings to all of our wonderful Altavians!

Since we haven’t met yet in 2021, welcome to a shiny new year! We hope that you all had a very happy and healthy holiday season. Before we move on to this new year though, we want to officially thank Meliora and everyone in the barony that helped run a truly wonderful virtual Yule event for Altavia and our friends in Angels. It was an evening full of fun, music, contests and, most importantly, friendship!

To start off the year, there was a January Caid court where we saw the ascension (but not coronation) of our new Majesties, Panza and Katherine and thanked their Graces, Alexander and Tahira, for their tireless service to the kingdom. Speaking of service, our very own Baron Niko was asked to join the Order of the Pelican! He said yes and we can’t want to celebrate his vigil and elevation in the hopefully nearish future.

As we move into the rest of the year, we hope to keep everyone involved and entertained while we look towards the day when we can meet in person again. Later in the meeting we’ll start discussing ideas for Altavia Anniversary. We were one of the first virtual anniversary events out of the gate last year and we know you all have some great ideas for new things to incorporate int this year’s event. In addition to this, we have online activities going on every week including our Monday night hangouts after “Live from Caid!”, the new bi-weekly crafting/largesse hangouts on Wednesday evenings and our monthly Arts & Sciences classes arranged by Lady Allessandra. Also, be on the lookout for a post on Altavia’s FB group from Lady Kungund, current Bard of Altavia, to gauge interest for a new monthly bardic circle!

Speaking of the Arts and Sciences, we want to thank all of the Altavians involved with running and teaching during Fiberuary, especially Dame Lynnette for wrangling all the cats. For those that weren’t aware, Fiberuary is a month-long series of classes taught by both SCA and non-SCA folks on the fiber arts, covering everything from lucet cord to tablet weaving to patterning your own Burgundian gown. Details can found at Fiburary! What a great way to keep the flames of the Arts and Sciences burning in the deep midwinter 😉

As always, we’re so grateful to everyone who is continuing to make time for the SCA during the on-going weirdness. We will continue to keep you updated on all the latest from the kingdom and the BoD on when we can meet in person again. May that time not be distant and, until then, we’ll see you on Facebook and Discord and Zoom and all the other creatively anachronistic mediums we are so lucky to have!

Yours in Service to the Dream,

Baron Nikolaos Phaistos

Baroness Briana MacCabe