Alchemy 2012

Burns are like my holidays. I use them to mark time through the year, and Alchemy is my Christmas. I plan and prepare for weeks and months. I see people I only see once a year. I give and receive intimate bounty. I wouldn’t dream of not including the childrenin the family.

As is common with other culturally significant holidays and rituals, I often go into Alchemy with a lot of pent up expectations. Usually I come out of the event with my expectations met, my un-articulated wishes fulfilled, and bursting with excitement and plans for next year.

For the first time, this year’s Alchemy fell flat for me. I’m certain it had nothing to do with Alchemy, since my social media streams are full of people declaring it the best Alchemy yet. I think I worked too hard this year. Setting up our theme camp took too much out of me the first couple of days, and then little things like people not showing up for their helping shifts really bugged me. I never had much chance to sit down with my favorite people, because they were working pretty hard, too.

There was plenty of positive that I could focus on. We had some amazing people kicking ass helping with the theme camp. I enjoyed Center Camp immensely since it was a great place to hang out with Dylan, chill out, and still have lots of people to interact with (and the music wasn’t annoying this year!) The effigy was neat and it burned wonderfully. I worked a greeter shift that was lots of fun.

Plenty of good stuff happened. For me, it wasn’t enough good stuff to balance the effort I put in. When trying to figure out how that changed over last year, Joshua reminded me that we came out the weekend before last year and did some work on the dome, then we came out Tuesday night and put our own tent up. This year we didn’t start setup until noon on Wednesday, which made for a bit of a break-neck pace.

Enough of that. On to the pictures. I only got daytime pictures, since the nighttime mostly found me asleep with Dylan. These photos do not begin to capture Alchemy; they are pretty random images of the sights that caught my eye one afternoon. Still, they show some of the whimsy, and I’m glad I got a handful of shots.

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