On Saturday, I wandered down to a park and discovered there was a Polish cultural festival going on!


I had an ice cream, listened to some singing, watched some dancing, admired some traditional dress, wandered around the stalls. Did a definite double-take when I heard Hatsune Miku's version of the Finnish song 'Ievan Polkka', although I think that might have been someone playing music on their phone, rather than an official song choice of the Polish heritage festival.


I wasn't certain of the cultural relevance of Sonic the Hedgehog, but, hey, always happy to see him.

It felt impolite to photograph Sonic without buying something from the stall, so, in honour of the fact that I've been revisiting the Dragonriders of Pern series, I picked up a flexible little 3D-printed dragon!




Top: my dragon pictured with one of my paintings (my first painting, actually: the one that got me into painting!), the chunk of rose quartz I picked up when I visited the Science Museum with necrophilia, and the beautiful cross-stitch of James Sunderland that Tem gave me for Christmas.

Bottom: my dragon pictured with our cat Zuko, who does not understand why he's not allowed to bite it.

I've named my dragon Zephyrith, after the dragon I rode in an ILLEGAL PERN ROLEPLAYING GUILD on Neopets when I was a kid. (Anne McCaffrey didn't approve of fanfiction or roleplaying at the time, although she later relaxed her stance, so there was an illegal underground Pern roleplaying scene for a while.)

I brought Zephyrith home and showed her to my housemates, and they all wanted dragons of their own! So I quickly hurried back to the festival and bought three more dragons. We're a houseful of dragonriders now. Wait, does that make us a Weyr? We're a Weyr.