Not to worry- I'm a pretty patient guy (hey, work for a government agency- I'm used to things taking awhile...
). As for my alias- I stole the last name off my wife Karin- it just sounded a lot better than mine which is Lid (I know- it's an Americanization of something Norwegian). It does have a distinct ring...My wife quite adamently claims that the McKechnie name is Scots and NOT Irish
. Well, who knows which side of the Irish Sea the McKechnies landed on but I can tell you that the McKechnie tartan is the UGLIEST tartan ever done- lime green, pale yellow, and something else. Kind of like something one of my cats coughs up on occassion!
A pard of mine (one who I'm working on for NCOWS) and I used to do a cheesy merchant impression of "McKechnie & Whitman" that we'd occassionally do at Ft. Tejon (we actually made it on Huell Howser's California's Gold) and we used to print up bogus gold stock certificates and give them out to the visitors and other reenactors. The funny thing was for some time afterwards I'd have reenactors come up to me wanting to "talk about the gold strike on the upper Kern River that never materialized"...all in the spirit of fun. For awhile there the name McKechnie was spread far and wide...
As we say, we're sutlers, we're here to help....
Angus McKechnie