Not feeling particularly profound today, but I thought since I was getting back into the routine everywhere else, I might as well do it here by posting something.

The routine was disrupted last week, as I was off for a week. I needed some time, and some things needed done. Didn’t get quite as much as I’d like done, which is pretty much always the case, but we’re in the midst of a physical transition in the house (replacing some furniture, moving some rooms, reducing some clutter), and the process needed to move along.

It wasn’t all work, of course. I spent a nice-ish day at Busch Gardens (the “-ish” stands for HOT), and on Thursday, @fairiemom and I spent the evening at Maymont Park in Richmond relaxing in the shade of a big tree and enjoying an outdoor show by The Indigo Girls, who I* hadn’t seen live since our honeymoon fourteen years ago, and given that this show fell right around anniversary time, it was nice full-circle sort of thing. We first saw the ‘Girls early in our dating phase, when a bunch of us caught a show in ’93 or so at our crosstown rival college – they’ve been kind of a constant in the soundtrack of our relationship.

Like a lot of things that have been a going concern since the mid-eighties, the band took a little while to find the groove, but things started sounding really great a few songs in, and went on for the rest of the evening. The band’s supporting a new record, which is quite good, but much of the show was a “greatest hits” sort of package, and enjoyable all around. All the big tunes, plus a couple of interesting side trips into the semi-obscure (they did a great version of “Kid Fears”, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen live with the 3rd harmony part). But then, I’ve only seen them thrice, rather than 75 times like the nice woman we met in line.

Here are a couple of grainy, blurry cell phone pictures:

The real surprise of the evening was The Shadowboxers, a band from Atlanta who played a great opening set, then stuck around and sat in as the Indigo Girls backing band the rest of the evening, providing a full sound (and the Michael Stipe part on the aforementioned “Kid Fears”). These guys are infectious performers, and won the crowd over handily. They’re currently in the process of putting together their first full-length record, which is going to be really great, if their performance and the demo EP they were selling are any indication. If I were to classify them, they’re equal parts folk, country, soul, white boy R&B, and rock and roll; it’s a nice combination. Lots of great instrumental skill, a great rhythm section, and three lead vocalists creating some really nice harmonies. They’re also kind of pretty in a boy-band sort of way – kind of like if Timberlake decided he wanted to join up with Robbie Robertson, or if Rascall Flats had more talent and dialed down the corn-pone twang.

In any case, I really enjoyed them, the show, and the company.

Those are really the highlights; I’m not going to go into the work stress and such that nobody wants to really hear about.

I do have a couple of other things that might be worth sharing, though, so take a look at the following random links and observations!

♦- If you like good independent music at a reasonable price that supports charity and the artists who created the music, I suppose I should point you at The Humble Music Bundle, which you can get for the next not-quite ten days for the price you set (five records, six if you pay more than the current average price, which as I type this is $8.26). Tunes from excellent artists like Jonathan Coulton and They Might Be Giants! Go forth, and download them!

♦- The other evening I watched the recent remake of the film Fright Night. Among other fun actors, it stars David Tennant as Peter Vincent, stage magician and vampire expert. The film worked well, and is a lot of fun. I thought it worked equally well, and was more fun if I simply assumed that Peter Vincent was actually the Doctor incognito sometime between series 4 and the specials year. The character went on a bit of a bender off-screen there; I could totally see him spending a few years as a tattooed and eyelinered stage magician drinking hard and swearing up a storm, with the TARDIS masquerading as the panic room in his apartment.

♦- Tangentially related, actress Mary Tamm passed away over the weekend. She was the first and best Time Lady Romana(dvoratrelundar), and lots of fun during the “Key to Time” season with Tom Baker. Want 90 minutes of fun? Go spin up The Pirate Planet on Netflix Instant and see what the world is now, sadly, missing.

♦- Fred Clark at slacktivist put up a great post about the Evangelical response to liberal boycotting of Chick-Fil-A; which gets to the heart of the matter about how certain there really are two types of people in the world who fundamentally don’t understand each other. Insightful analysis as always.

♦- …finally, over the weekend, a fellow named Joe Peacock posted a poorly thought out piece on CNN about how geek culture is being overrun by pretty girl cosplayers who aren’t really geeks, and how this is a bad thing. Both John Scalzi and Amanda Marcotte weigh in from the geek and feminist perspectives, respectively, each offering a glorious takedown of the whole manufactured question of “who gets to be a geek?” The answer, of course, is “anybody who wants to be.”

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*She saw them as recently as three years ago when we bought tickets to a show that got postponed, and our babysitting arrangements for the rescheduled date fell through. She went with the eldest, I stayed at home with the youngsters..