As is tradition, consider this the Concarolinas wrap-up post!

As I indicated previously, going into this one, it felt a little weird – there was some drama regarding guests and politics, which, thankfully, never ended up crossing my path during the weekend. Instead, I got to spend some time with dear friends, making music, jokes, sharing stories and updates over a pint or three, and saw some really pretty great music performed (in spite of some weird programming choices for music and performance), and played a couple of good shows myself, and overcame technical difficulties that might have broken lesser men.

The Humdingers had two shows over the course of the weekend; a “happy hour” set near the bar on Friday at 5pm, which went well, and we shared the stage with next-generation Huminger Liam on keyboards for most of the set (at least until the batteries ran out), and featured in the audience pretty much the entire extended family of singer/guitarist/co-bandleader Scott, all in fine Potter regalia(!), and Sunday at 2pm, which was past time a lot of folks have hit the road, but we still had a pretty nice turnout, featured Liam once again, and was saved by my friend DJ (from Dimensional Riffs, the Nefarious Ferrets and elsewhere) when the input jack on my bass crapped out halfway through the set, when he loaned me his Ibanez to finish things out. My lovely wife also livestreamed the whole thing on Facebook, which let a lot of our friends who weren’t there enjoy the show too!

Otherwise, I got to see, as I said, some pretty great music, from usual friends Mikey Mason (who did a couple of shows of music and comedy), Valentine Wolfe (who sounded amazing, and put the best show I’ve ever seen of theirs, and *all* their shows are damned near perfect), the aforementioned Nefarious Ferrets, and Atlanta’s own Nick Edelstein, who I met at Dragoncon a few years ago, and is amazingly talented, generous, and all-around excellent, as a performer and a friend. I also caught most of the a show by Frenchy and the Punk, who impressed the hell out of me, and got to hang out a bit with Neil from Antler Hill, who jammed with us a bit on Sunday in the hallway near our merch table.

…I also got to knock another item off the bucket list by appearing on Mikey’s Beer Powered Time Machine podcast, where we (along with Chris and Tina from the Nerdbliss Podcast) tasted and talked about a few beers, what exactly “filk” is, professional wrestling, and a bunch of other random things, late into the night on Saturday.

Other little highlights included hanging out with Julius the kitten (representing Saving Southern Kitties), conversing with a big plastic penguin, being told I was “buff”, and seeing my friend Scott look way prettier in drag than I might have expected.

On either side of that was driving *a lot*, and taking today (Monday) off to recover from the con (which is a great practice), but I still ended up cleaning the fish tank, doing a bunch of laundry, riding fifteen miles, taking care of the grocery shopping, and teeing up dinner in the crock pot, that I’ll finish off after I finish this.

So, yeah, it was fun. Exactly what I needed after the week I had last week…and as always, I kinda dread going back into the mundane world tomorrow….