Well, Saturday was pretty damned busy anyway. Friday was a usual workday, aside from hauling my behind out to Amherst to grab the kid (which I don’t mind doing at all – we had some nice bonding over college and work gossip and our friends Valentine Wolfe’s new record), with a stop at the Appomatox Court House National Historical Site (again, me and my National Parks…) to walk around, enjoy the site, and *own* the Pokemon gyms for most of the weekend.

Saturday started with me trying to run some errands, which I did, but my farmers’ market connection wasn’t around at the town square (missed you, Jerry!), which was unfortunate, but I’ll live. We then spent most of the rest of the morning at the Celtic Festival, where the entire family except me (Andrew made his performance debut, and looked pretty damned good, if I do say so myself) did the Irish dance thing to an appreciative audience, and I got to chat with a couple of friends I haven’t seen in a while, and also have some pretty good pub-style curry chips from a food truck called the “Frying Scotsman”, enjoy some of the Highland Dance competition (this is not the Irish my folks do, but rather a Scottish form) where one of Mary’s college friends did pretty damned well, and see a bunch of other neat stuff like the British car show and a bunch of Irish Wolfhounds.

After wandering about a little bit, I made my way out a bit before the rest to drag myself and my gear (and a couple of capos because Scott forgot his) down to North Raleigh NC to do a show with The Blibbering Humdingers at HonorCon. Like I’ve said, The Royal Manticoran Navy aren’t necessarily our crowd, but there’s a lot of crossover (partial because HonorCon is local to S&K), and for some reason, the shows we do here, while small, tend to be a little *silly* and a bit unforgettable.

This year was no exception – we played for two solid hours, ran through a good bit of our repertoire, including some new tunes we haven’t actually really recorded yet (but will be on the official full-length release of Fantastic Geeks and Where to Find Them), including the highly-regarded “Elegy for a Nerf Herder” and the first public performance of the still-in-process-of-being-written “Little Lego Loki” (thanks, btw, to Mark and Samantha for the video – they pretty much put up the whole show if you care to go digging). I haven’t actually listened to all the recordings yet to see how it carries on phone videos, but I wanted to send a hearthfelt thanks/shout-out to Perry(? – apologies if I got the name wrong) our soundperson, who made us sound awesome, which is sometimes a real challenge in a hotel ballroom/convention space!

Other little notes to make; first, I find it kind of awesome that David Weber, the author whose books this whole event and Fan Club (The aforementioned Royal Manticoran Navy) are dedicated to, gleefully dresses up in the official uniform of the organization when participating in these things, and that at the host hotel bar, I had a very good bottle of Foothills Brewing Company’s People’s Porter, which was provided in response to my order of “whatever’s darkest and most local”, which I find is a pretty good way to order a beer in most places where I’m not particularly familiar with the brewing landscape.

Having energy after the show, I decided that rather than crash at S&K’s place, I’d just drive home (it’s only about two hours, even in the rain…) and sleep in my own bed, which would let me not rush so much early on to get to the scheduled Sunday performance at the Celtic Festival, which ended up getting cancelled due to rain (oh well), so I made meatloaf at the college kid’s request (apparently the dining hall can’t do meatloaf right), and watched the beginning third of Stranger Things series 2, which is awesome, then crashed early as I usually do on Sunday evenings while I mentally prepare for dealing with the frustrations of working a job I’m kind of down on right now, while my lovely spouse, who didn’t do nearly as much driving as I did over the course of the weekend, took the kid back to college.

So yeah, busy. Next weekend looks quieter – I think I’m supposed to run a D&D session at some point, and we’re working out logisitics of maybe going to see The Long Losts, who are scheduled to play a venue in town, and maybe, just maybe, get out to see Thor: Ragnarok, though there are some promises made that might need to be kept first. Oh well.