‘Twas a long weekend, but it was a good one.

As detailed previously, I had a pretty full weekend booked, beginning with a trip down to NC on Friday for the gig at HonorCon. Traffic, thanks to construction, accidents, and certain late-model Dodge Chargers and Subaru WRX STIs driving like assholes down I-85 (you know who you are), my trip took me a little longer than expected, but because I’m a responsible adult, I’d left myself plenty of room for error.

Anyway, I got to Humdinger Central with enough time to catch up, run through a couple of new-ish songs (including the really great “Son of the Sea” by Scott’s SCA friend Ken Theriot, which Scott and I have both been singing and humming involuntarily since Friday afternoon) and wrangle our gear for the evening’s activities.

The gig itself? A total blast, for, I believe, everyone concerned. We played the “Main Stage” at the North Raleigh Hilton, on a real temporary stage, for, on average, thirty people (which I guess isn’t bad for a con that tops out at an attendance of around 300), but those thirty people were the *right* thirty people, who were really into things, singing along (which is cool, since a bunch of them had never seen us before), and laughing in all the right places. they were having fun, and were a great audience for giving back to the performers, which made us give even more, creating a positive feedback loop of fun and merriment. Also, thanks to a little bit of alcohol and the fact that there were no kids in the audience, we may have gotten a little naughtier than usual (I kind of hope some video surfaces eventually…), though it was all in good fun, nobody seemed to mind our playing a bit later than scheduled, and seemed somehow appropriate given the rampant rumor that Republican VP candidate Mike Pence was staying in the hotel that night after his event down the road in Smithfield. I don’t know if it was a true rumor, but we like to think it was (given our naughty liberal selves and the military sci-fi con attendees who trend libertarian).

I spent the night in the Humdinger guest room, then hopped on the road early to get back home to drop a few things at home and spend a little while visiting the VA Comicon over at RIR, which I haven’t been to in a while. I caught up with a few friends, such as Dan Nokes and Chris Otto, picked up a great little “storybook for adults” called “Put Your F**king Phone Away”, by and generally took in the ambience of the whole geek gathering. They always get some pretty great costuming at this thing, and I kind of wish more of these folks would show up at the more local sci-fi cons (Marscon, Ravencon) because I think they’d really get a kick out of them, and would definitely bring something to the table.

After that, since I was more than half-way to Ashland anyway, I took a swing by Center of the Universe brewing Company for the annual release of El Duderino White Russian Milk Stout, one of my favorite seasonal brews in a town full of amazing brews, so why wouldn’t I grab a couple of bombers (and a growler of Pocahoptas because I was already there and had the empty vessel in the car)?

With that, my day was mostly done, other than to drive home and see the teenagers off to Halloween parties, and have a “Movie Marathon” with the youngest, which meant popping some popcorn, and falling asleep on the couch 20 minutes into Guardians of the Galaxy.

Sunday was pretty chill, overall. The eldest was off visiting an out-of-state friend who was in town, and the other two kids were running around the neighborhood with friends catching Pokemon, and I was mostly sitting on the couch with a cat watching Flash Gordon and various and sundry other things on the TV while getting up occasionally to do some laundry.

As for the coming week? I dunno. I’m doing another short one (because of use or lose leave), though the week at work looks pretty standard. Friday we’re going to work on getting out to see Doctor Strange because of course we are, have you been reading this damned blog for the last decade(?), and who knows what else. Also, I hear tell that we might be resurrecting the Jenny Hendricks Experience acoustic combo, so I might go meet with that crew to run some songs.

Anyway. That’s all from here, because honestly, it’s probably enough.

Except for this: I evolved this Pokemon this weekend; this design has to have been intentional, right?

Gotta be.