APR 30

2024

Tuesday: rolled out of bed for my second day of calls with trainees listening. It was trash day, so I sifted the cat litter, while Julie gathered the garbage bags. I finished the leftover cheeseburger soup, and since I need a night to recover before my big push to finish Moondrop Isle over the next 48 hours, we just watched some Ghosts and Poirot. Julie wasn't enjoying "The Mystery of the Blue Train", but I kind of liked how unhinged it was. Might fall asleep on the living room floor on purpose.

2023

Sunday: I'd fallen asleep on the living room floor because the cats were laying on me last night. Julie and I had leftover casserole for lunch, and after a couple of hours of messing around in Final Fantasy XIV's island sanctuary, we got cleaned up to go to the Saint Motel show. It was a bit rainy, so we both wore raincoats, and the plan was to take the bus on 7th street up to South. At the bus stop, the SEPTA app said a bus should arrive in about 10 minutes. 15 wet minutes later, there was no sign of the bus, so we checked again: the app said that the original bus had been canceled, but another bus would arrive in another 10 minutes. Another 15 minutes later, the app said that bus was cancelled. We started the long walk up to 6th street, and in the 20 minutes we walked, at no point did a bus overtake us.

Once we got to South, we stopped into a board game cafe Julie had been to before and played a couple of games of Carcassone. From there, we went and had dinner at Tattooed Mom, and I enjoyed my Philly cheesesteak sandwich, though I think Julie was even more excited about the jalapeno tater tots she ordered. From there, we made it into the venue, and though we were stuck with "standing room only" tickets, we found a spot right in front of the sound guy where we could lean against the balcony supports. I think there were only about three people wearing masks in total, and I was one of them. It was such a dense crowd that, even leaning against Julie and the sound booth wall, I was getting a lot of physical contact from the guy to my left and the girls in front of me. Situations like that always make me leery of the potential for a crowd crush, but that never felt like an imminent danger. It was one hell of a performance, though; they had people vote on the setlist before they came out, so the entire thing was portrayed like an awards show with red envelopes. Despite how packed we were, the band's frontman got the crowd to part and ran to the back of the room and right past us at the show's climax during "My Type".

It was pouring even worse when we got out of the venue. We planned to walk to 12th street to take the bus down from there, but it was encore of the "app says it'll be 10 minutes/oh look that bus is cancelled" routine, so we decided to try the subway instead. It was a nice ten minutes of sitting after being on our feet for so long, but then the subway workers announced that an emergency at the Logan Street station meant that all southbound trains were delayed. Since we had no idea how long that might take, we came back up to Broad and looked for buses. None seemed to be running, so we just walked all the way back home.