Wednesday: after we got done with work, we considered going to the gym, but it started to rain. We decided to skip it this time. Julie made a variation on the spaghetti squash with cheese recipe she's done in the past. She said she messed something up about it, but I couldn't tell. While we ate, we watched more Enterprise; we only have five episodes left after tonight's session. When Julie went to bed, I was going to have a bowl of cereal while doing stuff in Hearthstone and UmaMusume, but she came into the office to show me a new problem with our residence: the upstairs apartment developed a leak over our bedroom, and one of the drop ceiling tiles turned into mush and crashed by the foot of the bed. We took some photos and sent them to the landlord.
Tuesday: I had asked for the day off thinking that we were going to go to a concert today, but Julie said she'd been feeling burned out on how many concerts we've done this month, so instead, I just picked up some cat treats and Taco Bell for lunch. This gave me plenty of time to prepare the litter, the trash, and the recycling, which was for the best, since we had plans in the evening: it was time for the monthly Latchkey quizzo at POPE. We were surprised to encounter that couple we'd previously met up with at the Cheesecake Factory. They stuck around for the first half of the trivia, but we had an average performance, overall. We ended up one point shy of the tie for second place. (This was the month in which Latchkey apparently had some notoriety thanks to various politicians stopping in to buy music, due to the debate and ongoing campaigning in the city.) Glad to report that I'm finally enjoying my monthly POPE burger: the trick is to cut slices off with the knife, then use the toothpick to convey the bites to my mouth. Anyway, once the competition ended, we paid and returned home, where I found myself quickly overcome with sleepiness. I treated the cats and went to bed just after 11 PM.
Sunday: one of the other units was having water problems, so we had a whirlwind clean-up to accommodate a plumber's visit to the basement. My work shift went alright. After I finished, I made that veggie pasta with feta for dinner, and we continued watching Derry Girls. The cats seem a bit out-of-sorts with all the havoc in the apartment, but things should settle down by tomorrow. I spent most of my evening catching up on podcasts—i.e. Castle Super Beast and Third Strongest Podcast, though I think one episode I accessed was a Hero's Path update, actually. I also read through the annotated source for Ryan's game, The Curse of the Garden Isle.
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Friday: today was the Walnut Valley Music Festival. I would later write it up for SB as follows:
Yesterday my friend Ryan invited me to the Walnut Valley Music Festival.
(this feels like the beginning of a twine game)
(I may only be saying that because I'm high rn)
I had no real familiarity with bluegrass music, but I was up for a big outdoor activity where my natural zone of personal space and my willingness to mask myself continuously meant I could look at people without any expectation to interact with them.
The town where this happens, Winfield, is an hour's drive to the south, so he offered to drive us down. We haven't spent time together on an activity like this before. For 20 years, we've only gotten together to play the latest Smash Bros., go swimming, or play the occasional game of pub trivia—before yesterday, I couldn't even tell you what kind of music he liked. Perhaps that's why it felt strange whenever he'd suggest an activity or course of action: these were dimensions about himself he seemed almost embarrassed to introduce after all this time.
He'd been coming to this festival for about 11 years, so I let him set the agenda of acts he wanted to see and areas he wanted to look through. We started with a tour of the four official stages in the fairgrounds proper, only the first of which had both amplified sound systems and a combination of spot and stage lighting. Opposite the stages were tents set up as merchandise booths, while the stages were flanked by cordoned performer queues, food stalls, and the occasional first aid station. While making the rounds, we saw Damn Tall Buildings (Ryan felt that one of the performers outclassed the other two; I just thought they sounded better when they were playing in concert rather than during solos or otherwise featuring one particular player's performance) and Mile Twelve (Ryan's verdict: "Fun. Progressive." and "That Rachel Baiman can really sing. I should see what else she's performed.").
We caught a bit of the first round of the fiddle competition, hearing contestants 15, 16, and 17, who seemed "Good," "Very young and still learning so let's clap a lot," and "Technically flashy but otherwise unmoving." We'd later find out that contestant 15 would win the entire competition.
We took a walk through the separate campgrounds, where additional stages proliferated in various levels of canonicity. We reached stage 5 (the "Off-Broadway" of Walnut Valley) right as a cluster of bands and amateurs crowded the stage to perform their rendition of some pop love song from the 80s whose name I immediately forgot. Tents and campers spilled in every direction, while flags, peace signs, and other assorted icons and signs glowed or caught reflected illumination. Kids rode bicycles with neon lights threaded through the spokes and wrapped around the frame, and golf carts bounced through ruts in the dirt. By the time we reached "Stage 25" we were seeing oddball performances like a woman in her sixties strumming an inaudible guitar while serenading her partner about how much she likes her men big and stupid, the bigger and the stupider, the better.
It was darkening enough that we went back to Ryan's car to grab folding chairs, and we returned to the main stage just in time for Tom Chapin to invite the Gothard Sisters on-stage for one of the most awkward impromptu collaborations I've ever seen. Fortunately, they were quickly replaced by The Steel Wheels, who were extremely talented performers all and easy favorites of the festival. They looked and sounded great, and we decided to cap the night off by catching the end of Pretend Friend's set, whose performance was honestly the most fun of the entire night. Those guys were a blast.
And then today I taught a crash course in digital customer service at work this morning, grabbed lunch with Julie in a park, took naps, and then visited one of our favorite local restaurants for dinner since their new location means we can't just pick up dinner like we used to. And then we took edibles and I watched a few episodes of Preserving Worlds before Julie fell asleep and I started writing this post.
Thursday: printed a new phone list at work today. This time around, Karina left the phone bank, but Zack came back. Jackey left Internet. This list would last us until October 23, 2020, at which time I'd make the next one.
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@jsnlxndrlv on twitter:
23:20 The fibula is totally my theme bone. #FB
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