I enjoyed the weekend. It began Friday afternoon with Hallie’s violin performance in the Conn variety show. Our girl stood in front of half the school and absolutely nailed her piece. Kelly and I are constantly amazed that the complete confidence our kids have for performing in front of a crowd. She had not one whit of stage fright and played beautifully.
My parents came over to see the performance and Kelly’s parents came down for that and to stay the weekend. We spent Friday evening at Music on the Porch and were ready for bed around 10.
Saturday morning, I cooked pancakes for the family. Then we went to the NC Museum of History to check out a toys exhibit. It was fun looking through the exhibits, many of which I hadn’t seen before.
The plan after that was to head to the pool, but college baseball was on TV and the air conditioning (and couch) felt so good. After watching a game, Kelly’s parents took the kids to dinner at Piebird while Kelly and I got ready to join our friends the Sawatskis for dinner and the Decemberists concert downtown.
We chose the Remedy Diner for dinner and it turned out to be a poor choice. We’ve had great experiences there in the past but for some reason the service Saturday was horrible. We went an hour and a half before we got any food, the explanation was they were “slammed for some reason.” The beer was good, though, and we got our second round of drinks comped. I think it was an anomaly but it definitely affected our plans.
By the time we were out of Remedy the skies were turning dark and rain was spitting. We watched the storm clouds to the south of the city from our vantage point on the fourth floor of the parking deck, making note that the concertgoers below us were being turned away if they thought to take umbrellas inside the venue. Finally deciding that if the skies were going to “open up” on us they already would’ve, we ventured down to our seats.
The show was wet but fun. The Decemberists were excellent. Almost too good, actually. They should drink more before going onstage or something, because their playing seemed note-for-note perfect and lacked some spontaneity. Of course, it was the first time I’d really listened to them so I could be off the mark here. The crowd certainly was enthusiastic: lesser bands playing in the rain would’ve driven far more people off. We left at the first encore, missing the lead singer’s later antics with the crowd.
Sunday we said goodbye to Kelly’s parents. After breakfast, I finally got around to fixing our ailing Roomba again. It was doing the “wiggle walk” again because my previous fix had come undone. This time I soldered the wires together so they wouldn’t come apart again and the robot vacuum was good as new again. Oh, and I filmed the whole procedure to make into a YouTube clip later in my Copious Free Time.
Kelly took the kids to the pool and a music performance downtown and I stayed at home to tackle some long-neglected projects at home. I spent two hours putting in a new outlet on the back porch. With that done, I found more baseball to watch and got caught up in the Florida State – Texas A&M game. I turned it off when the Noles were up 16 runs to 6. This morning I saw the final score was 23 to 9. Wow!
Oh, and I also found time this weekend to fix my Rivendell home radio station. I’d been running the software through an ssh-tunneled X session which meant that whenever my laptop wasn’t connected to the server the songs weren’t playing. I needed something that would let me start graphic apps and disconnect, so I configured NXserver on my Rivendell box and launched the software there with icewm as the window manager. I haven’t got it all figured out yet but it’s working the way I want it and I can now leave it unattended.
Pretty fun, productive weekend in all.