Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

*whew* Managed to get a ride lined up for tomorrow (I was hoping to ride with somebody already heading that way; instead, a friend is going way out of her way to do me a favour). I'm not going to get to hang out much, so if you're hoping to find me to say hello, you'd better come to our set ( 16:00 on the Honeysuckle stage)

I spent way too long thumbing text messages, waiting for email, making phone calls (and noticing how few of the folks in my cell phone's memory are in Baltimore), and worked the mouse a bit longer than I should have in between bits of the ride search, for something that I got a bunch of ideas for that are a bit beyond my drawing skills. So my hands are a bit tired. But I feel like I accomplished a bit today, at least.

A reminder: The Maryland Faerie Festival is this weekend at the Patuxent 4H Center in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Three Left Feet will be performing there on Saturday (5:00 PM on the Honeysuckle Stage). I posted about this in more detail last week, but the quickest way to get all the information you want is via the festival's web site.

And, unsurprisingly, I'm looking for a ride -- I've got half a solution, sorta, so a ride from either Baltimore or College Park will be useful. I'll be carrying the double bass.

Posting this later than I meant to again, but with enough lead time to be useful, I hope -- I've got gigs coming up the next two weekends at two cool events:

(I'm still looking for a ride to the Greenman Festival from Baltimore, by the way. Just two guitars for that one, no recorders or double bass.)

And a bit of advance warning for gigs farther in the future:

Not sleeping well lately; mostly leg issues.

Dreamt I was some sort of stage manager / entertainment coordinator or something for a large event where Dept. of Fath Homeland Security decided that musicians were suspicious because they carried too much stuff and some of it was electronics, so they made all the musicians park farther away and lug everything in by hand through inspection checkpoints, so all the musicians / engineers / roadies were late and pissed off and I had to try to calm them down and get everything back on schedule. (Dunno whether this was related to having read about a bomb squad blowing up a £1000 bat detector that was part of an environmental impact study or something, just before falling back asleep the second time.)

That dream somehow managed to seque into one about playing with 3LF at a small outdoor festival (smaller than the Maryland Faerie Festival), discussing nuances of dances and their corresponding music afterward with members of the audience while loading gear into a car that was a cross between a 1970s Corvette (C3), a 1984 Corvette (C4), and ... whatever year of Thunderbird was really tiny and had the funny, curved back seat, but the dream car was much more Corvette than anything else despite having a rear seat) ... and, on waking reflection, apparently a TARDIS -- I was fitting stage risers into it at some point. We wound up trying to determine the year of a particular dance and someone with a wireless 'net connection Googled the choreographer and found out he'd died young in 1920, allowing us to determine that the dance was probably from between 1910 and 1920 (for readers not familiar with 3LF, that's centuries late for most of our repertoire). It seemed as though we were trying to talk about the Maltese Bransle, but remembering some of the moves the dancers demonstrated now that I'm awake, it was actually a cross between Karabushka and The Electric Slide with just a smidgen of Maltese left in it. (Actually a rather pretty dance, especially since Emma, whom haven't seen in ages in real life, was there in her uber-voluminous ethnic dress with a skirt that comes out to about twice as much fabric as a full-circle skirt; it moved really dramatically for the steps I dreamt about.)

I think that noticing the incongruity of the Electric Slide steps showing up in a 3LF dance was what woke me.

[ETA: when I woke up with a dream in my head that I felt I had to share, I'd completely forgotten that the automagically-posted quote of the day queued up for today was somebody else's dream.]

Okay, now I'm awake and trying to figure out whether I can get to Riversdale in Riverdale (oops, it's "Riverdale Park" now) by noon for a HCB gig (about half the band, low-key, with some ECD tunes as well as our usual repertoire) since my earlier tentative leads on transportation didn't work out.

Event details, that I really meant to post at the start of the week:

Children's Day
Come out and play! Early 19th century amusements include stilts, hoops, marbles, Maypole dancing, and a puppet show. Refreshments and children's delights will be sold.
$1/child, $3/adult; children must be accompanied by adults.

Er ... anybody going thataway from Baltimore with room for me + guitars + woodwinds?

There are powers that can be invoked and wielded, for a price. When the cause is important enough, you pay that price willingly.

Several hours ago, playing at a wedding reception with Three Left Feet, was such a time. The price, you wonder? I'm going to have "Si Beag, Si Mohr" stuck in my brain for the next week. (It's not as though we played it a lot -- just thrice through the melody, that's all -- but with that one it doesn't take much to get it brainstuck if you play it right, as maugorn, who was on melody for that tune, does.)

The good: awakened (by a dream) before the alarm went off. Currently on schedule for going off to the 3LF gig today (departing in about ten minutes).

The less good: That was only four hours of sleep; I hope I'm not already feeling crashy again by the time we start playing.

The "*shrug* what'cha gonna do?": Perrine knows I'm heading out and is being ultrasuperclingy.

In general, weddings are fun gigs for musicians. I don't anticipate an exception today. Taking along some migraine-mitigating tea just in case the thing I'm most worried about happens.

I'm exhausted to the point where it cannot be accurately described without the use of expletives. Here's the really short version of how my day went.

I did not get enough sleep.

Rides wound up working out, some last-minute, others nearly so.

The weather sortakinda cooperated ... -ish ... though not especially comfortably. I did switch from bass to guitar for the third set at MTT because the sky was spitting. The second day of MTT was cancelled due to the weather forecast.

The new dead batteries I put into a camera to replace the old dead batteries ... annoyed me by being dead. (In all fairness, I don't remember how long those unopened blister-packages had been in my camera bag. But it was frustrating.)

In Greenbelt we had a really good audience.

In the very first tune of the first set of the first half of the Greenbelt concert, I broke a string (one of the Elixirs, on the 12-string). At intermission I discovered I had run out of that size.

Partway through the first half of the show, the jump ring on my big pewter cross parted, sending the cross and last year's Pennsic medallion clattering to the floor. I'm counting this as technically being a wardrobe malfunction. :-P (What, me a tease?)

So now I'm back at home, planning to fall asleep shortly. I may describe the day in more detail later. Or not. Good day, but a long day, especially on so little sleep.

The good: I've got a ride to MTT tomorow morning, and as a bonus I get to see a friend I haven't seen in ages.

The bad: Though all I've accomplished today is searching for a ride, looking for a car, a little LJ, and getting ready to go out, I am exhausted nearly to the point of tears. My body hurts; my head hurts. And I didn't manage to coordinate seeing another friend I haven't seen in ages, who is briefly on this coast. :-(

I also didn't make it to the free concert I'd wanted to go to. But although I really did want to go to that, I didn't have my heart set on it -- so that's just an ordinary everyday disappointment rather than a full-blown, missed-opportunity, full-volume "ARGH!" like missing a chance to hang out with aliza250

The neutral: I have not yet sorted out how I'm getting from MTT to the HCB concert tomorrow evening, nor how I'll be getting home from that, but I'm a little less worried about those actually, and there are a couple of tentative possibilities ... I also have no idea how I'll get back to MTT on Sunday, but I also don't know whether the weather is going to allow the second day of MTT to take place -- I think I'm going to keep an eye out for travel options for Sunday but postpone getting all stressified over it until I see what the weather is going to do.

Let's see whether a spot of dinner and a large dose of ibuprofen make me feel less any less like crying. Then I'll try to finish getting garb&gear all lined up and ready for tomorrow. This is probably a night for comfort-food.

Gotta remember to bring a tarp to protect the bass in case the rain comes early or sorting out a ride to Greenbelt comes late.

Tomorrow evening there is a free recorder + gamba + harpsichord concert in Baltimore that it looks like I'll be able to attend (plans are a little vague; the important bit is getting to see aliza250 while she's on this coast, and the concert is one of our options for something to do).

Saturday afternoon, I'm hoping to be performing with Thrir Venstri Foetr / Three Left Feet in Marching Through Time, a multiple-period (spanning a couple thousand years, roughly), multiple-reenactment-group military history showcase at Marietta Mansion in Glen Dale, Maryland ... if I manage to arrange transportation somehow.

(I'll be skipping a recorder workshop that I'd wanted to go to, to play with 3LF instead -- I mention the workshop here because I recall at least one local friend being at least a little interested in it. I'll also be missing a birthday party. ... unless, of course, I fail to find a ride to MTT but a ride to one of these other events suddenly appears.)

Saturday evening, I'm supposed to be performing with The Homespun Ceilidh Band at the Greenbelt Arts Center in Greenbelt, Maryland ... assuming I manage to arrange transportation somehow.

Sunday afternoon, I may be again performing with Thrir Venstri Foetr / Three Left Feet in Marching Through Time, at Marietta Mansion ... if I can arrange transportation.

The following weekend, 3LF is playing at a wedding; the weekend after that, HCB is playing at the Southern Maryland Celtic Festival, I think the weekend after that HCB or a subset thereof is performing at Riversdale, and then a week later is a recorder-club meeting, followed another week later by 3LF performing at the Maryland Faerie Festival. I've no idea yet whether I'm booked for anything during Balticon the next week. It looks like I have a free weekend at the start of June ... I'll post about those other events in more detail; in the meantime, here's the info about this weekend's events.

I hope to see some of you here and there this weekend!

... And, of course, er (*cough*) ah, if any of y'all can help me out with rides hither and yon so that I can actually show up at some/most of these events, please do let me know. I'll be travelling with two guitars, a rifle-case full of woodwinds, and, if possibly, a double bass. I'll be starting out from southwest Baltimore, though with enough advance warning I may be able to arrange to start out from Arlington instead. Thanks. (dglenn@panix.com, 919-649-5862)

And now, the announcement I should have posted yesterday except that I wound up being too busy for LJ:

I've got some political/economic/philosophical thoughts to try to organize, but I feel I should get some "what I've been up to" out of the way first, and try to find time to turn rambling musings into a coherent presentation of ideas later. This entry contains stuff that'll still work if left all rambly, so my words-per-minute will be higher.

So, the long-promised last-weekend weekend-before-last entry (I started writing this last week) ...

Saturday (2006-05-06) was a mix of frustrations and blessings. It started well enough, with silmaril and Breno arriving to give me a ride to the Spoutwood Fairie Festival where Thrir Venstri Foetr was to perform. I was going to be on guitar and recorder instead of double-bass and recorder, so fitting into Breno's car was actually possible. I hadn't eaten breakfast, gotten enough sleep, or been able to find my hat, but I didn't have to stay alert enough to drive. Which, ah, contributed to the first mishap. There's a lot to be said for nifty conversation that passes the time quickly, but its effects one the ability to spot road signs is not among those things. All three of us overlooked our exit and we wound up twenty miles too far north.

Easily enough remedied spatially, but damaging temporally. An 11:50 arrival at the parking lot for a 12:00 set -- not good. (It's a good thing we were already following the advice that maugorn so emphatically suggested at rehearsals afterward, and planning to arrive much earlier than our scheduled start time, so there was that bit of time for something to go wrong and still get there.) So we were walking rather quickly, threading the crowd, when we passed the poor, misguided protesters shouting Christian-inspired (I'll not credit their theology with being consistent enough to warrant the denominational label without a qualifier) slogans and catchphrases over a fence at all the attendees on the path to the front gate. Theology aside, there were flawed assumptions about the festival and the folks attending it, obvious even at the speed with wich we passed them by.

Oh no! Magical creatures! A mix of people who a) believe in magical creatures, b) believe they are magical creatures, c) want to believe in magical creatures, d) like the idea of magical creatures without believing in them, and e) just want to go enjoy music and a day in the sun while considering the magical creatures unimportant stage-decoration! They must all be Pagans! Oh no! Maybe shouting at them will make them abandon their debauched plans to attend a ... very family-oriented event? (I wish I'd been wearing my larger, more obvious cross, when I shouted back at the protesters, to make the error of one of their assumptions more obvious.) Let's take a moment to review, shall we? The Bible is actually quite clear on the appropriateness of magic, and it says the same thing several times in pretty much the same way each time: do not consult the fortune-tellers of the people you just conquered. I think most of us can follow that advice easily enough, whether we attend fun festivals or not, right?

We actually got to the stage, where maugorn and the dancers were waiting for us, by noon according to my watch (which is really my cell phone, which corrects itself to whatever Cingular's network clock says), but opening cases, plugging in, and tuning still meant starting the set five minutes late and not warmed up. I didn't play great the first few tunes, but there was also a problem getting enough signal from my pickup to the board, so I'm not sure anybody but maugorn heard me. The weather was wonderful for physical comfort and visual beauty, but the pleasant cross-stage breeze was stiff enough to stuff the notes right back into the recorders, and the recorder I used most was the bass, which is more susceptible to that effect than smaller ones are. I saw silmaril shielding her recorder from the wind; when I switched from guitar to recorder I sometimes had to turn my back to the rest of the band and the wind still stole some of my notes.

The stage was an especially good one for taking advantage of pre-gathered crowds -- across from the main group of food vendors and downhill from a bunch of canopy-shaded tables. We can usually gather a crowd to us easily enough, but here we had a head start. And they looked like they were enjoying the show.

The second set went better, due largely to not having just rushed in at the last minute. In between, we wandered around the festival a bit, ate yummy food, and found a place to sit and talk. There were a fair number of folks I knew there, to run into.

The three of us didn't hang around after our second set -- I had to save my spoons for the next day, and the other two had evening plans. We did grab a bite at the Paper Moon diner in north Baltimore on the way back. All in all, a good day. A tiring day, but I didn't use up all my energy.

I've been distracted by such things as comparison shopping for a water heater, finding how many plumbers who show up on "Search for _____ in Baltimore" web sites don't actually include Baltimore in their service areas, actually making it to both rehearsals this week, and trying to synchronize the different copies of my web site in preparation for actually moving it, that once again I've neglected to alert folks to upcoming performances. Whoops.

On Saturday, 6 May 2006, Thrir Venstri Foetr (Three Left Feet) will be performing at the Fairie Festival at Spoutwood Farm, in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, a rather large and joyous event. We'll be performing at noon, and again at 4:00 PM [note correction if you're reading this for the second time]. $10 adults, $5 children under 12.

Google found me an NPR "audio postcard" about the festival, from 2002.

(Note that Three Left Feet will also be performing at the Maryland Fairie Festival two weeks later, on Saturday, 20 May 2006. I'll post more info about that next week.)

On Sunday, 7 May 2006, The Homespun Ceilidh Band will be performing (in more of an "ambiance and atmosphere" capacity than a concert) at Children's Day at Riversdale House Museum in Riverdale Park^[1], Maryland, from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. The event is described thus on the mansion's calendar of events page:

Come out and play! Dance 'round the Maypole, roll hoops and walk on stilts at Riversdale's first annual Children's Day Festival. Enjoy early 19th century amusements such as graces, marbles and corn husk doll making on the beautifully landscaped grounds. Performances by Horn's Punch & Judy Show run throughout the afternoon. Learn to juggle, go on a scavenger hunt and get a prize, and dress up in children's period costumes. Meet some wild animals under the supervision of Park Rangers, and enjoy the music of John Ward's "Homespun Ceilidh Band". Refreshments and children's delights will be sold. Admission at the gate: $1 children, $2 seniors, $3 adults, includes entrance to the mansion.

(The Homespun Ceilidh Band is also performing the following weekend, at the Green Man Festival in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Saturday, 13 May 2006. I'll post more info about that soon.)

[1] For far-flung friends who find that name familiar but not quite right: yes, Riverdale Park is the town formerly known simply as Riverdale (the town that outlawed trick-or-treat). Apparently they wanted to sound more high-falutin', but I think it just makes it sound cheesey. And for everyone else: yes, the mansion uh, "house museum" has an 's' in its name while the city named for it does not. That wasn't a typo.

I'm waaaay behind ... on LJ reading/commenting/posting, and on pretty much everything else. Web site updates that I really wanted to get done this week are not yet finished. But I did make it to both rehearsals this week -- that's where most of my spoons went -- which is a positive sign fibromyalgia-wise, as long as I don't screw up my body this weekend. The last week that I made it to both rehearsals was before Pennsic. At this point I'm far enough behind on LJ that I'm not going to catch up completely unless someone designs a more efficient interface for reading old entries quickly. (And I don't mean download speeds, I mean a magical UI. Okay, I don't actually know that what I want is magic; it may be technofeasible, but I haven't designed it yet and don't know whether it's beyond my human-factors-engineering skills to pull off. Someone point me to relevant literature accessible to someone who doesn't already have a MS or PhD in the relevant fields?)

Anyhow, on to what I should have posted days ago:

Tomorrow, Saturday, 8 October I will be performing with The Homespun Ceilidh Band in Crownsville, MD, at the Anne Arundel Scottish Festival & Highland Games. The event starts at 10:00, and we'll be performing a few times during the day. The performance schedule will be worked out on site with the other acts that'll be on the same stage, so I can't tell you specific times, but we usually play our first set there early. We will have copies of our second CD, Home, for sale. The stage is in a huge covered area, so brave the rain and come on out.

Sunday, 9 October I will be playing with Thrir Venstri Foetr (Three Left Feet) in Glen Dale, MD, at the Medieval Faire At Marietta House (the group will also be at the Medieval Faire on Saturday, but obviously I will only be there on Sunday), performing at 12:30 and 14:30 (the event runs 11:00 to 16:00).

Come on out, dance, say hello.

Who is in charge of traffic? Is it Asphaltia, or does she only rule parking lots? Whoever it is, I seem to have ticked them off ... not to the same degree as Odysseus did Poseidon, fortunately, but in a similar vein. Traffic was nasty and slow and annoying and in my way every direction I went today. All the more so when I opted to use a different route than the one that had been ickissimo earlier so as to improve my odds. I wound up stuck in traffic in Georgetown, taking an exit I didn't want because the warning that my lane was turn-only wasn't posted early enough for me to do anything about it, tangled up in the not-a-thru-street portion of the underworld (including many-blocks-long decoys on which perhaps the lack of proper cross streets should have been a clue, but if so I failed to grasp it). I'm glad I'd allowed more time than the trip out should have taken because I arrived half an hour later than I was supposed to be there but still half an hour before we went on stage.

The gig went well despite how wobbly I felt -- having spent most of my spoons just getting there. Not our most enthusiastic audience, but they stuck around and seemed to enjoy us and some came up afterwards to say nice things and buy CDs. (This was a street fair in SE DC.) By the way, as of today the official (as opposed to "pre-release") copies of the second CD, Home, are available. Shrink-wrapped and everything. (Remember that the pre-release copies some of you already bought will be collector's items because of the mistake in the track list on the back!) It's not up on our web site (nor on CD Baby) yet, but will be very soon.

I decided to head back to anniemal's by going around the city instead of through. I had trouble getting out of DC to the east (including having to detour around a different street fair), then ran into major Beltway upfuckedness in PG County, which WTOP told me extended well into Montgomery County, so I decided to strike out cross-county on lesser streets ... some of which turned out to be similarly suckitude-stricken. Fine, that path took me near a store I seldom get to, so I figured I'd take a break and pick up an obscure beverage I like ("soo jeong gwa", or sweet cinnamon punch). And I got stuck in a cash register situation that looked eerily similar to the outer loop of the Beltway a little earlier.

Then I wrestled with an air hose that didn't really want to fit the valve stem of my tire, a balky pressure guage, and -- you guessed it -- more ooky traffic, though fortunately moving a lot faster this time if still crowded and annoying and filled with people who did not receive my telepathic broadcasts telling them to please move out of the way and let me have the open chunk of pavement ahead of their formation because I needed to blow off steam by opening up the throttle a bit. (Why oh why is "can read Glenn's mind" still not a part of the Maryland driving test?)

I am in Arlington. I am extremely tired. I am more than a little cranky. And various parts of me hurt rather a lot.

Other than playing a gig, the good parts of today were: that the band after us was also good, and had a surprisingly full, rich sound for a duo (drummer/singer, and guitarist); and that caught (by accident) part of a Neil Gaiman interview and I got to listen to part of "Hot Jazz Saturday Night" in the car, a show I pretty much never manage to catch. Teagarden, Goodman, etc. ... a couple of catchy songs from the 1920s, a decade I'm not all that familiar with ... yay [whatIcall]real jazz. (Actually, what I consider "real jazz" covers a fair bit of ground, it just omits "lite jazz", "cool jazz", "lukewarm jazz" ...)

3LF has a gig tomorrow in PA. It's in my PDA with a question mark and no time, so I hope that means I'm not signed up for it (I'm guessing that the date (today versus tomorrow) was decided while I was missing practices) because I'm a wreck right now and I've not been to rehearsal since just after Pennsic. Managing Hastings the day after Anne Arundel (next weekend) is going to be hard enough, and that's a lot closer. Apparently anniemal and syntonic_comma have plans to go to the Maryland Renaissance Festival tomorrow, and I'm invited -- I'd really like to go, but I do not expect to be in any shape to do so by morning, nor do I expect to be able to stay active long enough tomorrow to make a trip out there worthwhile (and I'd hate to slow down folks who are properly up to enjoying the festival right).

Here's hoping I recover enough by Tuesday to get to both rehearsals this week. Any with any luck, maybe manage to see Serenity before I lose track of who posted journal entries with spoiler-cuts lately that I want to go back and read after I see it. fidhle said there's a line that he thinks I'm going to find especially wonderful, but he doesn't want to spoil it for me.

And here's hoping that sometime soon I have the energy to sit down and think out the entries I've been meaning to write that are something other than "here's how my day went" and "here's how I'm feeling". Sheesh.

If only this cinnamon punch came in something other than these teeny tiny cans (238 ml) ...

Just a quick reminder: Tomorrow, 2:00 PM, at the Town Green Park in Bowie, it's The Homespun Ceilidh Band, and at the MS Fantasy Ball in the evening, in Glen Burnie, it's Three Left Feet. Hope to see some of y'all!

Upcoming performances (copied/pasted from a couple different places):

This coming Saturday at 2:00 PM, I'll be performing with The Homespun Ceilidh Band in a free concert ( at the Town Green Park in Bowie, Maryland (Old Bowie) )

A few hours later that same day, I'll be performing with Thrir Venstri Foetr (Three Left Feet) at the MS Fantasy Ball in ( Glen Burnie, Maryland )

And then a few weeks later, on Saturday, 23 July, I'll be playing with The Homespun Ceilidh Band again at the Virginia Scottish Games in ( Alexandria, Virginia )