excuses, excuses

First I went on vacation, and then I spent a week wallowing in self-pity about having to actually work for a living. And in the in-between times I was walking the dog and playing the bass and hiking and going to a fabulous local music festival and seeing an actual movie... in a theater and everything!

So, that's where I've been. Worry no more. I'm still here. Just distracted.

There's no way to adequately describe the wonderfulness of my vacation, so here are just some snippets from the past couple weeks.

There was the night of the staff concert that lasted forever and ever, after which most people stumbled out toward their dorm beds (or, just as likely, their very-late-night jam session of choice), and Jean Ritchie, living legend of traditional Appalachian ballad singing, no spring chicken herself, came into the theater lobby where I was working in the CD booth and sat down to sing shape note hymns with a very lucky few bystanders. That's my dear friend Meredith on the right, and my new friend Matt (also my neighbor - we live in the same town in southeastern Vermont so of course we had to go to western North Carolina to meet) on the left. Milt, the lovely music prof who taught my only-slightly-torturous-in-a-vacation-sort-of-way 9am music theory class, is the guy just over her left shoulder. And that's Jean's son peering down from above. There's a photo on someone else's camera of me sitting next to Matt, singing with Jean. Talk about once-in-a-lifetime magical moments.

There was also the utter hilarity of the entire week. I haven't laughed that hard, that often in a long time. Working in the CD booth was so fun that, I kid you not, I spent a lot of my free time there when I didn't have to be working. That's messed up. Not only did I get a whole lot of musical knowledge and some fabulous new friends out of it, but it also gave birth to - you heard it here first - a new band. We found ourselves singing a couple songs in harmony, and the good acoustics of the theater lobby can't take all the credit for how great we sounded together. Here are my two lovely new bandmates, and, of course, the leftover bourbon:

Of course, forming a new band with three people who live in North Carolina, Ohio and Vermont presents some logistical challenges, but we have strong faith in the power of technology, road trips to magical music festivals that A Certain Someone is going to be given absolutely no choice about going to, and the rest of that bourbon to make us utterly ready to take the show on the road. When we're all done with college and grad school and day jobs, that is. (I have a hunch I'll be ready to give up the day job before they're through with those other things.)

And speaking of music festivals, unassuming little Greenfield, Massachusetts has a very impressive thing going on, as I found out this past weekend. Apparently the Green River Festival has been happening for 22 years now, and growing every year. It's a great, chill, community-oriented festival that just happens to have people like Lucinda Williams and Mavis Staples and Los Straightjackets playing. I baked in the heat and humidity on Saturday and had a nasty dehydration headache by the time Lucinda Williams came on in the evening (and that's after 2 liters of water! that I totally just sweated out). But they did a good job on both musical entertainment (did I mention Cajun music? GOOD Cajun music!) and meteorological effects, especially since we only had to suffer a few minutes of rain to get this very intense rainbow.

Another thing I did on Saturday was see an apartment that I can but shouldn't decide to afford, where I could live alone and have space for all my stuff and all the guests and potlucks and houseplants (light! the apartment actually gets daylight! I'm not sure I remember what that's like) I could hope for. I was supposed to live this coming year with a sweet housemate in a sweet house while the house's owner moved temporarily to Mexico, but the latter fell through and I may give up on the former and just take the plunge into the living-alone scenario I've wanted to try since... well, since I first started living in apartments at all. Is this the time? I know I want it, but I've still needed to spend the last couple days asking everyone to convince me I'm not crazy.

Feel free to add your two cents on that question in the comments. Housing-related or not.