A Perfect Birthday

So much weekend. And time to write about it without anyone looking over my shoulder! Yay forced week's vacation!

First big news -- I am now on Twitter as @TheButternutty and this is my first foray into the Twitterverse. Expect much Punch Brothers stalkings. 

This birthday weekend was in the top three birthday weekends of all time. (I was volunteering for the Obama campaign and was the volunteer coordinator in the campaign office on election day, which was my birthday. That one is in serious competition for Best Birthday Ever. The other was my first time performing at a music/art festival at one of the coolest venues of all time called Pasaquan. Google it.)

We had a lovely drive out, lots of conversation. Lots of career angst, still reeling from being laid off, wondering if it was me personally or just that I was first in line to get cut. It's so frustrating trying to get any career traction starting from the bottom after two decades of staying home with children. But this is about my amazing birthday weekend, not my job angst.

When we arrived at the llama farm, the driveway gate was closed and a tortoise-shell llama (didn't know they came in tortoise-shell) was standing there at the gate, staring at us, looking very judgy. She did not know why we were there and she did not approve. You've never experienced condescension until you've been condescended to by a llama. We had to drive down back down the road to find cell service to call our host to open the gate for us. He apologized and shortly greeted us with the warmth of an old friend. 

His home is a gorgeous rambling farmhouse on 40 hilly acres. The back sides of the house are wrapped with an extensive deck with multiple gazebos (now that's a fun word to say out loud) and a fire pit that he had already set up with kindling and a stack of wood at the ready. Grumpy and I, being old and boring, had already planned ahead for the evening's drinkings. We picked up a few bottles of wine on the way there, thinking that relaxing in the room would be better than drinking in a bar and then attempting to drive the curving mountain roads back to the inn. Turns out it was a good decision as we were then fully prepared for the evening around the fire.

Our co-guests were a pair of 60-something newlyweds that were just adorable. Both had lost previous spouses and finally found post-widowhood happiness in each other. They were interesting, personable, and seemed to enjoy our company, even though I proceeded to get fairly more than tipsy and I don't exactly remember all of the details of the evening. (I asked her the next morning if I'd made an ass of myself and she replied that I was delightful and that even if I had made an ass of myself, she'd never have told me. That's a classy lady.)

We spent Saturday wandering around and exploring the local area. The town of Logan is ridiculously cute with some jaw-dropping architecture on the local churches. After stopping for a coffee (and replenishing the wine supply), we spent the rest of the afternoon driving up and down and around the hairpin curves of the foothills backroads. This extra-long, extra-warm summer -- a frightening indication of global warming -- has finally broken and the fall colors have peaked weeks later than usual, which, despite the frightening global consequences, made for some breathtaking views. Grumpy really wanted to do some hiking but my old-lady knee was protesting and so he had to be happy with a short walk around a cute pond.

We headed back to the room and gussied ourselves up for a nice dinner and an evening with NOAM PIKELNY!!! I was a little nervous about a two-hour, solo banjo show. I honestly wouldn't have traveled so far to see any other banjo player. (I'm not sure I'd have left the house to spend two hours listening to any other solo banjo player.) But, being as I'm seriously stalker level when it comes to the Punch Brothers on YouTube, and I've seem them together live several times, I was betting that he would use his droll humor to break up the banjoing and my bet paid off in a most delightful way. Between bits of pure genius instrumental work, he had me doubled over laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. 

At the end of the show, he announced that he'd be downstairs at the merch table signing things. Oh my wildest hopes! Oh the daydreams I dared joke about *maybe* becoming reality! I sort of shoved my way down to stairs to the merch table as soon as the house lights came up and was first in line with my Universal Favorite tour t-shirt and my program. After what seemed an eternity (maybe five minutes) he descended the stairs all sweaty. I was trembling. The program in my hand was trembling. My heart was pounding. I have never fangirled so hard in my life. I managed to pull myself together enough to tell him that I'd come all the way there to spend my birthday with him and could he please sign my program (although I did buy a t-shirt) because it had the date on it, which is my birthday? Did I mention birthday? After he signed it for me, I looked up at him, putting on my most adoring face and said, in my most earnest voice, "You're like, one of my top five favorite Punch Brothers ever, of all time. Seriously." And he laughed -- like a grunt-snort-chuckle. I MADE NOAM PIKELNY LAUGH!!! I'm framing the program and hanging it in my dining room with the rest of my religious relics. 

After the excitement of Saturday, I thought surely there was nothing Sunday that could even compare, but after breakfast our host let us walk the llamas. Like dogs. On leashes. And I got to walk the condescending tortie. She was so pretty and so soft, and actually quite sweet. Grumpy was assigned the tortie's mother, who was REALLY condescending and judgy. She actually spit at him. More of a "pfft" than an actual spit, but certainly a sign of disapproval. I didn't even try not to laugh out loud. 

We finished out our day with a lovely hike around the gorge at Conckle's Hollow and spent the drive back listening to the Prairie Home Companion podcast of the show we missed the night before -- a perfect benediction to a perfect weekend. 

Good night llamas. Goodnight Noam. Goodnight 42. Good night moon.

Oh Heck Yeah, It's Friday!

First Order of Business:

1.      Parker Milsap

2.      Lillie Mae

3.      John Mellencamp

4.      Dan Auerbach

5.      Valerie June

6.      Feist

7.      Rhiannon Giddens

8.      Devil Makes 3

9.      Justin Townes Earle

10.  John Mayer

11.  Pokey Lafarge

12.  Willie Nelson

13.  Sheryl Crowe

14.  Chris Stapleton

15.  Jeff Tweedy

16.  Ani DiFranco

17.  Shovels and Rope

18.  Adele

19.  Lumineers

20.  Regrettes

For posterity, my Prairie Home Companion list, if you’re playing along at home. It counts as a point if they appear on the show in any capacity, even just sitting in with the band. Although nobody on this list sat in with the band or appeared as featured duet artist last season, because that’s just way too easy. I’m really annoyed that I didn’t make the right call Fiona Apple, who is appearing this week as the featured duet artist. I considered her. She toured with Nickel Creek in the early naughties, but she’s been pretty quiet lately so I didn’t put her on the list.

Last year he stayed pretty consistent with Sarah Jaroz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins. This year he seems to be spreading the featured duet artist love around a bit more. Earlier this season he featured Rachael Price from Lake Street Dive. That episode made me ugly cry repeatedly. Damn you Thile!!! No, seriously, it was actually cathartic and I felt a little less alone in this crazy fucking world. Thile can be really effective at making one feel all of the feels when he sets his brilliant little mind to it.

Some of them will depend on timing. I almost left Chris Stapleton off the list because he’s pretty big and fairly mainstream, but it just happened that he was playing the arena across the street that night and was willing to take the time to appear on the show. I think that John Mayer and Adele would both be down with coming on the show for standard PHC pay scale if timing allows. I don’t think they would divert from a tour though. The show is produced by Minnesota Public Radio and just doesn’t have the budget to make that worth their whiles.

I’m still really tickled about being right on the Auerbach call. I can’t wait to see Thile go all fanboy over the Black Keys guy. He’s totally going to go all fan boy and it’s going to be adorable. He’s totally what Andro would refer to as a Cinnamon Roll. I’m not sure where she got that. I can’t keep up with the things the kids are saying these days, but when I get ahold of what she’s saying I sure do love mangling it just to annoy her. Yes, I’m THAT kind of mom.

Speaking of moms, I had a lovely bit of texting with mine last night. We just started talking again a few weeks ago. We had a bit of a falling out after the election and didn’t speak for a few months. Either enough time has passed to give us some distance from that shit, or she’s maybe starting to see that the current political climate is causing chaos and craziness and it’s out of control and the angry mango was as bad a thing and I’d feared.

We had a post-election conversation that went something like this:

Her: At least he isn’t a criminal. Benghazi and her emails. She’s had people killed.

Me: Yes, mom, yes he is, and a dangerous, narcissistic one at that. And those other two things aren’t actually real things and no she hasn’t.

Her: Well, that’s your opinion.

No! It isn’t my opinion. Whether or not actual events did or did not happen is a matter of fact. An opinion is a stance on whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza (it does). How did this woman raise me to have such acute critical thinking skills when it appears she has none of her own?  Now that we are on speaking terms again, she is carefully avoiding politics and religion. (Which I had been previously avoiding, but she always managed to bring them up and then proceed to call me hateful and intolerant for my views about things like, you know, facts, and whether or not the NYT is a credible news source. It is.)

In the time since we last spoke, she has learned how to insert GIFs into text messages and has become for all intensive purposes (the Word Murderer used that this week and I also spit coffee out of my nose, but more on her later) a texting tween girl. She also uses the tween text abbreviations like 2 and u and b and ur and 4 – like she’s writing lyrics to a Prince song or a DJT Jr. tweet. (Seriously though, he doesn’t know the difference between Maxine Waters and Frederica Wilson and then proceeds to slut shame her over a HAT??? How the fuck is a hat slutty?) And it makes me insane! This is the woman that raised me to be a grammar Nazi (although she said last night that she prefers the term Word Warrior, which I agree is much less fascist) and from whom I inherited my knack for writing and editing.

So, the Word Murderer. Well, this week she’s used the word “understandment” repeatedly, as in “It is to my understandment that…” and she’s referred to the Hawaiian word for hello and goodbye and thank you and welcome and probably a few other things like chicken, tree, papaya, and the color mauve, as “Haloha”.  She did this on Monday like six times in the space of an hour. She’s also been bragging about her IT skills dropping terms like “chat room” and “disc drive”, because those have been relevant at any point in the past ten years, but yeah, I totally believe you’re an expert. And of course continued discussion of the ubiquitous Swifter.

And proof that I’m a Word Warrior and not a grammar Nazi? I haven’t even attempted to correct her.

Thank the fucking goddesses it’s Friday. This week has been about a month long and I’m ready to go home and sit on the porch with Grumpy and Bucky and declare it wine-thirty. 

My Trivial Tragedies

It’s been a tragic weekend and this morning isn’t panning out to be much better.

First off, I have $0.13 in my bank account because the ancestry website I was working with are idiots. I signed up for the free two-week trial with the expectation that I would be charged $19.99 a month to continue because, well, because I CLICKED THAT OPTION! My two weeks were up on Thursday of last week and instead of charging my account the expected amount, they charged me $99 for the six month plan instead. What the fuck? And even though I called and had the charge refunded, it will be 3-5 or maybe 5-7 business days (the customer service lady didn’t quite seem to have it all together) until the money shows back up in my account. Goddammnitmotherfucker.

We didn’t starve over the weekend however because even though Grump’s account was down near empty, it allowed him to make a couple of purchases that threw him into the negative (we will have to pay the overdraft fees). We filled the tank of my car all the way and did major grocery shopping because if you’re going to throw your account into the negative, make it worthwhile, right?

So we had everything we needed for a road trip and a picnic on Saturday, which was nice. Although the day started off crappy because Grump decided to pick a fight over nothing (nothing being my pickity grammatical habits) and we squabbled until he had satisfactorily annoyed me (I may have referred to him as Mr. 3^rd-Grade-Math because he had to take the remedial refresher math course when he went back to school and still sort of struggles with fractions, as does, I realize, almost everyone else who isn’t a giant nerd and I do try really hard not to rub my giant nerd-ness in people’s faces until they start pushing my buttons and then it really isn’t my responsibility if a get a bit snarky and condescending, maybe) and then he was fine but I was seething – and feeling a bit guilty for the below-the-belt insult.

Why is this game even a thing? Has anyone else experienced this absurd game? The “I’m going to poke at you until I’ve succeeded in pissing you off and when you react I will call you a bitch and then proceed to move along with my day. Then I will act clueless as to why you are still acting like a bitch even though the fight is over” game. Ridiculous man behavior.

We made up over the making of egg salad and subsequent sandwiches, kind of. I was a bit touchy for a good while after that. We finished packing the picnic and gathered Andro and the puppy (10 month old lab-mix mutt, Bucky, after the Winter Soldier – because when he isn’t acting psycho, he’s just sort of vacant and confused and sweet), picked up the Goth Child, and drove out to a park in the foothills. We had our picnic and a lovely little walk and then *just* as I was getting into the car, something stung me on the ass. Ow! I felt fully justified in whining about that all the way home, much to the delight, I’m sure, of everyone else in the car.

We got home in time to watch the live stream of A Prairie Home Companion on YouTube. I’m a tad obsessed with all things Chris Thile and Punch Brothers and now PHC because I’m a great big progressive-folk-to-post-punk-indie-pop-music-spectrum nerd. (The scope of my nerdnesses is absurd.) When everyone in my office was excitedly compiling their fantasy prediction of sportsing things during March Madness basketball last spring, PHC had just wrapped its first season with Thile as host and I devised the game of guessing who is going to be on the 2017-2018 season. (Predicting sportsings just doesn’t seem fun to me, but I wanted to predict SOMETHING so as not to feel left out, which totally didn’t work in the end.) I picked 20 artists based on a matrix of scoring that included things like new album releases, previous participation in NPR music activities, especially Tiny Desk Concerts, and a few other really nerdy things I’d noticed as patterns from last season. (I think there was one guest last season who had not done Tiny Desk, and I’m guessing he just hasn’t done Tiny Desk *yet*.)

So far out of my list of 20 I’ve gotten two points and we are only a few weeks in to a 26 show season. I’m particularly proud of my call on Dan Auerbach, who is (if you didn’t know) half of the Black Keys and also released a folky solo album in late spring. I KNEW Thile would be a Black Keys fanboy. I mean he DID have Jack White on the first episode of his first season and acted like SUCH a giddy little fanboy and anyone who gets that giddy over Jack White is a White Stripes fan and thus is also going to be into the Black Keys because the Venn diagrams on those fandoms almost completely overlap. Neither The White Stripes nor The Black Keys would really be appropriate acts for PHC, but Jack White doing throwback-to-old-style-country-music things was perfect and solo Auerbach doing folky things is just too good to pass up. Am I right? Of course I’m right. He’s going to be on next week.

Sadly, I have nobody to compare points with because, despite several pleas to my fellow music nerds on my FB feed, nobody else will play this game with me. Tragic, right? If the Regrettes end up on the show, I will have nobody over whom I may triumphantly gloat because nobody else really…..cares. Why must my life be so tragic? (And if you haven’t, check out the Regrettes cover of Fox on the Run on A. V. Undercover on YouTube. It is AMAZING.)

Right before the beginning of the show, I managed to add insult to injury. Or injury to injury. Or something. On my way down to grab the wine – because one MUST have a tasty beverage while watching the YouTube livestream of PHC – I fell down the stairs and bruised my ass in the exact same place where I’d just been stung. The fuck?

And this morning – this morning – I walked my sore, bruised, stung ass all the way across the very large campus of the complex where I work to the cafeteria, because of course the cafeteria has to be as far away as possible, to get a piece of toast (costs 50 cents, which I happen to have on me) because I have half an avocado in my lunchbox and the idea of avocado toast for breakfast seemed lovely. There was no bread and the toaster was turned off and there were no cafeteria staff around to help. And because I have 13 cents in my account, I could not afford to buy something like a muffin or pastry that cost more than the 50 cents I have on me. So now I’m getting close to hangry and that usually gets ugly fast.

I’m telling you. Tragic.