This had to have been one of the best weekends I’ve had in a good long while. I had quite a number of hours banked up at work, so I was able to beat traffic home. My wife and I got to spend some time together as she wasn’t swamped with projects, and she had made substantial advances on the landscaping while I was at work. Meanwhile the roofers showed up and had repaired the hail storm damage.
On Saturday, Mark, Michele, Jim, Loralie, Tamara, and I went to Six Flags for the SAIC picnic. Jim and I started the day doing roller coasters, then we all got together for lunch and ate more ice-cream, popsicles, and soft-drinks than a human should, and then went on a few more rides coasters for good measure.
Superman, Bat-Wing, Joker’s Wild, and Two Face were the hits of the park for those of us who were willing to let our feet off the ground.
We went home bruised and totally exhausted when my cell phone reported 46 calls. Apparently my brother-in-law went to join up with us… only he headed to King’s Dominion. Oops.
Then the next morning Danny, Laurie, Alan, and Michele showed up on my doorstep at 8:00am and we all rode out to the Maryland Renaissance Festival and spent the whole day there watching shows, eating bread bowls filled with soup, downing smoked turkey legs, and tossing back sodas. I took lots and lots of photos to commemorate the day — I guess Danny is rubbing off on me.
With digital cameras, film is cheap (think about it for a second), so I walked around the whole day taking pictures of people, costumes, animals, scenery, skits, and of course us. Whatever was blurred to the point of non-recognition or was just simply unflattering, I simply deleted. Just under 180 pictures survived and are pending distribution to the group.
As with the coasters, there were some notable high points in this day as well. This had to be the first time ever I’ve gone and not see O Fool’s show. The format of it changed, and there are three things that strike me as problematic. The first is that during setup time there is an awful lot of dead time happening on stage — you don’t get to see what’s happening and there’s no actor out there. The second is he’s given up a lot of stage time to his son, but O Fool is the accomplished actor; this destroys the contiguous flow that once was there in prior versions. The third is that for portion of his skits, O Fool is wearing a mask to emulate other characters; this covering up his face is a sincere disservice to himself, as it blocks out virtually all of the non-verbal communication which is a necessity for his show.
But this left us with more time to catch some other acts, two of which were Shakespeare Scum and The Bloody Theater (which had nothing to do with Blood whatsoever). The former does plays at lightning speed (sometimes in reverse) with several strange twists, and usually once someone forgets their lines it all spirals out of control. The latter starts deliberately out of control and goes into straight improv for the whole show. The featured actor there is “Bob” who, by all accounts, is the “nicest guy” both on and off the stage.
We spent quite a while talking with Bob after he was done for the day. We walked away with the feeling of “Bob’s a nice guy.” I don’t know whether he just has a high tolerance for annoying audiences or whether the Dana Carvey smile planted on his face genetically gives him an advantage over the rest of us.
The 70% chance of rain that was supposed to flood us out, but was stayed by the poncho’s hidden on our persons, managed to scare off the majority of the crowds. There were ever slight sprinkles to keep the heat down, but nothing that constituted rain in its own right. Only after we were in the car and heading home did the skies unleash the furry.
Once home I was way too tired to go get something to eat and curled up on the floor watching Lathe of Heaven on A&E. I’d been trying to finish that show for about 2 weeks; thanks to TiVo, I could slice it into pieces and do so in my spare time.
This weekend has set new highs for being able to hang out and jam a lot of fun and excitement into a 48 hour period.