Great Big picoreview

I am home! I am exhausted! I am full of Great Big passionate love!

Picoreview: not quite fabulous as the two-set show at the Moore this past February, but a not quite as fabulous GBS show is still pretty damned fabulous. Lots of meeting up on my part with assorted OKPers and LJers, and lots of bouncing once we got a little knot of us together at Stage Alan. Séan's buzzcut wasn't nearly quite as scary-looking as I was expecting. And he did the greatest, longest intro to "I'm a Rover" ever, full of much love for Seattle girls. We love you too, Séan. ;)

Also, it must be noted that auntmonkey is made entirely of awesome, for she got a get-well card for solarbird sent backstage to the band. And they SIGNED IT. <3 <3 I did not, sadly, get a chance to tell them thank-you to their faces, but I will clearly have to add this to the list of things I want desperately to say to The Doyle if I ever get a chance to speak with him and not sound like a babbling fangirl!

There will be a much longer show post on the morrow, but for now, I have GOT to sleep!

Great Big Sea at Bumbershoot in Seattle, 9/3/06

"If you go to a GBS show and don't come out of it hoarse from cheering and shouting and singing at the top of your lungs, with your hands stinging and your legs and arms aching from all the clapping, fist-pumping and leaping around, with your heart thumping and your ears buzzing and the surety that you couldn't be happier about it all, then I propose to you, my friends, that you are clinically dead and there is no hope for you."
-- casirafics, over on her journal

Truer words were never spoken than these, because *sighs happily*, if you go to a GBS show and have not in fact experienced these very things, you are doing it wrong. As I write this, I am sore in the knees and hoarse in the throat and feeling a hell of a lot better than I have in the last couple of adventuresome weeks here around the Murkworks.

This was a return to the type of GBS show I'm more familiar with--the single-set show, about an hour and a half long. It wasn't quite as fabulous as the two-set show they were doing during the last tour, but then again, even the B'ys themselves would have a hard time topping the fabulousness of that. Still, even a single-set GBS show is pretty damned fabulous!

Since there were quite a bit of rumblings on the OKP amongst the Pacific Northwest crowd about meeting up before the show, I'd posted a link to this pic of myself with my usual red and blue hat, inviting OKP people to keep an eye out for it if they wanted to say hi. This let me actually meet quite a few people, which was really, really cool. OKPers met included MorganEH and his wife (Kikki, said her ID was KikkiScooter), OregonWildChild, AnnR, Binny, Sooz71, helenwheels, and Janeill. Along with the OKPers, I also met Linda Strout, who says she knows me from Norwescon as well, which was pretty neat.

LJers encountered were wingedelf and damashita, their little one scootercomputer, the fabulous casirafics who I know from Writer's Weekend, and of course auntmonkey and her step-kid.

( Meeting up at Bumbershoot: Auntmonkey's Sekrit Plan... )

( GBS hits the stage... )

( Post-show: Anna goes to Kells... )

( This morning: Dara gets her present... )

Quiet holiday Monday

First and foremost, happy birthday to both ssha and my little sister wildshadowstar!

And now then, random glimpses of the non-GBS bits of the weekend, featuring two back-to-back sweet things that happened to me, as if yea, the very proximity of a concert by my B'ys spread good will all over the Emerald City.

Saturday: Ran errands down to the shops, to pick up various and sundry important things, as I'd mentioned before. But what I forgot to mention is that when I stopped in at the Wild Birds Unlimited shop to buy another couple of jars of the handy no-stink gel crystals they sell there, I amused the clerk by describing the product as exactly that, and that I was coming into a bird store to get that stuff. I also told her, since she's seen solarbird and me come in there several times, about Dara's bike accident. She made a lot of very sympathetic noises--and here's the really cool part. She pulled a candy bar off the rack on the counter by the registers and gave it to me for free to take back to her. That was a very sweet gesture and requires much praise. Y'all should go buy stuff from that store. And tell them I sent you.

Sunday: Before scampering off to the concert, I went to Ballard for a massage appointment with my friend and LMP Liz, my regular massage person. Since she's the only person of my acquaintance who's not regularly online and with whom I do not otherwise regularly communicate, I brought her up to speed about what had happened with Dara, and explained I was hoping for a general maintenance type of massage to try to chase off the stress of the prior couple of weeks. Liz was very sympathetic as well, and we had a nice 90-minute appointment. She took my scrunchy out at one point to finger-comb my hair out, and told me that my hair was, quote, "glorious", unquote. *^_^* Second sweet thing to happen to me all weekend! Liz is a total sweetie, and a great LMP besides. Consider this a recommendation for her, too. You can find her at the Ballard Health Center.

Meanwhile, in the Not Nearly So Vocal But Still Perfectly Earnest Fangirling Department, I got a nice little note back from the author Donna Andrews, whose mysteries I have been reading lately--she's the one writing the Turing Hopper books and the Meg Langslows. I had emailed her to thank her for a very enjoyable read after reading the first Turing Hopper. She answered me back finally to say that she was glad I was enjoying the read. Woot!

Monday: Mostly fried today post-concert, but I stepped out to help solarbird with planting the amazingly hardy little plants she'd bought at Molbak's on the day of her accident, and which had somehow managed to survive being stuffed into her backpack for two weeks since none of the rest of us had even thought to get them out of there. One of the plants looks like it's survived nicely, though the other one's looking kind of yellow and peaked. Dara's hoping they'll transplant all right into the rockeries surrounding our house. I helped her with the watering and the carrying and the just generally making sure she wasn't going to keel over outside or anything. Which she didn't, and that was all good! She even had energy to spare for bitching at the blackberry vines and the horsetail threatening to encroach over the retaining wall.

And since I did actually walk from Seattle Center to Kells and back again last night on top of walking around Bumbershoot itself, I got a credible amount of exercise yesterday. I must therefore note it here!

Sunday miles: 3.25 (from Seattle Center to Kells and back again)
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1330.9
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 21.9
Miles to Isengard: 462.1