Friday night I performed with the gang from my old a cappella group, as well as all the current members and other alumni. The music was pretty good considering we'd had three hours of rehearsal that afternoon. It's amazing to see the current batch of folks, and to see how the rest of us have grown up. Our voices have matured, most of us have continued performing in some form or another, and with our Dynamics and other experience, we're mostly professionals, in attitude and almost in quality. Then there was a decently rowdy college beer party afterward. As promised, I took care of almost no people or property and had a great time. I managed to connect with a nice girl a couple years younger than me who I'd always thought was incredibly cute, but we didn't intersect much; it was nice just to talk to her and get a sense of who she is as a person (she is, in fact, pretty rad, though in 1999 I wasn't in a place to find that out).

On Saturday I woke up and discovered that, in a true rookie move, I had gone to bed without drinking water. No one else being remotely close to getting up, I took my headache to a nice breakfast diner for an egg sandwich. I hung out with folks for a few hours, then started to get cranky about various things; I get like that, wound up in my head sometimes and deciding suddenly that it's time to leave. I can alter that, or at least put it off, for a good cause, but there was no good cause this time. I puttered around Saratoga Springs for a while and finally got on the road.

I got up unhealthily early this morning (considering I hadn't shifted to Eastern time) to go up Grand Monadnock as an early celebration of a couple of family birthdays. After stumbling back to the car, we drove to my brother's place, a little ways south of BFE, New Hampshire, for dinner and hanging out. The prize quote from one of my nieces: someone grabbed her foot, and her father said "That's my foot. It's got five toes, it looks exactly like my foot." She counted the toes, and to make sure it wasn't her dad's foot, she counted six toes instead of five. I looked her in the eyes and said, "Are you a polydactyl cat?". Without blinking or missing a beat, she said, "Yes!". I'll ask her again in a few years, when I'll get to make her go look up "polydactyl".

Because I missed the 80s, I'm still discovering some of the music of Morrissey and The Smiths. It's not all good, and a lot of it is mopey, whiney and sad, but "Ask Me" is just fun:

Spending warm summer days indoors
Writing frightening verse
To a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg