In Which I Do Something Exceptionally Dumb

Thursday night we all went to "Thursday in the Square," which is a large social event held in downtown Buffalo. It's pretty much a featured music act on a stage, food & beer vendors, et cetera. Amy and Janet were in town and organized it, and the featured act was Lou Gramm from Foreigner. Man, he has not aged well at all. Whereas Steven Tyler was always ugly but can still sing well, and Mick Jagger has turned out similarly, Lou has lost both his looks and his voice. Every break between songs, or even in the middle of a song during an instrumental, Lou would waddle to the back of the stage and suck down bottled water and mop the torrents of sweat pouring down his face. He has to be close to 300 pounds and can no longer carry an extended note and doesn't even try, instead dropping an octave and just cutting it off. It was like mediocre karaoke, at best. The four of us (me, Christine, Janet, and Amy) swore blood oaths right then and there to kill any one of us that every got that bad, to put us out of everyone else's misery. We eventually tired of the desperate caterwauling and meandered down to a biker bar for a more fuller cultural experience.

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Pennsic War started this weekend, so Friday morning was a flurry of activity as I gave Christine a ride to pick up her car from the collision shop (the insurance check finally came, thank God), filled the propane tank, did grocery shopping, packed up the car and trailer with over 1000 pounds of supplies and equipment, and hit the road by 9:30. I made excellent time to the site and arrived just before 1 PM. It was then that I was informed by the bemused event staff that the site didn't open until Saturday morning. D'oh!!! That's gotta be the worst screw-up in the past six months for me, easily. So I was left wondering if I should turn around and go back home (burning another 4 tanks of gas hauling the trailer through the Pennsylvania hills (two up and then two back again); budget wouldn't support that), or get a hotel room (budget wouldn't support that either), actually unpack and set up my pavilion (2 hours setup, 2 hours breakdown, and then two hours setup again once the site opens... ouch!), or sleep in my car (again with the ouch). I unhitched the trailer and left it on the battlefield and drove in to town in search of salvation, which came in the unlikely form of the local Wal-Mart, where I purchased a children's dome tent for $17. This thing folds up to roughly the size of a rolling pin, and when fully set up is an ellipse measuring 5 feet by 6 feet, and about 2 feet high. Even for my scrawny 5'6" frame, this was a tight fit and I slept curled up with earplugs desperately trying to blot out the sound of a full dozen people drumming less than 50 feet away from my head. Thank God I'd had the foresight to stock the cooler with plenty of ice and beer.

So considering how much rushing around I did on Friday morning, arriving at the site a full 24 hours early pegs the stupidity meter for me. But the stupidity didn't stop there, oohhhh nnooooo........