netgirl_y2k

What you WANT when you buy a ticket to an outdoor concert in Virginia in the end of May is a serene, breezy clear sky on a night where it's warm enough to wear shorts but cooler than a sauna and you don't get eaten by bugs or drenched by a thunderstorm. The point is you don't know (though May's a better bet than July...)

Anyway, that (first, perfect) weather scenario is exactly what DID happen for twtd and me lat night when we saw Josh Ritter at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. Josh was really excited about playing in this garden, including making up a story about how the fancy greenhouse behind us was supposed to be a cathedral but didn't get finished so now it's just the bones of a cathedral which makes it a ghost building. Also, he alluded to playing two separate songs solely because they contain references to roses and he was basically standing in a rose garden (I mean, on a stage, but roses all behind it), and at one point he was (making up?) scientific names for flowers and inserting them into the songs.

The setlist was maybe not all that I wanted -- he played a lot off the new album which I think is good but gives me complicated feelings (if you're going to write a lot of songs about your ex and ALSO how great your new lady is, you are mostly going to make me feel really awkward for both of them; basically, dudes, I don't want your breakup albums unless (1) you're The Mountain Goats and you're going to go full out "I hope you die/I hope we both die!" (2) or you're Bruce Springsteen and it's 1985. Everybody other dude's breakup album can go home (lady breakup albums are eternally awesome, though, and also if you're dude and you are writing 'breakup songs' that are actually about your band, Jason Isbell.) But I can't argue with the music as music, especially when the band started rocking out -- would have liked some more of those and fewer slow songs but I will give credit that a Josh Ritter audience is really hardcore in that they will actually *be quiet* through the damn slower/quieter songs, a craft that has not been mastered by the fans of any other musician I've ever gone to see (even when it's the Mountain Goats and JD stops the show to shame them.)

So, yeah, that was the show -- also, David Wax Museum opened and I loved them as much as when I saw them in C'ville last year and this time I bought one of their CD's. Ritter also had amazing looking T shirts that tempted me deeply but I need to save that money for books at WisCon I guess?

Anyway, that was the end of my yesterday, which was good because my summary of the rest of the day was basically that I was having an extended argument with some lady on Twitter about whether menstrual cramps are a real thing that a lot of ladies have. (Spoiler: yes they are and also that lady needed to shut up.)

Now I just have half a day of work left -- of which the most tedious tasks are already completed -- before taking off and heading to WisCon eaaaarly tomorrow morning. I may or may not be internet-around during the con, depending on whether I decide to take my laptop.