Done Since 2020-01-19
2020-01-27 05:40 pmSo we spent the weekend at Conflikt, which is why I didn't post this until today. It was good. @pocketnaomi and I entered the songwriting competition, because the theme was "Who is this guy Murphy and what is he doing at our con?", and St. Murphy's Day is one of N's family traditions when things go wrong. So we wrote A (Loose) Canon for St. Murphy -- mostly N's work with a little input from me, including the parenthesized word in the title, and quite a bit on the second verse.
As usual, I had trouble dealing with the melody and guitar work simultaneously, but after all we were judged on our songwriting, not performance. We didn't win, but that's okay. We may do some rework on it as a FAWM starter. (I went to the FAWM workshop.) We pulled Summer in for the performance -- she's going to be Toastmaster at RainbowCon this year, and was spending the weekend with N and G.
None of N's kids were up to coming; our Chaos was there, though, as usual. We also took Colleen's caregiver, V, along -- damned good thing. My back wouldn't have handled it.
I started the weekend with something of a sore back; it was very painful most of the weekend. Aggravated, no doubt, by handling luggage, even though I had help with the scooter and the suitcase. After two massages from N, a lot of time with the heating pad, and regular doses of naproxen and tizanidine, I got it down to the point where I was able to take care of C Sunday night and this morning. I borrowed Colleen's scooter Saturday night after she went to bed -- good move.
As for luggage... I took my old Travelpro rolly, and the new gig bag (like this one, only blue) that I got on sale from Musician's Friend. Poor old Rolly has a broken wheel -- it clicks loudly on hard surfaces, and is pretty much falling apart (the wheel, not the bag as a whole). And it no longer fits under an airplane seat. Time to retire it. The gig bag is lighter than my old one (also a RoadRunner), and has a main pocket big enough for a songbook. (The neck pocket is much smaller.) It will probably end up being my main gig bag, though that isn't certain.
Expect a curmudgeon post or two sometime this week.