Another week, another busy weekend!

Another week, another busy weekend! The drum corps show (or, as Brian heard it when I said it the next day, the “drunk horse” show) was a lot of fun on Friday night, even if Jen, Kay and I were faced with the realization that we are now old. Seriously, the crowd was mostly high school marching bands, so we felt slightly out of place. But the show was fun. The best in my opinion was Santa Clara Vanguard. Their music included a couple bits of a piece called Russian Christmas Music which is one of my favorite pieces we ever played in concert band, and their marching was insane — they formed all sorts of shapes like a hammer and sickle, “USSR”, “CCCP”, and “1917”. They basically never stopped moving. That is tough to do, to continue to play well and sound good while constantly running around the field.
On Saturday I ended up taking my time getting on the road to Austin. I woke up around 9:30 and took care of a few things, showered, and watched the Tour de France time trial before finally hitting the road around 12:30. The drive to Austin is 3-3.5 hours, but it never feels like it takes that long. For some reason, it is a really enjoyable drive to me. Puffy clouds and all.
I rolled up to Brian and Leila’s a little after 3:30 and we headed to Baja Fresh for a quick early dinner before their wine and cheese party. Now, about this party… First of all, their circle of friends take their parties seriously. If we had a wine and cheese party down here, this is how it would go:

1. Becca announces a wine and cheese party. Parties are always at Becca’s house. It starts at 7:00.
2. She doesn’t spend the week before cleaning her house or shopping obsessively, because that’s not what we do.
3. At 8:30 or so, we all finally show up, very fashionably late.
4. Some people bring wine, some people bring cheese, some people bring nothing. Jo brings Smirnoff Ice, and Nick brings Kraft singles.
5. We sniff the cheeses suspiciously.
6. Depending on the crowd we start either a) lamenting our sucky love lives, b) watching tivoed versions of the Daily Show, c) laughing at Apache’s limp, d) telling Tiffany that she should break up with Nick, or e) playing Settlers.
7. We all get tired at an absurdly early hour and go home.

Leila and Brian’s party, on the other hand, was actually like a planned coordinated event! People showed up with 20 minutes of the designated starting time. They actually brought fancy wine and fancy cheeses. They mingled. Leila and Brian had been cleaning for a week. Everyone was paired up in couples and talking about their houses and dogs and kids. No one talked about pumas or robot deer. In short, it was a party unlike anything my social circle would ever have, and as a result, I felt a bit out of place.
It was fun though, and I tasted lots of interesting cheeses and drank a lot of good wine and had fun chatting with some of Leila and Brian’s friends. We slept in late yesterday and then had brunch at Y Bar. I had fruit waffles and hashbrowns and they were both yummy. I got back on the road to Houston around 2:30, since I had to be home in time for a soccer game at 7:00 last night.
In other random news, I am going to be quoted in an article in the Denver Post about Longs Peak! When I got home on Friday, I had an email from a writer at the Denver Post. He is doing a story about the Keyhole route, which is about to become non-technical for the first time in 20 months. In looking around for first-hand stories, he came across my trip report from a year ago, and contacted me to ask some questions. He said I’d be perfect for his story; I think he was looking for someone who’d tried to do the route recently that ended up turning back because of the conditions, and I fit the bill. So random, and cool, and I will post the link to the article when it is published!