got up late. took a shower and i headed out to c-stone for the r.m.c bbq. after waiting in line to get through the entrance, i ended up showing up around 1:30pm….30 minutes after it was over. there were still a few hanging out, so i stood around and mostly didn’t say anything. then they all left, and i was stuck talking to a weird guy. eventually we parted, and i walked over to get something to eat. but my dislike of large crowds and lots of activity (sort of feels like visual/auditory overload or something), mixed with the large number of cool-looking, attractive young ladies (keyword being “young”) made me decide to leave. i drove back to the dorm, where linc was still hanging out. neither of us had hardly any bands we knew we wanted to see today, so he decided to skip out. (plus it was raining this morning. although by the time i left it was no longer raining, and evidently it barely sprinkled at c-stone.) anyway, he hadn’t eaten either, so we decided to find a local place. we ended up going to the red ox, a steak/seafood/etc place. it was around 4pm and we were the only ones there. the waitress talked to us most of the time, so we got to learn a lot about good local places to eat, what there is to do around town, etc. she was born in poland, grew up in germany, and moved here about six years ago. our theories were that she was either a mail-order bride or was a mormon that married a morman man from here who was in germany on his mission trip, but we never asked so we don’t know what the truth was. she was an instructor at western illinois in sociology. (she has a masters, but was full-time.) after that we headed out to c-stone. i saw parts of a number of bands, but the only one i really thought was very good was a black/death metal band, which i think was called tantrum of the muse. i can’t really listen to cds of the stuff, but they’re enjoyable live. hopefully tomorrow will be a better day as far as bands go. in one of the merch tents there was a guy selling writings of 1st and 2nd century church fathers. i started talking to him and he’s an orthodox xian, and turns out he’s friends with beau branson from thymikon. we talked with him for awhile and i bought about eight of his reprints. so that was pretty cool. i think tamara would have enjoyed talking with him. and some of the talks this year are about kierkegaard and nietzsche which i’m sure she would have liked. i keep relating a lot of stuff at c-stone to tamara (bands, discussions, people i see and talk to)…i guess we had a pretty strong tie to c-stone. we first really talked there, we went to c-stone for our honeymoon, and we went together one other time too. plus i have the opportunity to see more people at c-stone than in my normal life that tamara fits in with as far as dressing style and such goes. oh well.
oh yeah…happy birthday to me. i’m now officially 35, and driving in other states with an expired driver’s license. aahhh, 35. living the glory days. could life possibly get any better than it’s been the last year or two? (that’s sarcasm.)
day6 — first day of c-stone
note: this is one of a number of entries that were lost in a server crash, followed by a desktop crash, back in late 2004. on march 1, 2009, i happened on a cache file on the crashed desktop hard drive, so i am reloading all of the entries with their original date and time values intact for posterity.