Saturday I went out Geocaching for the first time in a few years. Agnes came with me and, using the new GPS (thanks Tim!), we were able to find 6 caches in 3 hours. To regular cachers, I’m sure this does not sound like much, but my previous attempts (with a much older and less accurate GPS) topped out at the reciprocal of that.

On Sunday, aside from getting a few things done around the house, the evening brought a Chemtrail show in Manhattan. I’m not sure if its the added adrenaline from being in the city and away from their home locations in Asbury Park, but the band was in top form and played wonderfully. They admitted to a couple of mistakes, but overall were quite pleased with their own performance. In addition, the sound technician they worked with was wonderful. I suppose it’s a luxury that’s only allowed to the first band on the bill (and even then, only when they show up more than an hour early), but sound checks were done on each member individually and then with the band as a whole. This allowed for much better levels across the board. To anyone in the business, I’m sure this sounds quite amateurish (of course they should do sound check on the whole band!), but it wasn’t something I had seen done for the guys before. I look forward to hearing the CD from the soundboard.
Other highlights from the night include my cousin, Marie, coming out for the show, a guy who was at the show who was “losing his shit” over them (read: so excited; called someone and was holding up his phone so they could hear; talked to the guys for about 45 minutes afterwards about his music distribution.. and their ‘image’… ok, so the 45 minutes of talking was more exciting than what actually came out of it, but at least people seem to be responding well to their style of music if not their wardrobes), and finally, to top off the evening, I drove in the city for the first time. Thank God J didn’t have me drive in, but at 12:45am, it wasn’t so bad. There were a surprising number of people still out and about, likely due to the holiday weekend, but I survived and think that I could muster the courage again (so long as I have a good navigator and don’t have to be looking too much at signs and can concentrate on the traffic).

Today we went out to the Tour of Somerville to watch and support our friend Sebastian in his race. I took loads of photos and look forward to downloading them and seeing what I’ve ended up with. There was a nice guy I ended up sitting next to who gave me some tips from his experiences capturing shots at these races. I think I was able to get Sebastian in a few shots, but I pretty much just turned on the multi-shot burst and just let it go while the racers went by. I’ll post something up here if anything great turned out.

In the other free times over the weekend, I’ve finished (well, 20 pages left) Order of the Phoenix and am ready to move on to The Half Blood Prince. Anyone who knows me well knows that each time a new Harry Potter book (and sometimes movie) comes out, I reread all the books up to that one in preparation and anticipation. So I now have (at the time of this writing) 53 days to read 627 pages (UK edition) in preparation for Deathly Hallows. So as long as I keep up these productive and somewhat relaxing weekends, I think I can handle the roughly 12 pages/day.