Darkoshi

On my flight back from California, I had a layover in the Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) airport. As my connecting flight departed from another terminal, I rode in the Skylink trains which run on elevated rails between the terminals.

Escalators go up from the terminal areas to the train station halls. The halls have large banks of windows, giving a great view of the airport.



DFW is in the path of totality of the upcoming eclipse. If I had timed my trip differently, I could have possibly watched the eclipse during my layover. However, I don't think you can get to the open air without leaving the terminals and then having to go through Security to get back in. (The terminal's "Pet relief area" turned out to only be a stinky room with a green outdoor rug and a water hose to rinse it off). Even from the panoramic Skylink halls, you probably wouldn't be able to see the sun directly overhead.

As South Carolina isn't near the path of totality, I've felt blasé about the eclipse. I've been too busy to give it much thought other than that partial solar eclipses are hardly noticeable. But when my mom mentioned it today, I checked the local details, and we'll get a 76% eclipse. That's a crescent sun. That's worth looking at through some eclipse glasses. It's nearly as much as I got to experience for the 2017 eclipse. It's the last one near here (hear, hear!) for the next 21 years (years and years and years!). It's worth getting a little excited for.

I wonder what a solar eclipse would look like from in the air through an airplane window.

Such as the small freezer compartments in the mini refrigerators often found in motels...
(It was so full of ice that the little freezer flap wouldn't even open more than part-way, because of ice on the hinge area.)

First I tried chipping away at some of the ice with a screwdriver. That didn't work well.

I thought of using the motel room's hair-dryer, but it was mounted to the wall and the cord didn't reach far enough.

I looked up the refrigerator model's manual online. It said NOT to try to chip away the ice as that could cause damage. It said NOT to use a hair-dryer as that could deform the plastic parts. It said to turn the refrigerator off and wait for it to melt. With a warm bowl of water inside to speed things along. But that would have still taken too long.

I tried tossing teaspoonfuls of warm water onto the ice at the top of the hinge, but that didn't work well.

So then I ran hot water on a washcloth and used the warm washcloth to melt the ice, with a towel at the bottom of the fridge to catch dripping water. I wrung out the washcloth over the sink and repeated it many times. Once I got the flap to open all the way, I continued melting away much of the frost and the ice inside the freezer compartment. Using a small hand-towel would have worked well too, maybe even faster.

On July 20th, I drove to Charleston with my mom and Qiao to see the Culture Club concert there. I could have gotten tickets to the Charleston concert on Friday or to the Charlotte concert on Saturday. Almost exactly 20 years before (July 25, 1998), I had been to Charlotte for my first ever Culture Club concert. This was my 5th.

I chose Charleston this time so we could visit my sister and bro-in-law, and so they could come to the concert too; they have been living in North Charleston for the last few years. The Charleston venue, the Volvo Car Stadium, it turns out, is a tennis court that is re-purposed for concerts during the off-season. It is open to the elements, with no roof or awning over the seats. There was a strong chance of rain in the forecast. I worried that the concert would be cancelled due to rain.

It began raining on the drive down and became a downpour as we neared Charleston. But after checking into our hotel room, the rain lessened and stopped. We went to a nearby restaurant for a quick bite to eat, and then picked up my sister and her husband. Getting to the concert involved driving on an interstate over a big steep tall bridge, which was nerve-wracking for me. First I got on the wrong ramp, and drove in the wrong direction, so I had to take the next exit, turn around, and do it again! But I made it through ok.

I was mentally/emotionally exhausted from having bought the tickets and planned the trip only the weekend before. I'm always low on sleep to begin with, and then was even more so. So I think I didn't enjoy the concert as much as I could have. Although I'm largely convinced now that concerts really aren't my cup of tea.

The opening acts were Tom Bailey formerly of the Thompson Twins, and the B-52's. (Here's a recording from the Atlanta concert with long clips of all 3 bands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrSFenAh03w )
I enjoyed watching them, but concert speakers are always so loud that the music quality sounds very bad to me. It is very noisy, cacophonous.

At concerts, when I sit in my seat rather than standing up and dancing, I feel bad for not displaying more enthusiasm for the performance. When I stand up and want to dance, I feel awkward. I don't really dance; I just sway back and forth repeatedly. Even if I'm really enjoying the music, that's all I can muster in public. So I feel awkward as an audience member, no matter if I sit or stand. The music quality really isn't so great, it's expensive, and it's a lot of extra effort to go out to a concert... listening to music in my living room is much more pleasant. But I guess one doesn't go to concerts to hear music. One goes to see the performance, to see the musicians. To see people. To feel the vibe of the crowd. To do something different. Right? So maybe this won't have been my last concert, who knows.

Culture Club's first song was not a Culture Club song. It was David Bowie's "Let's Dance", one of my favorite songs. Here is a good quality video of CC playing it at another concert:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPYaICA0oLk
And another:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_HUwAj9ek

That got me out of my seat, and bouncing as much as I'll bounce around in public, I guess.
Later on they played "Addicted to Love", which I enjoyed a lot as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGWpQmC9UK4

Those songs excited me as I didn't expect them, and I'd never heard CC play them before. But the other songs played that night didn't do much for me. I've heard them too many times. Even the band's "new" songs didn't sound as great to me this time, as they did at the last CC concert I went to in 2015. They didn't play "I Don't Do Emotion Like I Used To" this time. Nor is it listed on the track listing of their upcoming Life album. So maybe that is part of it; maybe they dropped or changed or didn't play the new songs that I liked best.

It made me feel funny, like a bad fan, that the songs which CC played which I enjoyed the most, weren't even CC songs.

https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/FeedbackFile/archives/2018/07/20/tonight-boy-georges-40-year-career-and-his-makeup-is-still-on-fleek

Rather than breaking up, Culture Club, George says, goes on "breaks" [...], which is why it's taken five years to release their latest record. George laughs before explaining, "We partly recorded it four years ago and then we had a break and then we started again about six months ago. We rerecorded everything, so basically went back to square one, took all the tracks we recorded before, and just rerecorded them because I really liked what the producers were doing."

The Life Tour included/includes 62 concerts in the U.S. between June and October - it's still going on. Then they will play 21 more concerts in Europe thru December. It sounds grueling to me, but I hope the bands are enjoying it.

Well, who would have thought that I'd be cold in Florida? It's cloudy weather in the 80s, with frequent interruptions of dark clouds and rainshowers. And some people like to keep the A/C way low. I had a nice stroll slosh run along the beach yesterday.

I wasn't sure if the Gulf of Mexico would have as big waves as other shores. It does, at least in this weather.

There are frogs and other critters here, making sounds at night which I'm not used to hearing by the seashore.

Driving through Georgia, we crossed a stream called "Ichawaynochaway Creek". How cool is that name?!

I suppose I should go shopping or something. Not just sit here on the couch watching season 2 of The Katering Show. I'll probably go to the ocean later again. I suppose if I don't feel like getting all wet, and possibly cold, and possibly sucked under by the waves, I could just sit in my beach chair and watch the ocean. (oh man, it sounds so useless, so pointless)