Bibliomama

Friday morning we got up and headed down to wander along the waterfront some more, because for land-locked folk like us, it really never gets old - okay, for me it never gets old, and Eve was happy finding a buttload of Pokemon. We wandered around looking at stuff, enjoying the East Coast accents and getting tattooed. We had a lunch on a beautiful open-air patio, and when Theodore Tugboat approached, Eve, who used to find him delightful when I would bring pictures home from previous trips, now pronounced him unutterably creepy. We went back to the hotel to wash up for dinner and made the horrifying discovery that.... We'd brought the same toothbrush, and now we had no idea whose was whose. We met Anne Marie for dinner at the same restaurant where we ate with her SEVEN years ago when we were all here to see the tall ships.  I had a mandarin mojito that was so fucking exquisite it even won Eve over. I think oysters are the height of sophistication an...

About two weeks into the summer, Matt said he had a fuckton of airmiles and Eve and I should go somewhere while he and Angus were busy with Goddamned Baseball. I looked at the calendar, and the next time I was on Facebook, I asked Hannah (HI HANNAH) if she was around the last week of July and not only was she around, she was on holidays from taking care of a passel of small children that week. Hardly daring to hope, I then asked Anne Marie (HI ANNE MARIE) if she was around that week and she was too, so I told Eve we were going to Halifax in a week and a half. She said "cool". Then I had a massive panic attack about traveling alone with Eve and flying and getting around and packing and sleeping in strange places and possible sea monsters and a bunch of other stuff and thought "maybe not". Then my wonderful husband talked me down from California or Asia or wherever the hell he was at the moment and booked the flight and rental car on points so I couldn't chicken...

I took Pam the first night because for some reason Eve was not intoxicated at the prospect of seeing Joe Jackson and Billy Idol. Funny thing about liking music in the eighties - without the readily-available wealth of Internet information that exists now, you could like a musician without knowing much about them at all. For this reason, I'm pretty sure I didn't know Billy Idol was British until just before Bluesfest. I also didn't know Joe Jackson was British. Or white. This made Angus laugh almost as much as watching the video for Rebel Yell. Joe Jackson was stylish and smooth and the show was really cool - he started alone on the piano and then was joined by drums, bass and guitar one by one, and then they finished the same way, and when he left the piano kept playing. I loved his old stuff and I did end up wanting to search out his new stuff, which isn't always the case.  Billy Idol was exactly the same as thirty years ago except a bit more leathery. He s...