Weekend Wrap-up

On Friday afternoon, we went to the "closing ceremony" of Maia's STEM Camp at the Herndon Community Center. Teams of kids (Maia's team was "The Artists") had spent the week building little cars out of straws and other detritus and then raced them down a ramp. We also watched a stop-motion video that Maia had made on an iPad, showing a rainbow car driving down the road.

Afterwards, we transferred our kids to the grandparents' car at the nearest Target parking lot and drove to the Wiehle Metro station. Our kid-free trip to DC got off to an inauspicious start when our train went out of service for a broken A/C. The next train through the station experienced multiple delays, being stuck behind the out-of-service train through several more stations.

We made it to Gallery Place around 5 and checked into the Fairfield Inn which was crowded with concertgoing families as well as people heading to Otakon. After a quick dinner at the Irish pub on the ground floor of the hotel, we crossed the street to the Capital One Arena for the AJR concert.

We reached our section 121 seats without any problems (although the new Ticketmaster paradigm of "you must have a mobile phone to go to a concert" is irritating), missing the first opener, Almost Monday, but catching the second, MXMTOON.

AJR finally came on around 8:15 to a packed audience. There were more moving parts than the MUSE concert we went to back in 2008. The pageantry sometimes overshadowed the music -- I would have preferred about 20 minutes fewer of audience interactions and gimmicks and 20 minutes more of music, but they sounded great and were onstage for just over 2 hours.

The composition of the audience was sociologically interesting, spanning white, black, Asian, young, old and everyone else. There were lots of tweens and teens accompanied by their parents but I was amazed to see that both the kids and the parents knew all of the lyrics to almost every song!

The old people earplugs we brought along were definitely worth it -- I could hear the full range of timbres clearly without subjecting myself to the constant 125db speakers echoing through the arena.

The band managed to perform their whole fifth album, Maybe Man, and fit in tons of previous hits like BANG! and Burn the House Down.

On Saturday, we Metro'd back to the real world and relaxed around the house. In the evening, we drove through the massive thunderstorm to celebrate our friend Ghazaley's 40th birthday somewhere in South Riding.

Meanwhile, the kids were having a great time at the grandparents' house.

On Sunday evening, the kids were returned home by the grandparents and we all ate an easy meal of ham and potatoes.

How was your weekend?

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