A Cacaphony of Awesome and Suck

Yesterday started as a pretty good day, lasted as a pretty good day, stretched into awesome later in the evening, and then on the way home descended into a bastion of craptacularishness.

First off, I had the day off.  To use the vernacular, it was win.  Not having to wake up at insanely early times (for me, anyway) for the first time in quite a while was great.  The morning passed comfortably and after getting ready me and Tim hit the road to Myrtle Beach.

See, Dragonforce came to town.. well, that other town, not the Columbia town.  I did what I could to get a group together but due to school needs, work, or Nyquil, others weren’t able to come along, with Tuten bailing the morning of.  Hope he’s feeling better today.  Anyhoo.

I load up the Zune with a good number of Red Panda Adventures (awesome podcast, done as a classic witty radio drama) and we hit Taco Bell for lunch and got gas for the Neon (too?) before hitting the I-20 out of town.  Gotta love gas prices down near $1.50 a gallon.. now if it’d only get back to ~ $0.78 a gallon.. yeah.

So, hours pass as we chat down the road, not really getting any podcasts listened to on the way but that’s fine.  We make it to Myrtle Beach as the sun’s setting and wander around a little bit looking for the House of Blues, the venue d’jour.  After passing it only once we managed to get there and stand in line for the next period of time until they let us in to buy tickets and such.  It was a bit odd but I actually ran into someone from my work there.  Not something I expected but, obviously, not an impossibility.  I thought I recognised someone else there, too, but I wasn’t sure.  After milling about the floor for a bit the first opening band started, a group called Powerglove.

They did metal remixes of classic video game songs (and finished with a remix of the Power Rangers theme).  So yeah, awesome.  Next up was a band called Turisas.  They are a group that hails from far off Finland and brings an electric violin and an accordion to the party.  They rocked the stage with what they called Battle Metal.  Holy carps.  Each of the two opening bands only played for a half hour each but they shoehorned so much pure, high-grade win into their sets that it seemed like we’d been rocking out for a while!  After they finished up (no pun intended) the stage was swarmed by roadies moving things and setting stuff up.  At around 9:00 PM Dragonforce took the stage.

They played an excellent set, bringing in songs from all four of their albums.  The band also cavorted about the stage and generally seemed to be having a great time just having fun with it all.  I love seeing stuff like that; makes for happy.  After all was said and done they had played for about two hours which included two encores.  I bought a tour shirt from the merch table and we hit the road out to seek for food and sleep.  This is were things started to go downhill.

Now, it’s not a major downhill swing, more annoying than anything, but still.  Basically what happened was we were coasting back down the highway through Myrtle Beach the same way we had come in and busily scanning the surroundings for an open eatery.  Then a cop hit his lights.  What.  The.  Hell.  It turned out that I was doing the horrible crime of going 37 miles an hour.  On an empty four lane highway.  At 11 PM at night.  For some retarded reason the road drops from 45 MPH to a mere 25 MPH for a stretch.  There’s nothing that makes this stretch stand out other than, as the officer put it, there was a Chik-Fil-A.  I never saw a stupid speed zone sign or anything of the sort and the cop acted like a prick the entire time including refusing to give me directions.  For my trouble I get a $133 ticket.  Speed trap much?  Understandably, I was pissed.  Unfortunately, due to how SC writes their traffic laws, I have absolutely no grounds to challenge it.  Even if I did I would have to go to Horry county in order to do it.  The gas cost there and back would be bad enough for most likely no change in fine.  So after this I heartily recommend that people stay as far away from this parasitic community as possible.  It’s deplorable that an area driven by tourism would treat visitors in such a way.  They certainly won’t be getting any more revenue from purchases there from me any time soon, if ever again.  It’s a small thing, but it’s what I can do.

Today I managed to oversleep my first class.. again.  Yay.  I was up, sort of, this morning but just never really got the oomph to get moving.  I kept dozing off.  Admittedly this probably has a lot to do with getting home around 3 AM running on little more than energy drinks.  Meh.  I’m getting ready now (sorta) to get to my second class before heading out to work.  Got the Zune loaded up with two new Turisas albums thanks to that whole Zune Pass thingie and I expect it should get the day to pass.  If I can ever get used to these new ear buds .. old ones died, new ones don’t fit quite right.  But that’s another story (and a boring one, too!)