The Killer Bs - Bluegrass, Books, and Baseball!

I had every intention of driving to Austin this weekend to attend the 2019 Texas Book Festival. Then I started looking into the various sessions and came to the realization that everyone I most wanted to see required a "Friends" pass costing something like $100 - a ploy I find both distasteful and annoying. And then I started looking into the remaining sessions and found way too many of them featuring authors pushing a book with a political agenda (and this is Austin we are talking about, so I'll let you figure out which political agenda that is all by yourself...it's easy). Even some reporters from The New York Times are there with a session of their own about how the country has gone to hell and it's all my fault for not voting for Hillary in 2016. It just didn't look worth the 300-mile roundtrip and two nights in a hotel at the inflated Festival weekend rates to come away from the experience in a worse mood than I arrived with, so I opted to stay closer to home.

Just ten miles up the road is a little community called Tomball, and on the last Saturday of every October the town presents a little bluegrass music festival that I always enjoy. Since my video camera batteries were all charged up and I had the cameras packed in the trunk of my car anyway, I decided to make this a music weekend rather than a book one.

Here's a little taste of the great music (the bluegrass-uninitiated will have to bear with me on this one) that I enjoyed today:

This band is made up of a bunch of friends of mine, and it's basically three generations of one family: grandfather (Jim Sloan), daughter (Leslie Sloan), two grandsons (Caleb and Ethan), their father (Randy Lindley), and their father's second wife (Amber Digby Lindley). The boy up front (Caleb) is all of 16 years old and has been playing banjo for exactly one year this weekend. You would never know it. That's Leslie on fiddle and Randy on mandolin. So here's their version of "Bluegrass Breakdown."

And the best part is that I got to play around with my video cameras a little bit, and that I came home in a better mood than the one I left the house in - something that would not have happened in the caustic atmosphere of Austin.

Oh, yeah...the third "B," baseball. The Astros won Game 4 of the World Series tonight 8-1, tying the series at two games each. There, I think that covers all three of my Killer Bs.