I haven’t had a whole lot of time to write anything on this blog this week, and the down time I did have I just didn’t feel like spending it writing anything here. Now that I have a little time I figured I would do one of my periodic roundups of things that have been making me happy recently.

1. My sister lives in Arizona, so I usually only get to see her maybe twice a year. I got have a bonus visit with her on Tuesday because she was briefly in Baltimore for work. She had a meeting with a doctor at Hopkins, so we planned to meet for lunch after that was over. Unfortunately her meeting got all screwy because the doctor had an emergency, so our nice lunch out wound up being a 30 minute visit in the hospital cafeteria, but it was better than nothing. I’m looking forward to spending much more time with her in a few weeks at Christmas.

2. Tuesday night I saw Next to Normal at Centerstage. My friend Alison and I have season tickets to the theatre, and they generally do a really good job. They don’t tend to do very many musicals, but every once in awhile one will show up in the season. Next to Normal is the first musical written by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt, who also wrote If/Then which is currently running on Broadway. It’s a more understated musical with only five characters rather than the large productions typically associated with musicals. Additionally, it’s about a woman with bi-polar disorder and the ramifications that has had on her family. Not the normal topic you expect for a musical either. I quite enjoyed it though. I liked the music a lot, and I thought the production was great.

3. WTMD, Baltimore’s local NPR music station run out of Towson University, has been holding live concerts in their studio since the moved into their new space in the last year or so. Thursday was a live lunch concert with the band Stars. I saw them at Rams Head Live  about a year and a half ago. I thought they were great in concert, so I took a long lunch break to go up and see the show. Serendipitously it worked out that I was planning on staying late to make up the time because as soon as I got back to work I found out that I was going to need to stay late to get a last minute project dropped in my lap done before I left for the day. Stars was a lot of fun once again, thought it was an entirely different experience seeing them in the middle of the day in a bright studio as opposed to at night in a dark club.

4. Every second Friday of the month is the Baltimore area librarians’ happy hour. It’s basically librarians from a bunch of the universities from around the Baltimore area get together for happy hour. We totally welcome any sort of librarian, but because it was started by academic librarians that is who it tends to attract. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve been to happy hour because it always seems like we have something else going on when happy hour rolls around. For a change we were finally free this Friday so decided to go. The location has moved around over the years, but has been meeting for a little while at Midtown BBQ & Brew. We usually meet in the upstairs bar. This time we wound up in an area I had no idea even existed off of the upstairs bar. It seemed like it was probably originally an apartment above/next to the bar that they just opened up into public space. There were some couches and a television that we had control of back there. We eventually wound up listening to the 90s music channel from the cable system on the tv, which somehow paralyzed us from leaving as we waited to find out what 90s song would show up next and reminisced about everything that was coming up. We usually stay at happy hour for an hour or an hour and half. We were there for over three hours apparently unable to drag ourselves away. It was quite an enjoyable evening.