captainsblog | Fathers and Daughters.

A brutally hot week has finally ended, with lots of work stress, more than the usual amount of animal maintenance, and some unfinished repair-and-upgrade business for both home and car.

Six hours of yesterday took me away from all of it- and the most touching part of it was sharing the event with our daughter, and a good friend and her father.

I've known Rachel (known here long ago in a galaxy far far away as thatyousay) when she was about the age Emily is now. We shared a lot of the same interests in music and entertainment and all things Geeky Buffalo. Somehow, in all those years, I'd only met her once, for about ten minutes- she was working the door at an a cappella group concert at UB, and an ATM had eaten my card on the way up there so I couldn't buy tickets. About month ago, last night's concert lineup was announced, and Emily and Cam let me know they wanted to go. Ultimately, I wound up with some extra tickets and I was pleased when Rachel spoke for them- and told me, earlier this week, that she'd be bringing her dad to the show.

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I'd been there most of the day, and both daughtery pairs were due downtown at about 4:30. I got a few extra minutes to explore the native habitat of the extinct species Dinosaurus Rochesterius.

The Dino, seen from across the river, reclaimed an old-time downtown train station, but the real spooky stuff lies on the other side. You can see their skyline and windmill in the picture above, but the foreground is part of the abandoned ruins of the mid-20th century underground section of the Rochester subway system.

The grown-over railbed, heading north from right to left; a block up the former tracks, it turns left and heads over an aqueduct structure below Broad Street, which once carried the waters of the Erie Canal over the Genesee River.

The City would rather you didn't see any of this, although there are plenty of urban spelunking sites telling you where the unguarded access points are.

And the Dino is equally blunt about its rules:

Ultimately, the five of us triangulated on the rib smell, and we had a nice introduction of two families of what Great Big Sea would refer to later in the evening as Good People. From there, it was a block further away from the river, into a gritty but well-placed concert site where we, Carbon Leaf and the boys from Carbonear spent close to the next four hours.

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Plenty of foodage in the grounds; Rochester has embraced food trucks, which have struggled around here against brick-and-mortar lobbyists. This was one of my favorite looking ones:

The crowd was enthusiastic and more than one bottle was passed around, but somehow the venue didn't have quite the same spirit of lawless drinking that Emily and I experienced last time we saw GBS at the Rock the Harbor site in Buffalo. Plenty of little kids on shoulders, dancing with Mom and Dad.

Also, plenty of swag:

I stayed away from the wearables this time, but the CD table offered a new-to-me option: a flash drive of that night's concert, moments after the set was done. It has their 14-track set of songs and openers from their second-act performance, and all of Barry's stories, about forgetting his clothes on the way up from Richmond and how not to sound like a wolf when singing along.

No wolves during "Life Less Ordinary." I think that's when I went over by the stage to get this shot:

After the set, I went to claim my drive, and watched for the band nearby. No autographs to be found, but I did see Carter doing his own loadout:

That got us to Great! Big! Sea! With plenty to acknowledge this as their 20th anniversary tour. From the first rhythms of "Ordinary Day" to the closing choruses through two encores, they brought an awful lot of cool from Carbonear into an otherwise unbearably hot night: