So, just want to say thanks to David, Dan, Mick (who made an appearance via video from the Shire) and my friend since Junior High school, John, for a wonderful weekend. We had dinner, got to see some amazing materials that were part of the inspiration for David's coming novel, and saw some live music at Levon's barn, The Midnight North and The Mother Hips. Hopefully, everyone enjoyed my company as much as I enjoyed theirs. 

My friend John was not really completely aware of who David was and asked me why Dan and I were so excited to visit with a history professor. However, once he got a look at David's archival materials and heard him discuss why he wrote The Fire Agent, he said "I really never read fiction but I'll make an exception in this case."

John only reads historical non-fiction but was truly impressed by the research David had done.  

The only misstep I made during the weekend was Dan brought along a strange bottle filled with some sort of Hungarian moonshine. He described it, incredibly inaccurately, as a "pear brandy" to which it had about as much resemblance as pears have to household cleaning products. In fact, if he told me it was what the Ukrainians use to fuel their tanks, I would have believed that more than that it was pear brandy. I made the nearly massive blunder of pouring myself a glass at the end of dinner. Which as I took a nice large sip, Dan suddenly said "Go slow with that!" and this bizarre taste and scent of hot glue seemed to overcome my senses and I nearly spit the extremely flammable seemingly 200 proof concoction all over David who was sitting across from me. 

Not wanting to embarrass myself, I swallowed hard and enjoyed the amazing feeling of what it might have been like to lay underneath an Apollo rocket as it left the launching pad on the way to the moon. I think David wondered why I suddenly jolted upright while gripping the table as if I was hanging on for dear life, but he seemed to try to ignore my strange behavior perhaps thinking it was just some sort of seizure that would pass. 

So, while I learned many things over the course of the weekend the most important item was probably if Dan approaches you with a strange bottle that has the word "Pear" scrawled on it in what looks like blue ballpoint, filled with a clear liquid, decline his offer to sample it.