Hollering, GeoPutting, and The Stokers

Damned Rodan, Yoda Rob, Suntigres, and BigG7777, 2017 Piedmont Triad GeoPutt Champions
(Photo by Robert Isenhour)

Yoda Rob addresses the ball —
"Hellooooo, ball!" (Photo by
Rob Isenhour)

For me, this was another breakneck weekend, having to fit in serious caretaking on the home front while still getting in gatherings with numerous friends, including some geocaching. For the horror community, it was Stoker award weekend — the festivities being held aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA (which I've had the pleasure of visiting in the past) — and while I didn't win a Stoker Award, I was on the winning team at the 2017 Geoputt Event in Burlington, which involved some serious and very solemn hootin' and hollerin'.

It started on Friday evening, at the end of a long and ugly bout with a sinus bug that kept me out of work for a couple of days. I was scheduled to make a racket at the third Songwriters' Showcase at The Daily Grind in Martinsville, as I have at the past two. I felt a lot better, but my voice was about shot from several days of snorting and hacking. Regardless, I went for it and somehow managed to crank out three songs without choking. Dunno if it scared anyone away permanently, but the audience was loverly, and no one hurled nasty things at me. Score one.

Wailing on "Nova," one of the songs I wrote back in my college days (Photo by Kimberly Brugger)

Saturday, after handling necessary business on the home front, Kimberly and I headed down to Stonefield Cellers in Stokesdale to share some wine and tall geocaching tales with friend Suntigres (a.k.a. Bridget) and her S.O. BigG7777 (a.k.a. Gerry). The wine and company were great, of course, though the prodigious heat and humidity would have had a devastating effect on my hair if I had any. Ms. B. and I eventually made our way back home for dinner and a movie, and I would love to say this was all very relaxing — it actually was — but certain states of affairs about which I won't elaborate online have cost me countless hours of sleep in the past few months, and last night was no exception. Virtually no sleep. Very, very exhausting, it is.

The notorious Night-hawk,
Putt-Putter extraordinaire
(Photo by Robert Isenour)

But sleep deprivation cannot derail certain trains, and thus it was that Old Robgso, Suntigres, and the BigG met up this morning for a day of geocaching and the annual Geoputt event in Burlington. Our first destination was Siler City, where we put in a few miles of trail hiking — again in hair-curling heat and humidity — and snagged somewhere around twenty caches before heading to Burlington for the Putt-Putt event. For the big tournament, which brought thirty or so geocachers out from all around the region, I teamed up with Yoda Rob, BigG, and Suntigres. Now, back in the dark ages, I was an avid golfer — although Putt-Putt and golfing are almost mutually exclusive activities — and my team put in what appeared to be a pretty respectable showing. And at the end of it all, it turned out that we were indeed the winning team of the event. Woohoo! Wahaa! Hooooey! I even brought home a nice trophy for this astounding achievement. The notorious Night-hawk (a.k.a. Tom) won the individual best score, for which he was awarded an entirely too-small orange vest.

And that, ladies and germs, is why we play.

And in the horror fiction category, several authors of my acquaintance and of unspeakable talent took home their own haunted house trophies for superior achievement at the Bram Stoker award ceremony in Long Beach. The winners were:

Novel: The Fisherman, John Langan
First Novel: Haven, Tom Deady
Young Adult Novel: Snowed, Maria Alexander
Long Fiction: The Winter Box, Tim Waggoner
Short Fiction: “The Crawl Space,” Joyce Carol Oates
Fiction Collection: The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates
Anthology: Borderlands 6, Oliva F. Monteleone & Thomas F. Monteleone
Non-Fiction: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin
Poetry Collection: Brothel, Stephanie M. Wytovich
Graphic Novel: Kolchak the Night Stalker: The Forgotten Lore of Edgar Allan Poe, James Chambers
Screenplay: The Witch

My congratulations to the winners, all quite deserving of the recognition.

For me, tonight's aspiration to actually get a decent night's sleep, for it's going to be another long week. I do turn a whole year older on Tuesday, don't you know.

G'night.

One of the day's most intriguing geocache discoveries, all hand-knitted
and constructed by Sull427 (a.k.a. Jean)

"Go that way. No, THAT way. Dammit, ball." (Photo by Robert Isenhour)

Punkins19 and Skyhawk63 (Photo by Rob Isenhour)