I carried around a notebook with me through the weekend and made some notes during Top of the Park and elsewhere, and thought I'd figured out a reasonably elegant way to solve a problem with blocking locks that we spent some time beating our heads against last year and gave up on. So I was reasonably happy about that.
I talked about it with Trond a bit over lunch on Monday and he seemed to think it sounded like a reasonable approach.
Monday night both bands were Andy's (Sandbox, his fusion band, and Fubar, which plays more covers), so besides Sara and me, a bunch of Andy's relatives were there, along with Trond and Laura.
Sara stayed for the movie, "Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit", and I went off with Trond and Laura to Andy's place, where Leslie served us some yummy pie, Stuart set off some fireworks, and we listened to a recording of the evening's show. All very pleasant but I was feeling tired and not terrifically social at that point, so I was happy when Trond dropped me off at home around midnight.
It turned out that not only had Sara stayed for the whole movie (and enjoyed it, despite it being rained on), but she'd also gone out with Dave and some friends and had coffee and then competed in some trivia competition at Buffalo Wild Wings. So she got home much later than me.
Despite all this, I woke up fairly early the next morning and decided I could make it to the Ann Arbor 4th of July parade. I walked downtown as fast as I could (there wasn't any bus service), but made it with plenty of time to spare, and carried a sign (who knew the stupid mp3-player port on top of my backpack would be useful for something some day) and juggled a bit in the WBWC group.
Afterwards I walked backwards around the parade (the WBWC was one of the first groups), then had a sandwich at Subway (my usual haunts were closed for the holiday), and went to citi and worked on my new locking patches.
We saw the civic band and then the Forbes Brothers (who were great fun), then went home. I kept working throughout and had finished most of the new locking code by the end of the day. Whee. We'll give it a few more days and see if it still looks good, or if I realize the whole approach is doomed from the start and I need to start over again....
The one unqualified piece of progress is that I now feel like I really understand the locking code. If nothing else I should do some documentation and cleanup work before I forget how it all works.