A Bob's Life: Monday Musings

Monday, August 17, 2026

Monday Musings - August 17, 2026

1. For those keeping score, today is the third of five August Mondays. We are scampering through August. Kids are either back in school or heading to school in the coming weeks. Summer is almost over. Labor Day is a short three weeks away and there are only 19 Mondays remaining in the year.

2. Protecting ourselves from the intolerable heat, Chris and I enjoyed a relatively quiet weekend. We did enjoy dinner with friends on Saturday evening. We had fun catching up with them after both couples had been traveling.

Beck
Glen Burnie, MD
August 16, 2026

3. The Orioles are back playing .500 baseball. Sitting at 2 games below .500, they have taken three straight from the American League leading Tampa Rays. Amazing! They are not also in possession of the third Wild Card spot in the AL. I hope this continues. They looked really powerful in their 10-2 thrashing of the Rays yesterday. They are in the defining part of the season as they are playing the Rays 7 times in 10 days. It is play for October time.

4. We had a great Facetime call with Beck yesterday. He is the cutest boy on the planet and he is so relaxed and cute when we are connected by video.

Woodstock 1969

5. Today in History. On Sunday, August 17, 1969, one of the all-time grooviest events in music history—the Woodstock Music & Art Fair—approaches its end after more than three days of peace, love and rock ‘n’ roll in upstate New York. Rain and other delays push the festival, originally scheduled to finish before midnight, into a marathon night of music that continues past dawn.

Conceived as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” Woodstock was a product of a partnership between John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield and Michael Lang. Their idea was to make enough money from the event to build a recording studio near the arty New York town of Woodstock. When they couldn’t find an appropriate venue in the town itself, the promoters decided to hold the festival on a 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York—some 50 miles from Woodstock—owned by Max Yasgur.

By the time the weekend of the festival arrived, the group had sold a total of 186,000 tickets and expected no more than 200,000 people to show up. By Friday night, however, thousands of eager early arrivals were pushing against the entrance gates. Fearing they could not control the crowds, the promoters made the decision to open the concert to everyone, free of charge. Close to half a million people attended Woodstock, jamming the roads around Bethel with eight miles of traffic.