A tasty melange
I continue to take the easy way out and add things to del.icio.us and Flickr rather than blogging. But faced with the task of writing yearly performance reviews for 14 coworkers and managers and my self, blogging amounts to procrastination. And I am all about procrastination.
A week ago Thursday, Alice, Adam, Sheryl and I braved the wilds of mid-Jersey, replete with trashmonkeys (Adam's term; I assume he's "taking it back"), to see Ryan Adams at the Starland Ballroom. It was an incredibly good show for a hardcore Ryan Adams fan. Heavy on Cold Roses (which was exactly what I wanted it to be), with some older stuff thrown in as well. The highlight for me was a fully electric version of "I See Monsters" off of Love is Hell, which took a so-so acoustic song and made it rock. I've looked around for a live version of it, and while I found that archive.org has a large collection of Ryan Adams concerts, none of the "I See Monsters" posted are electric. Ryan was obviously intoxicated, polite and a bit chatty. He and the Cardinals did two encores, the second one coming after they'd already put on the house lights in the Ballroom, prompting the following from Ryan: "We were just going out for a smoke and we come back and it's like, it's gone, they're packing up. It's like if you worked at a Books-a-Million and you go out for a second and you come back and the store's gone." I liked that.
The next day I flew out to Seattle/Redmond and was there for a week. I got to spend the weekend with Scotter and Rachel before the developer's conference thing I was attending started up. Scotter and I had our requisite Dick's within a few hours of my flight landing, of course. I arrived in the middle of the hottest weather in Seattle history (97 degrees is the record? Get a real climate.) and we tried to beat the heat at the movies on Saturday. I was very pleasantly surprised by Clerks II: Kevin Smith has had such an awful string of movies (I haven't enjoyed any of them since the first Clerks), so I wasn't expecting much, and it's obviously hard for sequels to live up to viewers' expectations. I'm not saying that it's better than the original or anything, but I laughed quite a bit. The kicker was that nothing in Seattle is air conditioned, not even the movie theaters, so we didn't really cool off too much inside.
I spent the rest of last week in a hotel in Redmond, walking 20 minutes each way to the Microsoft campus. (No car rentals for me!) I'm not going to say much about that as I'm probably not allowed too, other than the fact that there are many freezers full of free Good Humor in Microsoft buildings. I was selling out my Mac street cred by eating it, but hey, it was hot.
There wasn't much to do in the hotel on the nights that Scotter didn't visit, so I started watching The Show with Ze Frank, and got hooked. I remember reading the Times article about him a few months back, and knew that he lived in my neighborhood, but it took lonely evenings in a hotel room without a working TV to get me watching.
I'd be remiss not to mention the beagle puppy that Scotter and Rachel plan on getting once it's weaned. We went down to Olympia (which has to be the bumbliest-fuck state capitol anywhere) to see it ahead of time though. I'd be remisser not to mention the alpaca(!!!) that the beagle's owner also had on their property. I wish we had seen it earlier, but we spotted it as we were leaving and I couldn't get in close for a good picture.
A week ago Thursday, Alice, Adam, Sheryl and I braved the wilds of mid-Jersey, replete with trashmonkeys (Adam's term; I assume he's "taking it back"), to see Ryan Adams at the Starland Ballroom. It was an incredibly good show for a hardcore Ryan Adams fan. Heavy on Cold Roses (which was exactly what I wanted it to be), with some older stuff thrown in as well. The highlight for me was a fully electric version of "I See Monsters" off of Love is Hell, which took a so-so acoustic song and made it rock. I've looked around for a live version of it, and while I found that archive.org has a large collection of Ryan Adams concerts, none of the "I See Monsters" posted are electric. Ryan was obviously intoxicated, polite and a bit chatty. He and the Cardinals did two encores, the second one coming after they'd already put on the house lights in the Ballroom, prompting the following from Ryan: "We were just going out for a smoke and we come back and it's like, it's gone, they're packing up. It's like if you worked at a Books-a-Million and you go out for a second and you come back and the store's gone." I liked that.
The next day I flew out to Seattle/Redmond and was there for a week. I got to spend the weekend with Scotter and Rachel before the developer's conference thing I was attending started up. Scotter and I had our requisite Dick's within a few hours of my flight landing, of course. I arrived in the middle of the hottest weather in Seattle history (97 degrees is the record? Get a real climate.) and we tried to beat the heat at the movies on Saturday. I was very pleasantly surprised by Clerks II: Kevin Smith has had such an awful string of movies (I haven't enjoyed any of them since the first Clerks), so I wasn't expecting much, and it's obviously hard for sequels to live up to viewers' expectations. I'm not saying that it's better than the original or anything, but I laughed quite a bit. The kicker was that nothing in Seattle is air conditioned, not even the movie theaters, so we didn't really cool off too much inside.
I spent the rest of last week in a hotel in Redmond, walking 20 minutes each way to the Microsoft campus. (No car rentals for me!) I'm not going to say much about that as I'm probably not allowed too, other than the fact that there are many freezers full of free Good Humor in Microsoft buildings. I was selling out my Mac street cred by eating it, but hey, it was hot.
There wasn't much to do in the hotel on the nights that Scotter didn't visit, so I started watching The Show with Ze Frank, and got hooked. I remember reading the Times article about him a few months back, and knew that he lived in my neighborhood, but it took lonely evenings in a hotel room without a working TV to get me watching.
I'd be remiss not to mention the beagle puppy that Scotter and Rachel plan on getting once it's weaned. We went down to Olympia (which has to be the bumbliest-fuck state capitol anywhere) to see it ahead of time though. I'd be remisser not to mention the alpaca(!!!) that the beagle's owner also had on their property. I wish we had seen it earlier, but we spotted it as we were leaving and I couldn't get in close for a good picture.
One beagle...one ring...
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