the view from my balcony

ahhh, the joys of pollution :) Here are a few pictures I took from my balcony - a few days apart - when I was waking up really early for work [both were taken shortly before or after 6:30am on different days in the last week of July '08]

busy busy busy

I've been so busy the past few weeks that I haven't even had the time to think about writing a blog chronicling the things that have been keeping me busy. But here I am... during a surprising [and very welcome] respite from the constant onslaught at work.

Last night I went to the Weird Al concert with Erlynne and Chris. It was great! During the costume changes they showed videos which were hilarious. :)

The last two concerts I went to before Weird Al were Ours, and Yaz. The 'Ours' show was amazing. Ours was great, but more surprisingly, BOTH of the opening bands were really good. I bought the CDs they had there at the show and fell in love with one of the bands. They're called God or Julie. I haven't gotten this hyped about a new band discovery since Mika. You can get God or Julie's album "This Road Before" on iTunes, and I highly recommend that you do!

The Yaz show was also great. They peformed pretty much their entire catalog. A few of the songs had been re-worked and hopefully they'll release some kind of live versions and/or DVD at some point.

Now the next concert I look forward to is Nine Inch Nails. First, my friend Tony and I will be taking a road trip down to Houston to see them on August 16th. Then my friend Brock will join Tony and I to see them again in Dallas on August 18th. I've been listening to the NIN cds again, getting stoked!

Some of the other things that have been keeping me busy lately are watching movies and going to plays. I finally saw Iron Man at the dollar theater the other day and really liked it. I'd be excited to see what a sequel will present. I also saw "Baby Mama" [with Tina Fey and Amy Pohler] at the dollar theater - if you haven't seen it yet I recommend it. I laughed a lot. A friend brought over some DVDs one night and I finally saw "Lars and the Real Girl." Another one I would highly recommend. It made me cry - like 2 or 3 times...

My friend Chris is currently in a theater class and had to see and review 3 different plays. Since he didn't want to go alone, and of his friends, I'm the only one up for such a thing, I went with him to all of them. We saw Footloose [the musical] a british play called "House" [we didn't see it's companion play "Garden" though] and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." During both "Footloose" and "A Funny Thing..." I felt like I might have seen each of those plays at some time before in my life... but wasn't really sure, as my memory can best be described as "very spotty" now.

Footloose was put on by the Plano Repertory Theater. It was hard to sit through. The singing was sometimes ok - sometimes not. The acting was bad, the direction was bad. You definitely weren't missing anything if you didn't see this production.

In the next play - House - the acting/direction was all good, but the play itself was billed as a comedy and I think I only slightly chuckled at maybe two or three lines the whole time. It was just generally uninteresting and often boring. It had companion piece called Garden, being performed simultaneously by the same cast in the adjacent theater. Each piece was billed as standing on its own, but there were a bunch of things in the play we saw that made absolutely no sense without seeing the other one. Perhaps seeing the other one would have made it better, but I don't think I could have sat through another boring play just to get the other pieces to the bewildering puzzle.

"A funny thing happened..." was put on at the Watertower Theater in Addison. It was at least entertaining, and sometimes actually humourous. The actors certainly brought energy to the show. Overall good.

Should I BE this excited about an IRON?

I haven't been the owner of decent iron at any point in my life before and the latest hand-me-down I got from Lady was very problematic, basically making any clothes I tried to iron with it worse off than where they started. I've got all these shirts I never wear because I don't have an iron and even I wouldn't wear something THAT wrinkly.

So I decided it's time to buy an iron for myself. I have done this one time before - back when I was living in the townhouse in Allen. I didn't want to spend a lot of money and I basically got what I paid for. After about a year the heat setting knob broke and came off.

This time, I decided, is going to be different. I went online and did reasearch. I went to the Consumer Reports website and their "best buy pick" was a Black & Decker Digital Advantage D2030, which I searched for on a few shopping sites and realized that buy.com [where I have all my credit card points accumulating] had it for just over $50, and I had enough points that I cashed in and only paid out of pocket about $3.58. So I'm getting the sweetest iron out there, probably better than anyone else I know - and it cost me less than $4.00!!! And shipping was free! Unfortunately I can't get the instant satisfaction of having it right now... but nearly free is worth waiting for a few days of shipping.

I'm kind of surprised at how excited about this I am. I can't wait to let my new iron loose on all my jeans [the legs always get twisted around in the dryer] and I'll finally be able to wear all of my shirts without looking sloppy.

update

Haven't written any new blogs in a while... I actually just looked and was surprised to see that the last one here was over a month ago. It's not that nothing has been going on, just that I haven't taken the time to write it down. I'll summarize some of the highlights of the past month...

The summer concert-going season has started with a bang. I went to see a band called Rilo Kiley on June 15. Then a week later, on June 22 I went to see the "True Colors" tour - with Cyndi Lauper, The B-52's, Joan Jett, Andy Bell, and Wanda Sykes doing comedy. Both were very good shows. Lots of fun. Coming up later this summer I'm going to see the following:

July 12 - Ours [it's ok if you've never heard of them - most people haven't]
July 22 - Yaz [they got back together for a reunion tour]
August 6 - Weird Al
August 16 - Nine Inch Nails [in Houston]
August 18 - Nine Inch Nails [in Dallas]

So yea, I'll be losing some more hearing, as if I wasn't already deaf enough...

Work has been somewhat stressful. We're short one person, so the rest of us have to work harder to pick up the slack, and last Friday another of the ladies gave her 2 weeks notice. So it won't be getting any easier in the immediate future... :( At least on the plus side, I'm getting into the groove a little bit better and getting the hang of the job. I'm also planning to take the entire first week of September off and do my traveling for the year. I'm thinking I'll hit both San Diego and Phoenix the first part of my time off, then head to Boston to visit my brother for our collective birthdays. Gotta check with everybody to make sure that will be a good time to visit.

I also got a pretty sweet new digital camera [which is to credit for the new profile pic on here.] It's not as awesome as Clark and Guinevere's [I decided to go a lot cheaper] but it's still better than any camera I've ever had previously. Hopefully I'll actually be able to put it to use and get some sweet photos to put up here...

Faceplant!

dah dah dum dum dum, another one bites the dust!

At the end of my weekly bike ride I decided to take the short cut across the field back to my friends' house where we had started the ride from. The normally dry ditch had some water in it, but I didn't think twice about it - surely my bike tire would just roll right out... but nope - I went down in the ditch and the front tire stuck hard - at which point I proceeded to flip head over handlebars and land face-first in the dirt. Luckily I only ended up with a scrape on my chin and no broken teeth or bones. My jaw was a little sore the rest of the day, but that was it. I fully expected some latent aches today, too, but there were none. Not even mild whiplash. Lucky to have escaped pretty much unscathed from my first bike accident in approximately 20 years...

life is good

Ahhh. I just got back yesterday from a great vacation [which I had really been needing] and although it got started off on the wrong foot [explanation to come on that in a bit] the rest of the time was great.


Today, back at work, I got the official offer of employment, and thanks to some great acting by me in the interview [i.e. 'life is hard on what I'm making now,'] and my stellar performance on the job so far, the salary they're offering me is more than what I was making at my last permanent job [a job which had me constantly at my wit's end.] Here's a quick comparison of this new job vs the last [permanent] one: Making more money, working only 40 hours, a manageable workload, better co-workers and bosses, quarterly and yearly bonuses, a MUCH larger company [so there's room for growth or transfer if I decide I'm tired of what I'm doing.] Oh yea, and I'm in a better apartment that costs less. So yea, things kinda fell into place, creating a great relief for me.



Now for the vacation:

First, before we even left for the airport, our flight had been pushed back from it's original 5pm whatever start time to 6pm. But we still left my place at about 3:30pm. Before I left I checked online where it showed that the flight was delayed and the departure time would then be 7:30. When we get into the airport at the gate it shows the departure time listed as 8pm. So already, we're 2 hours behind what the airline said. Well, everyone hurries on board about 8pm because there are thunderstorms coming and we'd like to get out before they hit. No such luck. As they are loading the bags someone notices some kind of tear in some lining in the plane so they have to have a mechanic come look at it. Because he's doing that, they can't load any baggage. Time goes by... he finishes looking at it and decides it's OK to go, but by that time it's already raining and before they can start loading bags again there is lightning. They close the ramp [because for the people on the ground it's akin to being in a swimming pool during a lightning storm] and we have to sit and wait. More time goes by... When the lightning FINALLY clears out, they load the bags and we miraculously start moving. Well, don't get your hopes up too, high, however... because of the previously closed ramp status there are 20something other planes ahead of us in line to take off. At a few minutes each, that adds up to another hour... because of the wind pattern they route us around the airport to the far side so we can be ready to take off, but by the time it's getting close to our turn, the weather has moved through, the winds have changed and they make us taxi to the opposite end of the airport. And it's not like Dallas is a little tiny airport. It's like... 20 miles from one end to the other. I don't remember exact times, but I know that by the time we actually FINALLY took off it had been 4 hours since we had gotten on the plane. THEN we still had the 2 and 1/2 hour flight to go. When we finally got to Utah it was 2 or 3 am [I don't remember exactly because everything was kind of hazy about then] but it ended up being a good 12hour voyage from the time we left my house until the time we got to my aunt Carol's where we were staying. I'd say that qualifies as the height of ridiculousness. We could have DRIVEN half the distance in that time. The rest of the trip, however, was wonderful. There was always something fun going on and we got to spend lots of time together as siblings [something I had been missing... a lot.]

paying for my wreck

My insurance renewal bill came today - first time since my accident last October, and it's over $200 bucks more for the 6 month period than I was paying previously. I don't guess switching providers would save me much... would it?

I'm slowly but surely getting things at my new place in order. There's still a good deal of chaos right now as I unpack boxes. I have had a surprising Lady-like obsession with cleaning every surface of my new place, though. The other day I took a wet cloth to the screen door on the patio - the cloth was BLACK by the time I was done wiping the screen down.