I heart Cheap Trick… and Heart… and Journey!

Back in April I bought Chad tickets to the Journey/Heart/Cheap Trick concert and last night was finally the night. We got there a little early, got some drinks and popcorn, claimed our seats and there we stayed for nearly four hours as three of the greatest rock bands ever showed what a real concert is supposed to be. It was the first concert I have been to that was a true sing-along from start to finish. Nearly every song had the audience singing, you couldn’t help yourself. We had fairly awesome seats, to the left of the stage in the second section… close enough to see without the help of the large screens and out of reach of the rain clouds. And, as Jonathan Cain (songwriter/piano/keyboard/guitar for Journey) informed us we were the largest crowd ever at the Clark County Amphitheater. Way to make history Journey!

Lights dim and here’s… Cheap Trick!
They started the show and played classics “We’re All Alright,” “I Want You To Want Me,” and “Surrender” among others. The guys were hilarious; Rick Nielsen, lead guitarist, kept throwing picks into the crowd after every song and then threw handfuls when the set was over. Not to mention the fact that he played a new guitar for every song; including a five-neck guitar. I didn’t have a camera on me but here he is playing it at an earlier concert stop:


Two of the guys from Journey made guest appearances during the set and sat in on a couple of songs including “Dream Police” during the encore. You could tell they have a great time backstage.


Next up… Heart!
Those women can ROCK! They played a ton of great songs including “Straight On,” “Magic Man,” “These Dreams,” “Barracuda,” "Crazy on You," “Never,” and covers of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” (one of Chad’s favorites) and The Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me” (one of my favorites) which was nothing short of incredible. The power of Ann’s voice is hard to put into words. Hearing her on the radio is one thing but hearing her live is something you will never forget. She is in a class all her own. And you can’t forget Nancy, jumping and dancing all over the stage while killing her guitar and rocked a harmonica solo during “Never”... Chad has a new crush. No joke, at the end of the night he got a Heart concert shirt and couldn’t stop talking about Nancy. So great.

Unlike Cheap Trick who liked to talk between numbers, Heart just went from one hit into another and the crowd stayed on their feet the entire time. And when Heart left the stage with a standing ovation it wasn’t long before they came back out for a three-song encore.

If you have a chance to see them in concert, do it! I found some videos from this concert series on YouTube you can enjoy:

"Crazy On You":


"Never":



Finally the main attraction… Journey!
When their new lead singer, Arnel Pineda took the stage I held my breath. Could he pull off classic Journey? The answer is a resounding yes! He lights up the stage. I had heard great things about him but you still wonder. He delivers in a big way! He was flying all over the stage all night having the time of his life. It was infectious; you can tell the original band members really get a kick out of him and love the way he gets the audience pumped.


They played a number of songs from their new album and a bunch of favorites like "Any Way You Want It", “After All These Years,” "Faithfully", "Open Arms", “Lights,” "Separate Ways", "When You Love a Woman," "Wheel in the Sky," and "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin’.” And who can forget the encore that included my favorite "Don't Stop Believing." Those of you out there that left a little early to beat the traffic you are losers. You never leave a concert until the house lights go on for that very reason. I would never forgive myself if I missed them playing "Don't Stop Believing." Check it out:



By the end of the night our ears were ringing and our throats hurt from singing so loud. We couldn’t have asked for a better show.

Here’s a nice People.com interview of Journey talking about how they found their new lead singer on YouTube:
Meet Journey's New Singer!

Slipping and Sliding

This has to be the best way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Click here for more!



I accompanied Chad to this year's annual Vernonia Rural Fire Department BBQ and I am pissed I didn't bring my swimsuit. Next year my butt is going to be bruised from sliding down all day. Vasili and Eloise didn't enjoy it so much but they both went down twice all the same. I spent the four plus hours taking over 200 photos and getting a lovely sun burn. Totally worth it.

Stay tuned for home remodeling before and after photos... I just finished the bathroom remodel this weekend and oh how she is beautiful.

Horrible-ly Wonderful

Yes, I have not blogged in a really long time. But I've been busy. Buying a house sucks all your time, and sanity for that matter. But I digress. The purpose of this entry is to share the glory of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Pure genius. I've been waiting weeks for this and yesterday, when it premiered, the site crashed. But it was worth the wait. I can't do it justice. Just watch.

Retro Disneyland

Dad just sent me some pictures from converted family slides. They are from his first trip to Disneyland... in 1958!

I'll upload them as I get them.

Pictures Here!

Hillsboro... 50 years ago.

This could not go unblogged. Growing up we always new where the slides were at my grandma's house. There were boxes, upon boxes of them. And occasionally we would convince my dad, uncle, or grandma to let us see them. They would get out the screen and choose some slides and away we go. The slides cover everything from camping trips to birthdays, and even include my dad's first and only trip to Disneyland when he was a kid. To put that into perspective, the castle still had scafolding on it as it wasn't finished yet.

When my uncle passed away I was given all the slides and my aunt is currently converting them to digtial images. Here are a couple for your enjoyment.

This awesome picture is me and my dad. Every birthday we went out to a special dinner, I believe this is from my kindergarten year. Things to note: my missing teeth, the olive dress my grandma made me that I loved, dad's bitchin' tie, and my favorite... the shag carpet.

The picture below is a view from the front yard of my dad's childhood home. Why is this significant? Glad you asked. See that road that runs horizontal in the distance? That's TV highway. And that field on the left is now the Esplanade. And if you were to stand where his bedroom used to be you would be standing in the home section of Bi-Mart.


Unbeleivable how much things have changed in 50 years.

Arrested Movie

Hells yeah! I just read that Jason Bateman confirmed to E! that he has been approached by Mitch Hurwitz and Ron Howard (the masterminds behind Arrested Development) about making their genius show into a full-length movie. Oh happy day! And it's not just Bateman either, looks like they've talked to the entire cast and they are all on board. Now they just have to wait for the writer's strike to end.

Ugh, the writer's strike needs to end today. Yes, the strike has afforded me ample time to catch up on my reading, do my laundry, and watch a number of horrible movies but I want my shows back damnit!

Lost just came back after nearly 9 months and we are only going to get 8 new episodes instead of ~20. It just isn't fair. The show is so damn good I almost forgot what quality television looked like. And we don't even get all the epsiodes we were promised. I was okay with the 9 month wait because I knew I would get a new episode every week for nearly 5 months. But now I only get 8 and then have to wait another how many months for more!? I'm ready to throw a tantrum.

What am I supposed to watch when the Lost well dries up? American Idol? Survivor? Temptation Island? HELL NO! I would rather eat bugs while being stuck with needles.

So hear my plee AMPTP... pay the writer's for their work and give us our shows back!

Pretty Good Sure As You’re Born!

I love Disneyland, Splash Mountain in particular. To celebrate my 27 years of life I splashed down that mountain 27 times in five days. And I miss it already.

It has been months since my last blog but in my defense I’ve been freaking busy. In November I went to three birthday celebrations, had to go to both California and Arizona for work, and who can forget Thanksgiving. To be fair I love traveling for work, because if you can plan it correctly you get some free time to yourself and get to see things you may have never seen. See that behind me? Yeah, that’s the Grand Canyon. I repeat… I love traveling for work.

December had two more birthday parties, a trip to Seattle for the Dancing With The Stars Tour and an Underground city tour, and Christmas. I think over half of the people I talked to about the tour laughed at me, but jokes on them. It was spectacular. Live band, great dancing, and I got to see Wayne Newton sing Danke Schoen. And yes, that is how you spell it. For anyone that hasn’t done the Underground tour, next time you are in Seattle go on the tour. Chad and I had a blast and now can tell you all about the founding of the city. For Christmas we had a nice relaxed couple of days that involved virtually no cooking or dishes. Glorious. Couple that with the gift of a trip to Disneyland for my birthday and you’ve got one hell of a Christmas celebration.

Which brings us to Disneyland. Wonderful, fantastic, never disappointing Disneyland. Oh we had some memorable moments. Like Chad telling Vasili to “massage” Michael’s back. It turned into him beating him with his ‘tiny ineffectual fists’. I love finding all the random characters not just the popular ones. Plus seeing mom freak out on the Ferris wheel while Eloise sat there like it was a park bench was priceless. Then there’s the continuous trips on Splash Mountain. At one point Chad and I got to just stay on the ride four times in a row without getting off. The ride operators were just laughing at us by the end. We were soaking wet, it was low 50’s outside, and we were laughing hysterically.

Man I can’t wait to go back.

Halloweenies

Calling all pictures! I'm not quite sure how it happened but I only ended up with a toddler-sized handleful of pictures from the party. So I'm making a plea to anyone who took pictures to send them my way. I'll upload them to the album and then we can all get to them. 'Cause Stephan needs his 15 minutes of fame for his kick-ass robot costume. Seriously that thing was incredible!

I can't believe I don't even have a picture of my own costume. How lame is that!?

Oh well, at least we caputred the lobster and the robot (see gallery).

Pumpkin Ball 2007 Photos

Eleven AM and All Is... Well, It's Still Boring.

I'm having serious boredom issues lately. Yes, I have a big party to get together this weekend, I've got my first work-travel for my job coming up, I have to finalize the layout for the November issue of the paper, I've just moved into a new house, my sweet little niece is about to turn 2, and I can't wait to be in Disneyland for my birthday... but I'm still freaking bored!

While I like my current job, and love the people that I work with, I can't help but wonder if a highly skilled chimpanzee could do my job. I am responsible for tracking product interest, software evaluation requests, and facilitating workshops and seminars. This may sound like a lot of hard work but when one of my skills is streamlining processes it becomes a very little amount of work. Hence the boredom.

I spend the first 5-10 minutes of work checking email. I move on to monitoring 3 inboxes for workshop, software eval, and product info requests. I determine if they are valid leads, track them in spreadsheets, enter them into databases if necessary, and forward them on to the necessary people. This takes less than an hour. Which gets me somewhere in the neighborhood of 9:30am.

This is the point in my day that my co-worker (and project leader) Angie stops by the kitchenette (next to my office) for some coffee and a quick chat about what was on TV last night. We are both unashamed TV fans, especially of certain reality shows. We usually spend a significant amount of time chatting about the fools on said shows. On the dockett today was the psychos on The Bachelor and some more Big Brother. Yes, Big Brother is over but we obssessed about it all summer and just can't let it go. Especially now that they are "re-airing" the live feeds. The time is now 10:30am.

I move on to see if I need to order/ship any materials for upcoming events and do whatever tasks I have on the list. I am now at 10:45am. And all caught up on my work for the day.

I now have to sit around and process any new emails and to make sure I am available in case anyone needs help with a random project. So far today, no new emails and no projects on the horizon. Same as yesterday. And the day before.

It's times like these that I get desperate. I promise you that by the time 5pm rolls around I will have watched at least one Netflix, more than one TV show that the networks now make available on their websites, any number of YouTube clips people send my way, read disheartening articles about the presidential candidates and/or global news, and will have stared out my office window for minutes on end without blinking.

I am running out of ways to pass the time.

I’m Going Insane

Last night I dreamt the following…

I was walking down the street in what looked like Heidelberg (a city in Germany I stayed in a couple of years ago). Cobbled streets, quaint shops, just look at the photo.

Anyway, it’s the day before Halloween and I realize that I have no costume. I begin to panic. I’m suddenly walking very briskly through the streets and stumble into a toy/costume shop. For whatever reason I pick up a plastic broom that looks like it would be a part of some hollow light-up holiday lawn decoration, and continue making my way through the store.

When I get to the wig section I realize that I am being pursued by a hostile child, looking to be no more than seven, who contests that I have stolen his broom and he wants it back. I am about to argue that it in no way belongs to him when I wake up.

What the hell!?

I need to think of a costume. Fast. Sure I’ve thought of a ton of costume ideas, but none have been brilliant I assure you.