BLOGGING

Well hoodah-I have now blogged. I feel better already.
That is it for now.
Dad

American Idols LIVE! Tour Report

For those who didn't hear, Carrie won tickets to the American Idol concert on Friday. Floor seats, about 8 rows back. The evening included a 'Meet & Greet' with the performers. There’s way too much information to get into real detail about any one thing, so I’m just going to list a bunch of random thoughts and impressions I got, starting with the ‘Meet & Greet’ portion of the evening.

-A representative from the tour met a large group of us at the Will Call of the arena. I was expecting for the meet & greet to happen pretty quickly, but we were all kept waiting just inside Will Call for 30-45 minutes or so. I’m guessing they had problems rounding the performers up and getting them to the meet.

-Now, I’ve never been to a concert meet & greet. Maybe I’m naïve, but I figured we’d get a chance to talk and mingle with the Idols. No such luck. We were ushered downstairs into a large room where the Idols were seated behind a long table with a box of Pop Tarts in front of every other person, signing autographs like an assembly line. If we didn’t have anything to sign, we were given picture of all the Idols.

-We were expected and instructed to keep the line moving. We were not to touch the Idols. We were not to ask to have our picture taken with the Idols. We were to not ask the Idols to say hello to our grandma (which is what I was hoping Elliott would do for a friend of mine).

-Even with the short time we spent at the meet & greet, the Idols behavior was consistent with what we had seen on TV. Taylor seemed to be humming along to a tune only he could hear. Ace made sure to make contact with every person in line and thank him or her for coming.

-I asked Katherine if she was getting tired of doing all this publicity. She smiled and said no, but she actually mouthed it. So, for what it’s worth, it did appear that her voice problems are genuine.

-Almost all the Idols seemed very pleasant. There was only one who seemed annoyed or bothered to be there. And, no, I won’t say who it was, other than to say it wasn’t anyone I’ve mentioned so far.

-I was hoping to get a bag of loot from the concert. A free hat or program, maybe a meal. Other than the cast photo, we got diddly.

-This is an indicator of the audience. Between the meet & greet and the concert, Carrie and I had supper at a pizzeria near the arena. Out of maybe 150 people in the dining room, maybe a dozen were men. The number of people under 16 was about equal to those above 16.

Now, the concert:

-I’d like to apologize to all the Idols on behalf of the audience. Mandisa started a trend of all the Idols of asking the audience to get on their feet. This is Columbus. Unless you’re singing the OSU fight song, we don’t do ‘get on your feet.’

-Mandisa mistakenly called Columbus ‘Columbia.’ Understandable mistake when you’ve been touring for a month and don’t know which state you’re in, much less what city. Still the audience let her know of her mistake.

-She dedicated one of her songs to the bass player in the band. He didn’t seem to be expecting it, so it makes you wonder what’s going on back stage.

-I would say the note of the collective scream the audience hit when Ace appeared on stage would be a B-Sharp.

-By the time Ace finished singning ‘Father Figure,’ every girl under 12 had achieved puberty.

-His version of ‘Harder to Breathe’ is a lot better than I expected it to be. I could see him doing well with that kind of music.

-Even though he did this weird thing with his chest that simulated a heartbeat. The girls seemed to love it, but I thought it was a little creepy, and Carrie couldn’t stop laughing.

-He’s awfully fond of the arms-outstretched-Messiah pose on stage.

-This is just my opinion, but Lisa got voted out a lot sooner than she deserved. She’s got a professionalism that’s beyond her age. I think if she had waited to audition until she was 21, she could have taken the entire thing.

-And she plays keyboards.

-On the flip side, she like mellow 70s hits of Elton John.

-Lisa called Paris her best friend.

-During ‘Waterfalls,’ they had fairly complex choreography.

-It’s something about Lisa’s smile. More than any other Idol—including Taylor—she looked like she was having the absolute time of her life the entire evening.

-On her own, Paris danced like she was getting her freak on.

-That reminds me, I just wanted to say that all the performers seemed much more comfortable on the tour stage than they ever did on the show. But Paris was the most noticeable.

-Not much to say about Bucky.

-Bucky and Kellie, on the other hand… During their duet of ‘You’re the One that I Want,’ neither one of them seemed like they wanted to be there, like they were more concerned with their choreography than with the song. In comparison to Paris and Lisa, Kellie and Bucky could barely do the box step.

-No offense to Kellie, but I have a jar of pennies on my desk that has more stage presence than she did. She moved gracefully but stiff, like she had adopted her training as a high school beauty queen as a way of life.

-To her benefit, when she took off her leather jacket to reveal a corset underneath, I totally forgot about her stage presence.

-She ended the first half of the show before the intermission, saying she couldn’t wait to get out of her corset so she could breathe again. But when she reappeared in the encore, she was wearing another corset.

-Before the concert started and during the intermission, people were encouraged to send text messages to a number and have their messages projected on the video screens. There were plenty of messages of people proclaiming their undying love for Ace and Chris. ‘ace I love u marry me,’ ‘chris have my baby,’ stuff like that. But I think my favorite was ‘Marry me PopTarts.’

-Oh, and evidently someone actually proposed via text message before the concert started. And she said yes, so that was kind of cool.

-At the beginning of the concert and at the end of intermission, they played the title sequence of this last season, followed by a fast-cut montage of moments from the season. Maybe it’s just me, but I was bugged by the fact that they didn’t actually put Taylor in the title sequence. How hard could it have been, and it would have been a way to acknowledge his place among the Idol winners.

-If the note for Ace was a B-sharp, the one as Chris took the stage was High C. And if the girls went nuts for Ace, all their mothers went straight into heat for Chris.

-Chris had more solo songs than any performer other than Taylor.

-Since smoking has been banned indoors in Columbus, and is generally frowned upon by society, most people don’t have lighters to wave anymore. But what do we have? Cell phones.

-Note to Elliott Yamin: Next time you duet with Chris, YOU pick the song. Nickelback just isn’t your gig, man.

-By the end of the series, Elliott had cleaned himself and looked really snazzy with his ‘Rat Pack Nouveau’ look. For the concert he looked rumpled in black jeans, a black button-down and backwards baseball cap. Totally the wrong look for the kind of music he soloed with.

-I was surprised by the fact that there were no back-up singers on stage with the Idols. Were they backstage, or were they on a backing track?

-Best Song of the Night goes to the quartet of Elliott, Chris, Ace & Bucky on ‘Patience.’ It deserved to be the bonus track on the CD, as it showcased the best skills of all four performers.

-Number of men who played musical instruments: 3 (Taylor on guitar, harmonica and tambourine; Chris and Bucky on guitar).

-Number of women who played musical instruments: 1 (Lisa on keyboard)

-Katherine is still under restriction and could only do two songs, ‘Black Horse and a Cherry Tree’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’

-She was in a cast from breaking her leg. How did I miss that in earlier posts?

-While almost everybody else either dressed casually or ‘stage casual,’ Katherine stood out by wearing a long, flowing black gown reminiscent of her infamous yellow gown.

-Another notable song missing from the line-up: the girls’ ‘Man! I feel Like A Woman.’ Which is too bad, because I was really looking forward to it. I wonder why it was cut.

-Taylor just rocks. He may not be the best singer of the bunch, but he is easily the best performer.

-He came charging through the audience from the back of the auditorium to the stage, passing right past my aisle seat. Yay me!

-I was close enough to touch him as he passed if arena security hadn’t jock-blocked me. Boo security guy!

-However, I was close enough to get a good look at the seat cover with lapels he calls a jacket.

-Here’s the reason Taylor deserved to win American Idol: he makes every song his own. All the other contestants were singing covers of a famous song. With Taylor, you forget he’s singing a Stevie Wonder tune about racism.

-And I finally figured out what his dancing style reminds me of: Elaine from Seinfeld.

-My number one pet peeve about any concert: Forced encores. Why do performers continue to insist on trying to fake out the audience? Taylor says good night and leaves the stage. The rest of the band leaves the stage, but nobody turns up the lights. Are we really supposed to believe that they’re NOT coming back? Encores should be spontaneous, when the audience just will NOT let the performers go without one more song. When they’re pre-planned, it makes the whole thing feel disingenuous.

-But even I have to admit this: I actually got chills watching everyone on stage doing ‘We Are the Champions.’

-On the other hand, I got the distinct impression that Taylor had totally forgotten the words to ‘Living in America.’

-Oh, one last thing—what I said at the beginning about Columbus not getting on our feet for anything short of a BCS Bowl… we got on our feet for Taylor and stayed on them.

You know, Brian, you could do this...

Who's the big winner?

I won two tickets to the American Idol concert coming to Columbus on 8/11, INCLUDING backstage passes for meet-and-greet.

Guess what Wes and I will be doing next Friday?!?!?!?!?!?

Try not to turn too green!

I bet it was Dad who stole this cat

http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/07/18/20060718-B3-03.html

Homecoming, poison ivy, and X-ray vision

Helllllloooooo.... Is there anybody out there? WELCOME HOME, TESSY!!!!

I have poison ivy on my face. By Sunday morning it had gone to my eyelids. The left one was all swelled up. I didn't go to church on Sunday. By Monday I had it in my throat. I went to the doctor and now I'm on the roids, so try not to be too jealous of the toned physique and cute little goatee I will shortly be developing.

I was framing some pictures to hang, and I showed one to Wes. "This is the goods," I said. He looked at it. "What is this, your dad? he asked. "Yup", I said, "but more importantly, look at what he's holding -- that's good blackmail right there, that is!" Wes said, "You mean the rabbit he's holding?"

Dun dun DUN.

I looked closely.

Wes and his stupid Superman X-ray vision. He's right. It IS a rabbit that dad is holding in that picture. And all these years I thought it was a cat. Stupid me. Stupid no more blackmail.

A Basket of Poo

Today I happened to notice a short story that I wrote exactly a year ago. Although you've seen it before, I thought I would post it for your enjoyment:

*********************

A Basket of Poo


Mr. and Mrs. Smith bought a house. “Look, look,” said Mr. Smith. “It is a nice house.”

“It is a very pretty house,” said Mrs. Smith. “We should have pets to live in this pretty house with us.”

Many pets came to live with Mr. and Mrs. Smith in the pretty house. Some of the pets were big. Some of them were small. All of the pets were stupid.

“Look, look,” said Mrs. Smith. “See our stupid pets. We have a stupid dog, and two stupid cats, and stupid fish.”

Mr. and Mrs. Smith did not know that stupid mice also lived in their house. One day Mrs. Smith came home. There was a mouse in the kitchen.

“Look, look,” screamed Mrs. Smith. “Look, stupid cats. There is a mouse.” The cats did not say anything. They were too stupid.

Another day Mr. Smith said, “Look, look, Mrs. Smith. There is a mouse running around the living room.” Mrs. Smith stood on the couch. “Look, look, Mr. Smith,” she screamed. “Catch the stupid mouse.”

Mr. Smith caught the mouse and put it outside. The next day Mrs. Smith went downstairs to feed the stupid cats. She put her hand in the bag of cat food. She screamed and ran up the stairs.

“Look, look, Mr. Smith!” she said. “There is a mouse in the bag of cat food.” Mr. Smith went downstairs. He was down there for a long time. He did not tell Mrs. Smith what he did with the mouse in the bag of cat food. She did not ask.

After that, Mr. and Mrs. Smith saw many stupid mice. One day Mr. Smith said, “Look, look, Mrs. Smith. Our cats are too stupid to catch mice. We should not have stupid pet mice in our house. We should buy mouse traps.”

“You are right,” said Mrs. Smith. So the next day she bought mouse traps at the store.

Mr. Smith took a mouse trap. He put peanut butter in it. He took it downstairs and put it in the closet next to the bag of cat food. “Look, look, Mrs. Smith,” he said. “I will catch the stupid mouse that likes to eat cat food.”

“Why don’t you look in the closet and see if you can find the mouse nest?” asked Mrs. Smith.

“You are right,” said Mr. Smith. So he looked in the closet. In the closet were many things. There were baseball gloves and volleyball knee pads and jump ropes. There were knee braces and shin guards and baseball bats. There was also a large basket to put all those things in.

Mr. Smith took the basket out of the closet and looked in it. When he had taken out the baseball gloves and volleyball knee pads and jump ropes and knee braces and shin guards and baseball bats, there were still several large lumps of something left in the basket. It looked like thousands and thousands of tiny somethings that had clumped together into three large piles.

“Look, look, Mrs. Smith,” he said. She came downstairs and looked.

“What is that?” she asked.

“It is a basket of mouse poo,” said Mr. Smith.

Mrs. Smith said a word. She said the word in Dutch.

“That’s right,” said Mr. Smith. “Poo.”

My thoughts

I think that all grownups should get a 3-month summer vacation. With pay.

Teenagers could continue to run Dairy Queens for us, so we'd be able to get our ice cream. And that's all you really need in the summer, right?

I saw a dead possum this morning

Is that thrilling or what?

We finished our winter projects on Saturday. Only about 3 months or so behind schedule, eh? But there is now a bannister in the upstairs hallway along the stairwell, making it much more difficult to fall down the stairs from the side, so that's nice.

We watched 4 movies this weekend:

The new Pirates of the Caribbean
Swingers
The Princess Bride
Hitch

This is what we are forced to do now that we have finished the high-pressure need to work on that particular remodelling project -- relax. It is a strange sensation indeed.

Update on Paul Janssen

The latest update from Chuck late Thursday night:

Paul is being kept in an induced coma in order to stop him from fighting the ventilator and other tubes going into and out of his body. The primary problem is his lungs. They were badly bruised in the accident, and he inhaled water while lying unconscious in a ditch. The ventilator and induced coma are to allow his lungs to begin healing. The idea is to gradually bring him out of the coma and encourage his lungs to work by themselves.

He went through a crisis on Wednesday evening. His chest cavity began to fill up with air, and his blood oxygen, pulse and blood pressure readings went down. The doctor (the doctor who was on call that night, who "happened" to be the chief of that department) called in Chuck and Shelley and said, "We are running out of options here." He did, however, say that as a last-ditch effort, they would change the ventilator tube. Chuck and Shelly went back out to the waiting room while that was being done and began to storm Heaven with prayer.

Within a few hours, Paul's vital signs had improved to a point where they were even better than before. Later that morning, the doctor saw Chuck in the hospital cafeteria and told him that he was amazed at Paul's recovery. He confessed that the night before, he had not had much hope of Paul's survival. The doctor recommended that Chuck and Shelley continue to pray, because "we are seeing a real miracle here." The doctor, by the way, is Jewish.

In the meantime, Paul's regular doctor (the one who has been in charge of his case since the accident) had expressed concern that no one had seen Paul move his legs. He told the Janssens he was going to order an MRI to see if there was a blood clot in the spine. Now, that morning, before speaking to the doctor, Chuck had suddenly recalled an old song we used to sing, that goes something like this: "Every place on which your foot shall tread, I have given it to you, I have given it to you..." Chuck was impressed to sing this song over Paul and pray for fulfillment of that promise---this was still before the doctor had expressed concern about Paul's legs. After the doctor talked to them about it, Chuck told Shelley about the song. Shelley's mouth dropped open, and she said, "But the Lord reminded ME about that song this morning, too, and I sang it over Paul!"

They laid hands on Paul's legs and began to pray. Paul moved his left leg back and forth. They ran out to tell a nurse, and she went in and saw Paul's leg move, too. When it was reported to the doctor, his mouth fell open. He cancelled the planned MRI.

So for now, prayer continues to be needed for Paul's lungs to heal. The plan, at this point, is to gradually bring him out of the coma over several days and see if he can breathe on his own.

a few photos

sorry, right now i'm too tired to explain in detail these photos. the one of me and naoki was taken my last night at Helan's house. notice the short hair. Naoki gave me his baseball hat from his Japanese team, that's what I'm wearing.

and the other two photos are from Ingrid's homestay, it's a really nice house, lots of old and antique stuff...i'll explain it later. just thought you might like to have a peek at it. okay, nitey nite for me! enjoy the 4th of July.

no photo yet

sorry, haven't gotten around to taking a photo of my hair. but i did go to a hair stylist and get it fixed up. it's not bad now, but a little too short for my taste. jamie summed it up pretty well the other day. i came downstairs early in the morning, having just been forcibly woken up by my alarm. he said "steph! look at your hair!" i said "what does it look like?" he said "it looks...tired!"

More on mice

So at lunchtime today I decided to fetch something from the downstairs freezer. I opened the basement door, and had to stand stock-still to take in the little tableau before me:

At the bottom of the stairs were two cat food dishes, from which our two indoor cats, Bert and Ernie, are served their ridiculously expensive meals (they’re on a special diet thanks to Ernie throwing the cat equivalent of a kidney stone last year).

Directly in front of one of the dishes sat Ernie.

In one of the dishes sat a mouse, nibbling away at the tidbits left behind after the cats’ morning buffet.

Ernie was boredly observing the mouse – not as if he were stalking it, not even as if he found the mouse particularly interesting – certainly not as if he intended to do anything about it – and the mouse continued to eat.

Ernie could literally have stretched out his neck to snap up a mouthful of mouse, but he chose not to.

Apparently our cats are taking their diet way too seriously.

Guess what Wes will be doing when he gets home tonight?

thine hair shall be chopped...

ying cut my hair this evening. i was terrified the whole time. i won't go into details...it looks okay. i'm just not going to think about it, maybe on monday i will sneak down to the hair salon and ask them to clean it up for me without making it look too noticeable that they did anything. i think mom would like the style, it's just kinda messily done. anyway..........only one week left in this homestay, then i'll be with some friends for a week, then Uluru, then home! i'll put a couple photos on here of my new hair when i get a chance.

Kra-KOOM!

So we all know that I'm going to a chiropractor, right? Well, I've been going to a chiropractor for the past week or two. This week I've spent three hours on what they call a 'decompression table' designed to seperate my vertebrae, but what amounts to a medieval rack. Because I'm just starting this therapy, I'm required to spend the rest of my evening on my back, usually watching movies on the couch so my vertebrae don't reset (tough life, I know).

ANYWAY... Yesterday a nasty storm blew through Delaware, and on my way home from the doctor's office I saw a half-dozen branches blown off the trees, and power was out on the main road through town. Every time a galer like this hits, I'm afraid that the trees just south of our house will blow over. That didn't happen, but something else did.

I was flat on my back (watching Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, check you're local listings), when she asked me to come outside and see something. We walked to the back of the property, where she showed me that the largest remaining tree on our land had been split down to the trunk, and a large strip of moss had been turned black.

Looks like lightning, but since we weren't there when it happened, it's hard to tell.

When I was growing up, something similar happened to a tree in my parent's yard, where my family could see it. Lightening struck a tree and scored it in a spiral like the thread of a screw, then jumped to another tree with the same root system and shot up it like a bottle rocket. At least one of the trees died. I don't know what that means for the tree in our backyard.

In other news... I've formally and officially gotten Carrie addicted to Lost. Our local library carries a lot of DVDs of TV shows by season. I reserved the set at the beginning of April, and it just came in last week.

Once I got her to sit still for an hour, we ended up watching 17 episodes over the course of 2 days. She's so hooked she actually chose to watch a couple of episodes over working on the stairwell.

Hello Little One!

Here is what our Little One looks like. Everything looks good so far!

Kiss Me, I'm an Uncle!

So, among the other things my parents talked about as they were at our house for lunch yesterday, we learned that my brother has a 12 year old daughter he didn't know about. Dan was slapped with a paternity suit earlier in the year, and he took the test to fight it.

You can figure out how that turned out.

Her name is Taylor, but we don't know too much about her. We believe she is living in Kentucky with relatives. Her mother is unmarried, and we think that she has 3-4 other kids, each with possibly different fathers. Beyond that, we don't have much more info on her. Not even a photo.

Dan's going to have to pay child support, but in return he does get visitation rights. It's doubtful he'll pursue it, but my parents would at least like to meet their first grandchild, even if they know that they won't have much of an influence in her life.

This is the way we wash our clothes, wash our clothes, wash our clothes

This is how we get dressed in the morning now:

We get up, shower, brush, do whatever we have to do, and put on some sort of undergarments.

We pick out our clothes for work for the day, walk out to the end of the scaffolding that has been filling up our stairwell since Friday, and hang them on the end of said scaffolding.

(At this point I usually like to take my shoes and toss them over the end of the scaffolding in such a way as to maximize the scaring of the allegedly starving animals congregated at the bottom of the steps. (There are usually 5 (animals, not steps) at the moment, as we are dog-sitting for Drew and Lesley.))

Then we climb over (which scares the willies out of me, hanging 5 feet above the nearest step) or through (which requires one to do the limbo -- twice) the scaffolding, to get downstairs.

Then we can simply pick up our work clothes and get dressed downstairs!

Handy, aye?

Running

I have some exciting news. As some of you may know, I joined Curves about 3 weeks ago and have been working out regularly 3 to 4 times a week. I am feeling great and I really like it there. Anyway, I decided today that I really need to get myself in shape as well - not just lose weight - for soccer. (The team had there first game on Monday night for the Wooster league that they are in for the summer and just kicking balls with the girls and showing some of them proper techniques made me winded and tired.) So today, a day that I do not work out at Curves, I got up and ran before Mike left for work. I ran a whole mile without stopping at all. I was so proud of myself. I know for some of you this might seem silly and trivial, but for me it is a milestone. I have walked many miles for workouts, and walked/ran many miles, but it has been years since I have been able to run the whole mile without stopping. So I think Curves must be doing a lot for my stamina as well as losing weight and toning my muscles. It took me 13 minutes to run it and I could probably walk it just as fast if not faster, but walking never seems to get my heart rate up as much and I don't feel as good about doing it when I walk. Anyway, my next goal will be to get the mile down to 10 minutes which is about as fast as I ran it even when I was playing soccer in high school.

And by the way...

...you're standing in bull ka-ka.