111 posts tagged “friends”
Progressive Nation 2009 was VERY awesome. As I mentioned before Wassy and I went off to Albany to catch one of our most anticipated concerts of the year. The bands were Scale the Summit, Bigelf, Zappa Plays Zappa and, of course, Dream Theater.
We left for Albany around 3:30 and aside from one small hitch (some local construction had closed one of the lanes of a 2 lane road for 2 freaking miles why the paved it. Totally unnecessary...) we arrived at the parking garage on schedule. We grabbed some sandwiches and headed over to the venue a few blocks away.
Wassy grabbed a ridiculously overpriced t-shirt (seriously...$40 for very thin shirt?? Add $5 if you're XXL) and we settled in for the show.
First up was Scale The Summit which I liked well enough. They were a pretty dorky looking band, honestly. One of the guitarists wore his guitar so high it looked like a necklace. They had good music but it was a little same-y for doing a setlist like that. There's definitely instrumental bands that I like better. After they had their set, we decided to go see what beers they had on tap. They happened to have newcastle which was one of the ones we like (we're kinda picky about beer) and so off we went.
Bigelf started soon after we got back to our seats and man, they blew me away. I liked their studio CD but seeing them live really made the whole thing "click" for me. Very high energy show and their main vocalists is...scary looking. Complete with top hat and a coat with a long beard. I am definitely going to have to pick up more of their stuff.
Zappa Plays Zappa...eh. I had high hopes for this band as it's the sort of music I might enjoy. And sure enough the first couple songs were really good. But then it got...weird. Too weird for me. I need a little song structure in my songs. So instead I spent an hour and 15 minutes being bored.
However, about halfway through the ZPZ set, two obviously huge older Zappa fans came and sat in front of us in matching tshirts and one pair of binoculars. It should be noted at this point that we were sitting in the 9th row. Binoculars at this point seem a bit unnecessary. But use them they did. In fact they sometimes fought over them so they could watch the individual fingerings of the flute/sax player I guess. Anyway, despite being huge zappa fans and practically bouncing up and down through the entire set, they got up and left before ZPZ was finished. They confused the crap out of me...but it gave me something to watch.
After Zappa Plays Zappa, the main wait for DT arrived and, man was it worth it. They have a totally badass way of opening the show this year. Their stage setup is also really cool with a new upgraded video show and some neat stuff that Jordan does with a HDTV behind his setup that has a computer animation of him playing that's synced with the song as he's playing it.
The setlist was A Nightmare to Remember, A Rite Of Passage, Hollow Years, Erotomania, Voices, Prophets of War, The Count of Tuscany and with an encore of Metropolis pt 1. Pretty much the perfect setlist.
Wassy and I were praying that we were going to get Voices this time as it's one of our favorite Dream Theater songs and we thought we'd get it in Washington DC last year, but ended up not getting it. So the moment the first note of Erotomania was played, we went kinda crazy. My throat hurts this morning... But it was so worth it. Voices! It still feels a little like maybe I imagined it. Those were all the songs that I was expecting to hear and even the extended soloing bits in Metropolis pt 1 were pretty cool. Sometimes they can go on too long, but the band was interacting and having a lot of fun which kept things interesting.
James LaBrie was good last night, but I've heard him better. I've also heard him much worse. He hit all the right notes but had a little trouble in Metropolis which is a hard song to sing at the end of the night anyway. He was totally on in the showmanship department. Interacting with the crowd...lots of energy and it looks like he's in better physical shape than he has been in the past few tours too. I was particularly impressed by Jordan and John Petrucci during the introduction to Hollow Years where they had a really neat extended introduction solo that was just the right mix of technical and melodic stuff.
I'd put this as one of the best DT shows that I've gone to (this is my 8th DT show). I do enjoy going to concerts with Wassy as it seems like she has some sort of concert karma that makes the show extra awesome. And going with a friend who's as into it as you are is much more fun than going alone.
After the show got done, a quick walk back over to the parking garage and an easy drive out completed the evening. We ended up making an emergency stop at a McDonalds in Herkimer since we were both pretty hungry after the show and couldn't find anything good on the thruway.
All in all, a very enjoyable evening and well deserving of the anticipation
Well, it seems like August is shaping up to be an extremely busy month for me. He's a rundown of what's going on (so far) this month:
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August 4th - Progressive Nation 09
First up on the list of August events is a concert. Specifically Progressive Nation 09, featuring Dream Theater, Zappa Plays Zappa, Bigelf and Scale The Summit
I'm pretty excited about this show. It's been a while since I've gone to a concert first off and second the new DT album is extremely good which always makes me even more excited. Finally, I've been listening to some Bigelf and Scale the Summit and I've been pretty impressed with what I've heard. There was a change in the openers, but I can't say I'm terribly dissapointed with the end result.
- August 9th - Sterling Renaissance Festival
I had originally not planned to go to the Sterling Renaissance Festival this year, but my sister contacted me recently and she really wanted to go. So plans were made for us to go either August 9th or August 16th depending on if it's going to rain either day.
Hopefully we get good weather as I'm really looking forward to going. The two weekends are themed as Gypsy weekend which is new this year so it'd be neat to go see it and Wine Lovers weekend which will work out as well. -
August 15th - Family Gathering
Instead of doing a christmas eve party on my mom's side of the family this year, it was decided to instead move the traditional family gathering over to the summer and head out to the official family campground, Whetsone Gulf State Park.
This is another "I hope we get good weather" event, but I'm hopeful it'll work out. It'll be nice to get together with everybody and hang out. With the option of getting away and wandering the park for a bit if necessary too. Should be a fun time had by all, assuming of course that the weather cooperates nicely for us.
- August 28th - The State Fair
Yet again my friends and I are planning to hit the state fair. This year though we're going out in the afternoon (after lunch) hitting all the building stuff, just eating dinner there and then exploring the wine tasting stuff in the evening. Last year we discovered we really liked it when it was getting dark out and the crowd was thinning out so we're planning the trip to avoid some of the crowd. Yet again, I hope we get good weather this year.
This also helps mitigate a bit of the costs of going considering we're there for less time and eating less of the overpriced (but tasty) foodstuffs.
As the title of this post states, I survived the weekend. Which is quite a feat considering what was baked up on saturday. Yes...local fresh strawberries are in and that means Strawberry Shortcake Cake!
It was everything we had hoped it would be...the cake bit was awesome and the icing was...I can't think of enough good words to describe the icing actually. Highly recommend this item to anybody who happens to like strawberries. Or cake. Or food.
I think it goes without saying that it's gone now. And we all made a point to go to the gym this weekend to try and limit it's effect.
Other than the strawberry shortcake cake, the weekend was fairly generic. Saturday was kinda a lazy sort of day punctuated with some running around and shopping stuff. I bought a table for our balcony, pretty much completing the set-up out there. It's quite nice now, with two potted plants and some chairs and a table. Good for hanging out when the weather is cooperating. I also bought a laser pointer to terrorize the cat with. It also works on Fish, surprisingly enough.
One note on the laser pointer though...it made a big deal on the package about how it met FDA specification. This sorta freaked me out because I was trying to figure out what the Food and Drug Administration had to do with regulating lasers. But, apparently every laser product since 1976 has had to meet standards published by the FDA. Go figure...
Sunday I spent continuing to work on Wassy's website redesign which hit a snag. It could be a potentially huge snag...but it's my fault for assuming what the site would look like at 1024x768 instead of actually looking at it. Now I need to go back and rethink the positioning of things because it wasn't working out at all. I'm not sure what I'm going to do at this point, but I'll figure something out. I don't want to change anything too major because I really like the overall look of the site, but pretty much everything I did this weekend needs to be redone. Really want to get this done, and get it done well.
The building our apartment is in has a shared laundry room. One washer and dryer for the 6 apartments that are in the building. And since I'm up so early on weekends, I found it's pretty reliably open at 7am on Saturday morning, so that's when I've been doing my laundry. My friends follow me when I'm done since I can let them know I'm done and they can hop on board.
Except this weekend when the washing machine was broken. Dah. We ended up having to go out to one of the area laundromats and do our clothes there (and sit with them). Which resulted in a loss of productivity on what was supposed to be a productivity oriented weekend. I wanted to do some more work on redesigning Wassy's site and she wanted to get some artwork stuff done. It cut a couple hours of productive work time out of the day unfortunately.
We were originally intending on going to see Drag Me To Hell this weekend, but we've pushed that off a bit due to the productivity issues experienced yesterday.
Wassy's site redesign is coming along pretty nicely so far I think. I'm working on the header of the site which is going to be the biggest time sink since it's the most art intensive part of the design. But so far so good. And the more I use my Bamboo, the more I like it. It's very nice having a graphics tablet for this sort of work. Makes a huge difference. I'm still enjoying my shift in focus to graphic design type stuff, but like I mentioned earlier, we'll see if this keeps up.
It was really, really nice out yesterday. Just a little chilly, but sunny and warm enough to go outside and do some outdoors-y type things. So my friends and I wandered out to one of the local town parks in hopes that we could find some hiking trails through the woods like we did last weekend.
We went to a different park, but as we found out, it was just as large as the first one and had a lot more hiking trails. Enough to require a trail map to make sense of it. As we came to find out though...their trail map kinda sucked.
The first warning sign was that the trail map indicated an entrance to a trail that did not exist. We wandered down the road a little further and came to a path that lead into the woods that wasn't on the map, but we figured we'd follow it in anyway. It seemed to lead to a system of trails but we couldn't figure out where we were on the map. And a couple of intersections later we had lost track of where we were in relation to the park.
The trails themselves were pretty cool. Right in the woods, and through some interesting nature type areas. If we end up there next time I want to take my camera to get some pictures of some of the trees (if we can ever find the trees again that is) because they were really cool. It was a little bit muddy though. Like...a lot muddy. We were able to avoid most of it by cutting through the actual woods.
But, back to being lost. Eventually in our wanderings, we came across the back of a sign. As we passed it and turned around to see what it said we were surprised to find that it was warning us that the way we came was leaving the park land and the trails were going to become unmarked. At this point, we had two thoughts: "We left the park land???" and "The trails are supposed to be marked???"
Eventually we discovered that the trails were color coded. But the map was labeled with letters and no colors. So even if we found a trail, we had no idea which trail we were on or which direction we were supposed to be going on it. I have half a mind to write a really nasty letter to the town about their "map" and their "marked trails"
We stumbled off the park land again once more (also without being warned until we were back on) and then found ourselves on the red square trail...whichever trail that was supposed to be. Then we found the blue trail and realized that blue was "A" and we were back on the trail that we thought we were on from the beginning. Finally! Which was good because we were starting to get hungry.
We jumped off the trail at the first sign of the park showing up through the wilderness, but ended up walking into a bog type area. Ahhh...nature. What would a springtime walk be without mud. Eventually we found our way back to the park proper, although we ended up behind the maintenance building near where they store all the various pieces of equipment.
And thus ended our outdoors adventure for the day. It sounds like we've got a lot of options for outdoor walking in the area. A lot more than we thought we had. It's amazing what's local if you're actually looking for it.
It's been another good weekend for me, and as per usual lately, I forgot to write about it. I'll try to get back into the habit of keeping this up to date again. I started doing it then the move happened and I didn't have time and I never got back into the habit... Ah well, time to start again.
Anyway, the Friday party was a success. Lots of relaxation type stuff happening when it was much needed. Some City of Villains being played, some Rock Band and Guitar Hero. And much unhealthy food and drink was consumed.
Which is why I decided that on Saturday, I'd head back to the gym to try to get a habit going again, especially now that I have my iPod Nano. I had a good workout but I realized that I would probably need to get an armband thingy. The Nano has the headphone jack on the bottom and it makes it hard to set it down on machines while I'm exercising.
After the Gym, most of the day was spent up in the office working on my C# programming. I ended up doing a lot of good work on FrostBot, my AI chatbot project. On sunday I actually got it talking...sort of. It needs some improvements, but it actually works!!
Returning to Saturday though, Guitar Hero: Metallica came in through GameFly...a game that I was waiting to play. Wassy and I played some of that in the evening. It's a very very good game. All the songs I played were fun, the atmosphere is awesome and it even has the orchestra in it! All together, I think I'll be buying it. I'll play it enough to make it worth while.
Oh yes, I also started restocking my 20 gallon fish tank on saturday. I went out fish browsing with the intent to research things out, but the fish store had 2 bleeding heart tetras in stock and I had a school that was severely lacking in members, so I bought them. They integrated well with the existing fish and now I have a little school of 4 tetras swimming around in there. I want to get one other school of stuff before I'm finished.
Sunday, aside from finishing off FrostBot, my friends and I wandered around in search of a good place to walk. We ended up stumbling upon a local town park that has a really cool nature trail that isn't too far away. Win! We'll be going back there for walking frequently through the summer I think. It's a nice walk through the woods and it even runs along a creek for a little ways. The creek has a ton of tires and crap it in it...but it's still a creek!
That's about it for the weekend. Like I said, I'll try to write more frequently if I can. Hopefully I can at least get back to at least a couple posts per day.
This week marks the first week where our reduced hours are in effect at work. I've elected to take Monday afternoons off. If there's one thing that I could do with less of, it's Monday afternoons at work. Although all things considered I'd rather be working than not.
I did some calculations, figurings and general budgetary voodoo and I've come to conclude that I should be ok with the reduced income. I'll need to curtail my entertainment spending quite a bit and try to watch my unnecessary food expenses (as well as try to keep dinner costs around the level of spending that we've been doing for the past several weeks). I'm probaly playing it safer than I have to but it's hard estimating expenses due to the move and not having a good idea of how the budget is going to totally shape up with that. And now I have less cash per month to play with too. I'd rather err on the side of caution until I'm really sure of the numbers.
So it's not quite as bad as I had feared but definitely not ideal My already limited play money supplies have been nearly eliminated. I also ended up curtailing my contributions to my 401k plan for the time being. I'm still young and I already couldn't afford to drop the kind of money that I really needed to put into it. So it's not like that'll make a huge impact in my retirement savings. And there's no company match, so there's no incentive to keep it going. I'll readjust it when my financial situation improves, one way or another.
This week is going to feel pretty long as we already have plans for Friday. Wassy's finishing up her current semester of school this week so we're going to have a little celebration to commemerate the ending of her very annoying Digital Illuistration course. So there's going to be a week ending party situation going down here. Should be very fun.
Last week was pretty darn crappy, so the arrival of the weekend was very welcome. A chance to catch my breath a bit and do a little relaxation (while still getting some work done) was needed.
The fun started on friday when Wassy hinted she was working on a little art related project for me. She had just gotten a set of Copic Sketch Markers and she wanted to try them out on something. So she took one of the sketches she had been working on for an upcoming piece for me (using the markers) and did a ink and marker test run with it. Of course she didn't tell me that right off the bat. Just hinted she was up to something and made me guess what it was. I'm really impressed by how it ended up looking using the markers. I'm looking forward to the full piece and to seeing more copic colored pieces in the future.
It's just really nice to have a crappy week end with a little gift artwork. I really appreciate it because she was extremely busy with her school work and other commissions, so to take that much time out of that stuff and work up something for me means an awful lot to me.
Techy paragraph time: I decided this weekend that I wanted to learn C# and .NET. I never really got around to looking at .NET seriously and C# seems to be in demand these days, so I figured it was time to update myself. If you're into software development it's really necessary to update your skillset every couple of years to keep up with the ever advancing march of technology. So I figure it's time to get on the bandwagon and check it out. Went out to the store and picked up a hefty book and I've been working my way through it pretty quickly. It's a cool language and I'm starting to see why people like using .NET so much.
In less techy news, my friends and I were going to have this braised chicken recipie and I was sent in search of the fresh vegetable type ingredients on friday evening. I had some trouble finding a chili pepper though. I've never had to go buy one, you see, and when I went to the store nothing was labled correctly. I ended up getting two peppers, neither of which ended up being the correct peppers. We had no idea what they were, so naturally, we made Jay try them out. He's got a high tolerance for spicy foods, so we figured this was the best option.
He took one bite out of the first pepper and was fine. Then one out of the second pepper and was fine again. And then...he took a second bite and dove for sink for a glass of water. It seems that this pepper was "really f'ing hot". I thought he was kidding for a second there, but then realized that his eyes were watering...oops. I do feel bad about it, but it was EXTREMELY entertaining. I need to bring more random peppers home sometime...
Overall, a very nice relaxing weekend.
Two basic things that are being mentioned today.
First off, the wine and chocolate festival that I went to on Saturday was very awesome. There was much sampling of wines, and a few new wineries discovered which is always good. Upstate New York has a thriving wine country which is handy for me since I enjoy a glass on occasion and there's a lot of good stuff being produced right in the area.
We ended up buying a bunch of bottles for future consumption. Lakeland Winery had some really awesome fruity wines. Especially a melon flavored one. And the other big find was Tickle Hill for their Peach Fuzz and Hector Nectar. And a bunch of other things too. I'm doing this from memory and I can't remember them all.
We also sampled the cheese, chocolate and olive oil/hot sauce booths. Found some really awesome champagne cheese which I was tempted to buy, along with some all natural fudge sauce and actual fudge which I REALLY wanted to buy. I managed to hold off because I knew that if I did actually buy it, it'd be gone in about 3 hours. Which would be ungood for me. I did get their card though, so I know where to go if I ever do want some for something.
Sunday was mostly spent relaxing and watching South Park. I made my chicken alfredo for dinner which went over really well. I'm still getting used to the stove so I had the sauce done a lot faster than the pasta, but I'll adjust that one and get it right the next time I do it.
Now for the second thing. We've got some impending staff reductions going on at work today. I hesitate to say this, but I'm not terribly worried for my job considering the big projects that I just started. But you never know with these things. I won't know much of anything until this afternoon and even then there's a company meeting tomorrow morning so it probably won't be totally over until then.
We'll see what happens...
Last night we properly broke in the kitchen at our new apartment with some baking. Specifically cinnamon rolls. More specifically THESE cinnamon rolls.
We stumbled upon the recipie a couple weeks ago and determined that, yes...we would be making these. And making them soon. The recipie makes 7 tins, but we figured for health reasons we should cut that in half. Having 7 tins of cinnimon buns hanging around the house...no good. No good at all.
So we set out to make the rolls. Wassy did most of the work as she is the baking expert in the house. I helped a bit in the roll making phase. We ended up making quite the mess. Like...a mess of epic proportions. You have to spread melted butter on the dough and then add the sugar and cinnamon. Once you're done with that you're supposed to roll it up. But we discovered we didn't let it sit quite long enough so we had a little butter oozing problem.
The end result looked quite nice:
