Truckin'

Last week, I took off from work Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to help Becky out with the talent show at her elementary school. I run the audio and (with much help from my friends) videotape the show and make DVDs for the kids. But that's not what this is about.

The show was on Wednesday and Thursday, so I also took Friday off just to have some free time to do stuff around the house. That involved renting a pick-up truck to donate furniture to Goodwill and move stuff into storage. Now, I drive a Mini Cooper, so when Enterprise hooked me up with a Chevy Silverado, it might as well have been Bigfoot. Automotive comedy was the order of the day. Not only was it difficult for me to drive such a large machine, I was even able to actually lose some items in the cavernous cab. So if that's what you're looking for in a truck, I guess I recommend it.

By the end of the day, I was done with the truck and really wanted to get back to driving my car, so it occurred to me that I could go ahead and return it instead of waiting until the next day, except that I didn't have a ride back from the car rental place. Too bad I didn't have a ramp, or I could have loaded the Mini in the back and driven back that way, I guess.

Join the club!

Hm, over a week since my last post. Looks like I'm well on my way to joining the legions of former bloggers on the ol' internet. See if you can guess ... I've been, anyone? Anyone? If you said "busy" you're absolutely right!

I very nearly have a legitimate excuse. Becky runs a talent show at her school every year, and the month leading up to it is always super-busy for both of us. I handle all the tech, from making custom mixes and mash-ups of songs for the kids to running the audio on the night of the show and making DVDs of the performance for the kids afterward. She does everything else, which is about eighteen times as much as what I do.

We have our final full-tech dress rehearsal Saturday, then the show is Wednesday and Thursday nights next week. We're performing the show twice for the first time this year, since we had to start giving out a limited number of tickets to relieve overcrowding. The fire marshal would have had a stroke last year. We're going to try to set up a video projector outdoors for the folks who don't have tickets, which may run afoul of the Daylight Saving Time change this year. I'm all for longer evenings, but switching the clocks three weeks early this year may make our projection hard to see.

The Final Frontier

Now that all the hype about the Ansari X Prize has died down, I've finally gotten around to posting the pictures I took when we attended the very first manned commercial space launch. This actually wasn't either of the X Prize flights that SpaceShipOne made. We considered going back for the X Prize tries, but we figured that the actual historic thing was the first commercial manned space flight, and the other two launches were cool, but were basically commerce, not history. Just necessary to collect the prize money. Besides, we didn't really want to schlep out to Mojave and drag out of bed at 4:00 AM again.

Also, since Kate gave me some tips on how to bring the snazzy to my photos, I updated the shots from the Padres game as well. I don't think Sports Illustrated is going to come calling anytime soon, but it is an improvement.

What? Did you say something?

We saw the Who in concert last night. It was a great show! I don't much like the acoustics at the ipayOne Center, but the Who are sufficiently loud that it doesn't matter. We were six rows up off the floor, house left, a couple dozen rows from the front. They really rocked the place, and seemed genuinely happy to be in San Diego.

It's interesting how the idea of rock concert misbehavior changes with the times. All the aging boomers were tokin' up, passing around a king-size doobie. The folks my age, on the other hand, all whipped out their cell phones to illicitly memorialize the event for posterity on YouTube.



Ahem. Anyway, they finished out their regular set with "Won't Get Fooled Again," and every voice in the place was belting it out. That song is depressingly timeless. The encore was a selection from Tommy, which turned out to be a pretty long set.

"Hope I die before I get old," indeed. Yesterday was Roger Daltrey's 63rd birthday, but he shows no signs of even beginning to get old. Rock on, guys!