Up North (& Out There doing it)

The Tenth Show

Caught my 10th DMB Show @ Madison Square Garden last night. Quite a crazy milestone, but unfortunately the show totally didn't deliver and in fact really left me quite disappointed.

In a nutshell, Dave's voice was totally shot and by the 2nd song he was asking for help from the audience to sing the chorus and by the 4th song, I was wondering if he was going to be able to actually make it through the show.

All of this is so disspointing, especially since the setlist was fantastic for a 2nd night at the Garden, digging into a bunch of good stuff, a 2 minute lead into 'Say Goodbye' and a bunch of other great things.

But no Dave meant the whole band was off and you could tell. Carter and Dave were doing a fist bump after every song and it clearly was a challenge for him to be out there.  Interestingly enough, I had a ticket to the DMB show that got cancelled because of Dave's voice back in 2002 and I'm wondering that if this wasn't the last leg of the tour before they wrap up for the entire 2011 and before Dave & Tim hit the road for some charity shows, if they really should have cancelled this show too.

Boyd, Stephan -- all seemed to be lost on stage and trying to make up for the lack of lyrics by moving around a lot more -- but it just felt forced.

And they had a nice special guest, Vusi Mahlasela, who is on Dave's ATO record label and I saw at the 92nd St Y a while back, but it just wasn't enough.  They really needed a super star in for a lot of songs, or they should have turned the show into one big sing along by putting the lyrics up on the big screen.

Oh well, the wosrt part was I brought a friend who was seeing them for the first time. At least it can only get better for her.

Here's the setlist:

#41 *
Say Goodbye *
Funny The Way It Is *
Pig *
Write A Song *
Dancing Nancies *
Still Water 
Don’t Drink the Water *
(Christmas Song) +
Improv +
Christmas Song +
The Song That Jane Likes *
Crush *
Best of Whats Around *
Rhyme And Reason *
Black Jack *
Everyday *~
Time Bomb *
You and Me *
Two Step *

__________________
 
Sister Ä
Last Stop *

Show Notes:
* Jeff Coffin
+ Dave, Carter and Tim
~ Vusi Mahlasela

Sometimes all you can do is laugh

Much to my chagrin, I got some first hand experience in this last night that I couldn't do anything but laugh.  Giving the bath to the boys last night, I noticed all of the sudden some bubbles coming from under the water that shouldn't have been.

I asked G if he was feeling OK and if he needed to use the potty.  He vigorously shook his head.  A couple of minutes later, we've got a 'Babe Ruth'  situation right out of Caddyshack going on, so everyone out!

Not 60 seconds later, as I'm trying to figure out how to get the 'babe ruth' out of the tub, I hear D start vomiting up chucks of hot dog behind me onto the floor.

Ok, now this is getting gross and I ask him if he is OK and why he was throwing up.

He replied "THE POOPIE! THE POOPIE!" to which I had to chuckle.  It was nasty, but the one two punch -- all I could do was laugh.

Oh, what could have been

Back in the day, long before blogging software or even the concept really existed, myself, a good friend and one other guy were consulting and working together in one office.   Between churning out proposals and other work, all 3 of us discovered that we had all been given the run around by Verizon's landline service.  I can't even remember what the details were (although  I do remember one of my many complaints was having my payment check cashed for $0.01 more than it was written for 3 months in a row.  What's one penny? -- except when you multiply number of customers x number of months x $0.01 and then all of the sudden -- Office Space  style -- Verizon has a big windfall on their hands.).

And as the months progressed, we kept finding more and more poor customer experiences around services that  we were paying for and always talked about launching boycott.com, where consumers could voice their opinions and challenge the community to stop using someone's services because of the bad customer experience (BestBuy was on my list a couple of times over the year).

Recently, MH just made a blog post about how ludicrous it was that Verizon FiOS wasn't able to provide almost 15% of the Caps games to the DC market.  Well -- ZING -- that hit a nerve, driving a  ridiculous percentage increase in hits to his blog, getting the #1 hit on Google today if you search for 'Mike Holden Verizon' -- and some sweet irony that a Michael Holden is also Verizon's Sr Counsel.

Boycott.com -- Power to the People!

182.5

182.5. That's what the scale read when I got back from a fun, but physically activity unsatisfying vacation this past Sunday.

182.5 -- that's some serious weight for me. That's over 40% heavier than I was heading off to college (ed note: I was pretty skinny) and 20% heavier than I was leaving college (all muscle I assure you :)).

But that is really besides the point. The point is I feel lousy, am always tired and just don't think it should be that way (even with two kiddos under 4).

So on the way home, I made up my mind. I'm going to do something I've never done -- I'm going to try a diet (strangely enough, I recall 180 being by Dad's trigger point too back when I was little).

Atkins, here I come.

Standing Room only

I'm in the waiting room of the Dr. office and its standing room only. What a drag.

At Starbucks, What's this?

Waiting to go to a Dr's appointment for the 3 week cold that just won't leave. Notice that a guy at the next table over has a laptop with three fluorescent stickers on it that says 'For Destruction by Shred It' For some reason, I just have a feeling that he's not supposed to have that machine.

Strange, Strange

I had very strange dreams, that I was flunking a bunch of classes in high school.  Really weird.

Idiot

I'm not sure what it is, but I'm loosing my mind. I've just done a couple of really absent minded things over the past 8 months. Perhaps it's being ridiculously busy all of the time, but still no excuse.

Today -- I managed to drive and put my Miata up on a curb. If pictures were working you could see it. It's ridiculous.

So let's right this down

I'm not sure if this will exist by itself for very long. Don't get me wrong, Why Run is my main blog and I've got a couple of others kicking around. But I thought it might be fun to write down what happens when two folks who haven't lived outside a cross street in a combined total of 17 years, take it up North and give it a shot at country living. We'll see.