Pink Floyd Shows (Part 3, The Return)

Oh my heck! Remember the 55 MPH top speed thing? Well, I think that on the way home, we averaged 50 or less. In an RV that smelled of Febreeze and upchuck. Anyway...
We Left Lafayette sometime before noon, and headed north for I80. It seemed like it was all uphill and with a headwind all the way home. We got gas as we left town, and stopped in Cheyenne for gas, then we stopped in Rawlins (I think) then we stopped in Evanston. Come to think of it, it's a miracle we made any money on the trip the way the RV was guzzling gas. Lots of great sights along the prairies of Wyoming might I say. From the 300 or so windmills whirling away somewhere between Cheyenne and Evanston (I know, lot of territory there) to the tedium of being passed by 18-wheelers, it was quite a yawner for most of the trip until about 30 miles out of Evanston where we encountered a VERY long downhill grade, and we started picking up speed. A lot of speed. Jason was driving at the time, I was riding shotgun. He was white-knuckling it down this long grade as we flew by cars and semis and small animals all at 85 MPH or so with the Git-'er-done trailer flying along behind us. All in all, quite the high point of the trip home, until we got the Parley's Canyon and crawled past the jackknifed tanker truck at 5 MPH. We finally got into SLC somewhere around 11:00 PM, where we decided to all go home and worry about the offload another day.
The gigs were a lot of fun. It's a great group of people we've got involved in this band, with a lot of talent. We're going places now, just as long as we don't have to take the RV of Doom with us.

Pink Floyd Shows (Part 2)

We finished the show in Red Cliff really late and spent a while cleaning up the equipment and loading the trailer. By the time we were done, it was approaching 3:00 in the morning and I was very tired, to put it mildly. We got into our rooms across the street and quickly got to bed. The bed was really hard, but apparently it didn't matter, because I was asleep in seconds. The rooms were really nice, but they all had one quirk: they had a light switch at the door that controlled power for the entire room, including the bathroom. Once we figured that little quirk out, everything was good.
We ate breakfast the next morning in the grill and left town at about 11:30, expecting to get to our next show with a lot of time to get set up and get a sound check and everything. Didn't work out that way, of course. We got stopped for a while in Denver rush-hour traffic and lost for a few minutes, but eventually we made it to the next venue, a place called Nissi's in Lafayette, just East of Boulder. Nice venue, nice owners, small stage for a ten-piece band. We got all set up and got our sound check done with minutes to spare before opening time. Nissi's is a restaurant and music venue. They have nightly entertainment, and we happened to be that band for 2 nights. This is the web site for the club. Our performance started between 7:30 and 8 and we played for just over 2 hours with a short break in between. Overall, the show went well, minus one song screw-up and having the sustain pedal for the main keyboard plugged in wrong.
When we were done, we left everything there (since we were playing the next night as well) and headed for our overnight destination, the owners' cabin just over an hour from Nissi's. It was a gorgeous house built among the pines with great scenery and room for all of us to crash until we met the next day for the second performance, which went better than the first. Afterwards, we went back to the cabin for the night. We loaded up the trailer on Sunday morning and headed back for home, which will be the subject of the next entry...

Pink Floyd Shows Part 1

First off, I'd like to say thet there's nothing quite like riding to Colorado and back in an RV that has a top speed of 70 MPH downhill and with a tailwind. The cruising speed was more like 55 on the flats. The ride back was made longer by several factors that I may or may not go into detail over; suffice it to say the the RV spelled heavily of Febreeze on the way home.

The trip started out with a bad omen of sorts. I got a call from our keyboard player saying that they hadn't left Salt Lake yet, and that was about an hour after they said they were leaving SLC. Kudos to the guys, 'cause they were dealing with a U-Haul rental gone awry. Instead of reserving us a small, enclosed trailer for our gear, they had an open-air car-hauling trailer; apparently confusing us for classic RVers with a car. *eyeroll* Anyway, they pulled in to Provo 11-ish with a humongous trailer in tow with flames on the sides and "git 'er done" on the back. Not kidding! It was so large that we single-layered everything we had on the floor of it and had room for a couple more bands' stuff as well. We headed out and started toward Price on US-6 up Spanish Fork Canyon. Pretty uneventful stuff; several stops for gas and snacks along the way. Lots of getting passed by cars and semis. Finally got to the exit for Red Cliff, Colorado. Noticed the air was pretty cold, but didn't think a whole lot about it. Wound around a small canyon road with switchbacks for 10 miles or so, and came up to this:

But from the top of it. I thought we were going to get to cross it, but there was an itty-bitty turn-off just before the approach that we turned on to instead. That single-lane road wound around for a couple more miles until finally we got to a town that Park City, Utah must have looked like 50 years ago or so. A bar/club a hotel/liquor store/general store and about 100 houses scattered around the hillsides. Here's a look at the town coming in from the highway:

The building on the right is Mango's Mountain Grill which is where we played on Thursday night. The image of the town pretty much says it all, complete with all the snow on the hillsides. It was very cold, and of course I hadn't brought a jacket of any kind. Duh! Anyway, we got set up, ate dinner and were ready to play by about 10:30. We played a full set, and overall had a pretty good show.

Next: pushing on into Denver...

Lunch

On Monday the 5th, My friend Julie and I drove north into the next valley to have lunch with a friend of ours who is visiting from Arizona. We had a very nice visit and a very nice lunch at Zupas in Draper. I highly recommend the Thai Lobster Curry if you get the chance. They allow you sample any soup you want to before you buy, which is a real bonus. Not in a Sam's-Club-on-a-Saturday-in-place-of-lunch kind of way, but I am glad that they do that. I have several observations about the trip:

I don't see Julie nearly enough.
It was lovely to visit with Lisa
I work at a place that makes it somewhat difficult to take long lunches on a whim
Food is often more expensive than is comfortable to my budget
I don't get out with friends nearly often enough
I'm glad that my home and my work are about a mile apart; I couldn't commute a long way to work.

Today, as I noticed someone in the mens' room changing their clothes, a thought came to my mind: When Clark Kent went into a phone booth to remove the shirt/tie/pants/etc., whatever happened to those clothes? Did someone come to use the phone and say, 'dangit! What slob left these clothes all over the place?' Maybe he used the heat vision and vaporized them. *eyeroll* That would get expensive.

At least Underdog took care of the problem; the phone booth blew up, presumable taking the clothes with it.

With the advent of cell phones and the demise of the phone booth, where does Clark/Superman change now?

A lot of weird questions, I know. All brought to you by the rambling mind of JoesKnows© *smirk*!

It makes me laugh

For those of you who are on Facebook, you have likely been inundated with requests to load the 'My Heroes Abiliy' application from friends of yours who are currently using it. It's really a lot of fun, and I recently rearranged my abilities. I currently have Precognition (the ability to forsee the future and such), Memory manipulation and Teleportation. I am currently playing with the teleportation ability, because it's so new. I have discovered the ability to teleport into a battle zone and grab a random fighter and teleport out to a random location. This would be SO much fun in real life, don't you think? This could be a good thing for people who are on the verge of being knocked out in the battle zone, but I imagine it could be really frustrating for people who are about to knock somebody else out. Anyway, I laugh to myself every time I do this, because I just picture my victim asking themselves, "what in the heck just happened?". Just so you know, as I am easily amused. See you in the battle zones! Heh, heh, heh!

It starts

One of the best lines ever from a movie that I have actually seen, and perfectly appropriate for the beginning of a blog, I suppose. I don't usually rant and rave in public or in private, so I suppose my posts will be pretty random for the time being. I will start with a few things that make me happy at the moment:
1) Playing the saxaphone. I still get a kick out of telling people that I play tenor sax for a Pink Floyd cover band, and I can now play 'Wish You Were Here' on the guitar, which is difficult for me to play for some reason. I also play saxaphone for a couple of different jazz bands.
2) Being the Ghost of Christmas Present. I look forward to the Hale Center Theater (Orem) yearly production of A Christmas Carol every year, and still love it after participating for the last 9 years.
3) My dog, Aiden. He is a Shi-tzu, and just came to lick my nose. He's less than a year old and so is still a puppy. My daughter will try to tell you that he's her dog, but I paid for him and he loves me best, because I play tug-of-war with him.
4) My family. My two oldest are at the point in their lives where we can have deep, meaningful discussions. My youngest is still a pre-teen with ADHD and school issues, so we don't have quite the meaningful discussions as with the others, but we can still have fun.
5) My wife. Even though we seem to argue a lot, and have issues with each other, (who doesn't, I guess) I still love her very much. Who knew?
6) My friends. (and their blogs) I don't get to spend a lot of time with my friends, but these blogs allow me to read about them and what they're doing, which is almost as good. I'd really like to spend more time with them, but as a husband, father and full-time wage earner, I feel like my responsibilities there override my desire to be with friends. Thank you all!

Well, it's rather late and need to wrap this. We'll see how often I am able to update my blog, as I am notoriously bad at it. Perhaps my friends will provide the inspiration.