Kingfisher Cove

Live! In Concert!

JDub and I were pretty much in the minority at last night’s Snow Patrol concert – as old farts. Oh, there were others, a few with gray pony tails, and one notable well-groomed middle-aged fellow a couple of rows below us in a leather jacket who was actually playing air guitar in his seat next to his staid wife-with-a-tight-perm. But the crowd was mostly young nubile high school/college-aged ladies (as well as young men, probably accompanying their girlfriends). I suppose that makes sense because Snow Patrol’s music is quite melodious and I think most women prefer that (as opposed to head-banger stuff). But I was surprised that more “mature” folks weren’t represented because they appeal to a broad base.

Speaking of head-banger, that would be the two opening acts. They were like garage bands where the lead singers honestly believe that wrapping their lips around the mic and screeching at 10 gazillion decibels in competition with guitars screeching at 20 gazillion decibels constitutes…..what? “I’m outa the garage and I made it to the stadium?” I have to wonder how they were selected to open for Snow Patrol. Diametrically opposed animals. And why two bands? It was rather annoying because take-down/set-up times between acts took forever. Snow Patrol didn’t come on until past 9:30.

But when they did, we realized why we’d put up with going over two hours without a cigarette and listening to music we’d never choose to listen to in a million years. It was the difference between a double-wide surrounded with barking junk-yard dogs, and a roomy and tasteful timber-framed cabin on a sunny wooded lot along a sparkling lake. What a breath of fresh air! A lead singer with a wonderful voice! Music with complexity!  Lyrics with intelligence! 

I haven’t gotten over that sense of awe I’ve always felt seeing somebody I care about live in concert. We are sharing this room together! (Well, along with thousands of others…)

One cute anecdote. One of their (gorgeous) cuts on their new album is a duet with Rufus Wainwright’s sister. She isn’t touring with them, so they had a gal from the audience join them on stage and sing the duet with the lead singer. At first I wondered if it was a “plant” since it was arranged so quickly, but her body language was all about being nervous and blown away being up there on stage with them. She did a marvelous job, and what especially impressed me was that she was no knock-out. Your average, slightly chubby young lady with a pretty voice who got a roaring ovation afterward, and who will have one helluva story to tell (and remember) forever.

A Sea of Cell Phones

No lighters!  But a gazillion cell phones!Snow Patrol was awesome!(More later, it's way past my bedtime)

Concert Night!

I'm so excited!  Tonight's the night we see Snow Patrol in concert!  Go ahead and check out those samples on Amazon or listen to several nice snippets on their website.  This is a super album.

Do people still hold up their cigarette lighters at concerts? 

(Probably not.  That was so '70s).

Fight or Flight

I'm not much of a fighter, but I'll tell you what.  I'm constantly fighting the desire to fleeeeeeeeee!  When things get overwhelming or at the very least, out of my comfort zone, I have to figuratively hold onto something to refrain from racing out to my car and driving to....well, I don't know where.  (Which keeps me from actually acting on the desire!) 

My comfort zone must be pretty minuscule. I face its challenge several times a day.  And most of it centers on talking.  If you are a teacher (Margaret!), you're probably laughing because talking is obviously your calling.  And if not a calling, it's certainly a basic, fundamental requirement of being human and functioning in the world.  Me?  For example, I loathe the telephone.  When I know I must call someone at work, I feel dread.  And then the dread builds into a big, vicious, toothy animal, and I put it off and I come up with all kinds of reasons to not have to pick up that receiver and make the call.  I much prefer email because it gives me the time to order my thoughts and say things the way I really want to say them.  I'm not especially articulate and I don't do "improv" well.  I say stupid sh*t and/or ramble out of nervousness.  Or, I don't ask all the right questions, and then I have to do the worst possible thing:  Call back!  You should see me before I make a phone call.  I have a page of talking points/notes/questions to address that take me a good half-hour or so to come up with!  I'm a phone dweeb!  And public speaking?  Don't even go there. 

So on my way to work this morning, knowing that I had this important teleconference I had to "chair", I was in knots.  I kept muttering over and over again:  Go with the flow.  I pretty much knew the subject matter and I'd spent over two hours at home yesterday working on the outline and "talking points".  How did I do? Well, I believe I handled it.  There was certainly no positive feedback from the participants, and so therefore my insecurity in this arena left me feeling....insecure about how I handled it.

SO THEN!  I had to attend a lunch-time brown-bag meeting at the main office on the "art of writing proposal cover letters" that my boss was leading (I'd contributed some samples). SHE BASICALLY HANDED IT OVER TO ME!!  (Remember what I said about not being good at improv?)  Oh. My. God.  Talk about having my bowels in an uproar.  And this was in front of a good 20+ people!  Well, again, I handled it.  I believe I was interactive and personable and pretty much in-tuned, but I didn't receive an iota of feedback afterward from anyone.  In fact, my boss and my coworker totally disappeared (I guess they went to get a bite to eat since they didn't bring their brown bags with them).  I have no clue as to what they or anybody thought, and so of course I'm thinking:  They perceive me as a dweeb.

At 50, I'm tired of feeling insecure.  And does "security" have to come from acknowledgment from others that I did OK?  And if I did OK, would it really hurt if somebody would just let me know?  Maybe I really don't want to know...

I think I'd like to take a nice long drive (fleeeeee) to Australia! 

In Which the Black Cat Lounges in the Cellar

In preparation for mustering up the motivation to haul out the work laptop and immerse myself in not-fun-stuff, I popped open a bottle of wine that I'd bought at Trader Joe's last weekend (on that marvelous, spring-like day....).  When I saw the bottle, I had to grin.  (Helen, do you remember this:  Zeller Schwartz Katz?)  I'm accustomed to White Zin and so I poured a glass with a bit of trepidation. Would it taste as good as I remembered from eons ago?  I recall that the bottles used to come with a little plastic black cat strapped around the neck.  (Not anymore). I took my sip and gasped!  Oh. My. Gosh.  It's really really good!  I kept waiting to pucker or cringe at the after-taste or shudder at uber-sweetness or bitterness. None of those things happened.  It's a nice, smooth white wine that could possibly be dangerous because it's a nice, smooth white wine.

(Note:  It was a lot cheaper at Trader Joe's!)

I've continued to tweak here and there on my "new look".  It was bugging me that the banner image wasn't centered so I messed around with it in Photoshop and I do believe I'm satisfied for now.  The change has hosed many of my previous photos, since I don't have as much space now and new ones will have to be sized accordingly.  I'm not anal enough to go back and fix the rest!  If you see pictures that are cut off, you can click on them to see the full version.  I felt a need for a change (even though I kept the main colors and the banner, which I like just fine).  Next weekend is my third blogging anniversary.  Three years!  A change was in order.

And now I really must go immerse myself (No!  Not in wine!  In work!)  Maybe once I'm into it, it won't seem so bad, but right now it all feels overwhelming.  But I have a 9:00 meeting tomorrow morning that I absolutely must be well-prepared for.

Sigh.  I'd rather do laundry.  On a river bank.  With a washboard.

A New Look! (with issues...)

So, I brought home my work laptop and I have plenty of work to do, but instead I've spent the last several hours changing the appearance of my site.  It's a little scary to do that because it tends to hose some things.  And I have a help ticket into Typepad because comments, permalink, and trackbacks don't show as an option at the end of my posts.  (Huh?)  So for now you can't leave a comment telling me how much you hate love my new look!

(Update:  Oops, I had them set to the same color as the background! D'oh!)

Have I Mentioned How Much I'm Looking Forward to Summer?

No Harstine weekend again because the weather is going to be sucky.  Now and then throughout the Dark Months it's just a relief to get out of Dodge regardless of the weather, but we're tired of the dreariness that forces us to be cooped up in the camping trailer.  Too much of that this year!  We want to have deck fires and beach walks and barbecues.  A person can only find joy in jig saw puzzles and fighting the PC card to get on the internet just so much.

At this point I'm just simply looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow morning.  My butt is dragging.  That poor butt (that is hopefully shrinking but I haven't peered back there to check) is one tired butt.  I'm also feeling rather dismayed because I'm low woman on the totem pole as far as taking a vacation.  My boss and my coworker have senority and mucho vacation time accrued, and so my hope to take at least a week off around the 4th of July is dashed.  Then I thought I'd take time off at the end of July (when the weather is statistically good) and my boss is taking off two weeks then.  Even my hope to take off for a long weekend to Cannon Beach once my horrific proposal is out (I was thinking April) is not going to be do-able because my boss is taking off extra time each weekend that month.  Like....when?  I'm burned out.  I NEED a vacation, and I don't want to have to wait until August!  I simply can't wait until then.  Because I might go postal engineer.

ROCK Those Teeth

While I was having my teeth impressions made at the dentist today (and trying to focus on not gagging) the office stereo system was playing the Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane" and I kept bobbing my head to the chagrin of the dental assistant (who was very young and didn't know who the Scorpions were).

Hope those impressions didn't turn out blurry.

Blah

The reasons for general blah-ness are varied.  Such as:

• I didn't lose any weight last week.  I'm holding steady at the seven-pound loss.
• Even though I'm eating so much healthier.
• Haven't been exercising, though.  Sigh.  Wish I enjoyed doing that.
• I do go up and down a lot of stairs in the course of the day, though.
• It's cold, dark, and wet.
• No holiday to look forward to until the end of May.  (Since New Year's).
• And with my workload, the dream trip to Cannon Beach is waaayyy in the future.
• My new work laptop was on the fritz today and I lost nearly a full day of productivity.
• I was nervous before the laptop-on-the-fritz thing.  Now I'm pretty much in a panic.
• My medical flex plan that I signed up for (for this very reason) just informed me it won't cover my teeth whitening because it's cosmetic.
• My teeth have yellowed since having them whitened.  Likely coffee and nicotine.
• That upsets me more than you can know.
• My car is no longer clean and shiny.

I also spent the bulk of the day in the company of my coworker at the main office, and once again her negativity really took its toll on me.  We are talking about a woman who is four years younger than I am and I swear before I learned that fact, I thought she was a good 10 years older than me. Haggish, gray, too-long hair in no style; no makeup whatsoever; lips like skinny rubber bands glued at the edges in downward curves (can you say Church Lady?  Can you say "permanently pursed lips"?)  She disapproves of everything.  She views herself as a victim about everything.  She believes everyone is out to get her and is conspired to make her fail.  And then, totally inappropriately, she'll burst out in what I perceive as forced-girly-giggles.  (Over nothing that warrants even a grin).  It's like for a brief instant she realizes what a "downer" she is and so this girly screamlet-burst balances everything out.  But, there's nothing "girly" about her, and it just comes across as wrong.  It makes me pine for the branch office and my new-found friend over there who is so NORMAL and has an appropriate sense of humor and if she has a beef about something, it's tempered with that witty sarcasm that I am so drawn to.  And she's 14 years younger than I am!  (And wise beyond her years).  I'm back over there tomorrow!  Yay!

Here I am dissing about a coworker and I can just hear my dad:  "You shouldn't be talking about your coworkers on your blog."  Well, to an extent I must!  It's my outlet!   I'd otherwise go loony tunes!

And yes, my boss still has her tongue stud, along with some pretty darned impressive tattoos all over her back (and I'm sure other places), and even though I don't 100% trust her because I've witnessed her pulling some fast ones, I have to say that I genuinely like her.  She's definitely quick on her feet and you've gotta respect that.  And she's a cut-up.  You wouldn't necessarily expect a Drew Barrymore, knock-out-body-blonde with a tongue stud and tattoos to be extremely bright, but here she is.  (Bright, but rather manipulative....)

(Might as well get all that coworker stuff mentioned in one post).

JDub fully intended to go snowmobiling with his buddy today.  Once he maneuvered the Durango out of the garage and arrived at the nearby storage area where we keep the snowmobiles, he discovered that the trailer had two flat tires.  So he decided to bag it.  I don't know, but I'm thinking it might have been a blessing in disguise.   The mountains were absolutely DUMPED ON with snow yesterday and last night (and throughout today--we're talking multiple feet!) and I heard that the pass was closed throughout the day for avalanche control.  It may have been just major traffic headaches that he avoided, or it could have been a lot more dire circumstances that he avoided.   Instead, he drove his new car to the insurance office to arrange for coverage (plus to work), so I have a feeling that driving his car made missing a snowmobile outing totally worthwhile.  (At least until the newness wears off -- if it ever does!)

Sunny Has Arrived! (in the pouring rain...)

Aside from an ice storm or blizzard, the night couldn't have been any nastier to finally pick up JDub's brand spankin' new Solstice.  I've been referring to it as "Sunny" (Solstice + yellow...get it?), but I'm not so sure JDub's enamored with that moniker.  We'll see what evolves.  Boy, does that baby GO.  It's the GXP (turbo) model and it's definitely "got the ponies."  It has a sturdy go-cart feel to it, and it corners beautifully.  I'm so accustomed to his Durango and having to grasp onto something at a corner (it's a truck!), and this thing just glides through without the worry of losing your latte or having wiener dogs tumble to the floor.  (Haven't tested the wiener dogs in this, though!)  But man what a nasty night.  Sideways, slamming rain and wind, pitch blackness, and roads like gleaming obsidian.  I know JDub really wanted to "see what she's got", but the conditions were just too rotten.  Plenty of time for that.  So this picture is pretty poor, taken from our deck/porch because I was tired of being out in the rain.  The flash didn't work very well so I had to lighten it up with Photoshop.  I'd have to say that the "yellow" is prettier better than the picture shows, because it really isn't at all like Scotch Broom (thank god!)  It's more of a, well, sunny yellow!  There's Nate's little black Miata beside it.  They're close to the same length, but the Solstice is quite a lot wider.  I wondered how comfortable it would be and was pleasantly surprised that the passenger seat is very comfortable indeed.  Getting up out of the car is a bit of a challenge, though!

What a day.  I knew it would be, but it was another pedal-to-the-metal day (heh, JDub wishes!)  And it started out rotten because my latte stand was closed!!  It's never been closed on President's Day!  Pissed me off.  In fact, I've been irritable all day, probably as a result of that!  (Plus the weather.  Saturday's sun and balmy blue skies were a rude tease).