Three Things Full Of Happy

I can't believe I haven't written about the Sylvan Esso show last Wednesday...because it was phenomenal.

I was wary of going to this show because - although I enjoy this kind of music - I despise paying money for shows just to watch someone play on a laptop. I just feel like it's not that hard to get a band to recreate the sounds.

But these two put on a hell of a show. The laptop was there along with a mixing board, but Nick Sanborn played those things like he was behind a guitar or a drumkit. There was a ton of passion there. And dancing.

Amelia Meath is a wonderful front woman with a killer voice. I first noticed her when as a part of the group Mountain Man. They sang backup for Feist on the tour I saw and she completely stood out - nearly stole the show with her enthusiasm. She's darling and I think it's great that she's getting this success with her own stuff.

They got First Avenue dancing. That just doesn't happen. Minnesotans don't do that at concerts, but the place was jumping. It was a fantastic show.

This is their video for their single "Play It Right":



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I had been craving margaritas. That's a weird thing to say. But really I think I was just craving sitting outside on a beautiful summer day with friends and having some fun drinks. So I arranged a get together at a place in town that serves margaritas and a bunch of us had fun drinks on the patio on what was probably the most perfectly gorgeous weather day of the summer. Then we all headed back to my place and had a fun just hanging out together. I have nothing more to add to that (or pictures to share) but it was just a really great day.

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Then on Sunday it was Dog Day at the MIA (Minneapolis Institute of Arts). They open the doors to dogs and their humans and host activities for dogs in the courtyard. They can contribute to a mural and make their own art. They have photo booths and a caricature artist. Placed around the lot are water bowls. It's really fun and dogs are everywhere and the cuteness is overwhelming. It was also another gorgeous weather day. We took Robbie last year and it was muggy and cool, but this year it was gorgeous and the place was packed with dogs and people. It was super fun. And Robbie made more art. He's so talented.

A Year And A Day

It was my birthday yesterday. Another year older. 33. I'm not fond of that number. Not because I think it makes me old (it does), but I just don't like the number. 33. I don't know. It makes me uncomfortable. I'm already looking toward 34. That number just looks better.

I had an odd birthday. I was completely depressed for the first half and giddy for the second.

Things with work are weird now and it is what it is, but it had me feeling very very down all through the work day and that's no way to feel on one's birthday.

But after work I got home to this display on the kitchen table:

My lovely husband bought me flowers, presents, and cupcakes. I love cupcakes. As for the presents, they were just as awesome as the cupcakes. Sharon Van Etten's Tramp album. You know the one with this song that just slays me:



Also on the presents list: My Morning Jacket's album Circuital, which I've been wanting for a very long time now but for whatever reason had yet to pick up. AND Amanda Palmer concert tickets. I am so excited. I wasn't trying to be excited that she was coming to town because I didn't think I'd be able to go. But I do! I do get to go! And I can't wait to see this woman live.



I also got season 6 of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. So I now I have something funny to watch during the week...after I finish watching all of Sherlock again, which I just started doing.

I also got to do something I've always wanted to do that I never thought I'd get to do...I got to sing the National Anthem at a ballgame! The gals in Prairie Fire Lady Choir and I sang it in 4 part harmony before the St. Paul Saints game. Totally awesome birthday treat. Check that off the list.

The best part (for me) was the ladies sang Happy Birthday to me before taking the field. It was so sweet.

Then Matt and I met up at a bar to celebrate both my birthday and his being done with school. It was a big day and it turned into a beautiful evening and left me feeling very good about things.

And tomorrow it's the State Fair and I am so excited. Matt and I took the day off work. We're going to get there early, get coffee, and enjoy the day.

I love the fair.

2012

Happy New Year! 2012 is here. 2011 is just a really bad memory. Time to move on and stay positive.

I admit I was sad about being sick on New Years and not being able to go out and celebrate. But the Husband and I stayed in and played video games (we beat Zelda: Ocarina of Time and started Zelda: The Wind Waker), had a nice dinner, and I still managed to stay up until midnight even though I was feeling very feverish and gross.

But this morning I woke up and discovered a container full of these rolo/pretzel treats that I love on my doorstep. A friend of mine dropped them off this morning. It was so sweet and thoughtful and just really started this year off right. This is what I mean when I say I want to be a better friend to my friends. Because I have some really amazing people in my life and nothing feels better than to know that someone was thinking of you. And I want my friends to know how much they mean to me.

So, once again, Happy New Year!

Funny Things (To Me)

Alright. Time to lighten things up around here.

There are some things that strike me as hilarious - for reasons I can’t explain - every time I see/hear them. They may not be funny to you, but gosh darnit, they are funny to me.

1. Close All the Tabs?

There is a blog I love called Hyperbole and a Half. Allie Brosh is a super funny gal with super funny drawing capabilities. This post in particular had me cracking up, especially the repeated “Clean ALL the things!?” (Honestly, you’re going to have to read that post to “get it”).

So, at work I have to use Internet Explorer. I have to. The database I work in only works through IE. Often, I have multiple tabs open. Every day when I shut down my computer, it asks me if I want to “close all the tabs?” and every day I think of Hyperbole and a Half and every day I chuckle.

2. Just Clap Your Hands

The company I work for is big on recycling. We have signs up in each kitchen detailing what can be recycled and where to put recycling and all that stuff.

When I first started working here someone put a post-it underneath the Bottles and Cans header on one of these signs. It read: Just clap your hands.

Every time I went into the kitchen, I giggled about this. Alas, it has long been taken down.

If you don’t know why this is funny, shame on you for not knowing your mid-nineties alternative all-stars. Watch below:

3. Dirty Dancing Comic

I discovered this comic strip on the internets a long time ago. It is now posted in my cubicle for daily laughter.

4. James Hetfield Shopping

I mean, come on:

5. The Misfits

Back in high school I hung out with a group of guys who introduced me to music that as a teenage girl from a small town I might never had heard or given a chance. One of these bands is The Misfits and one of these guys we affectionally called Twid. The other two guys we will call C and N.

C and N used to use Twid as sort of a punching bag. We all did. He took it well. I think he secretly liked the attention. He was a big dude, so he could certainly handle himself if he ever got fed up with it.

Being that we lived in a small town with nothing to do, we spent a lot of time just driving around and listening to music. C and N used to love to make up new lyrics to songs. But my two favorite songs they would mess with were the following Misfits songs:

“Horror Business”

“Where Eagles Dare”

All they would do is change the pronouns in these songs to say Twid, but for some reason it was particularly funny in these songs. So lines like:

“you don’t go in the bathroom with me” would be “you don’t go in the bathroom with Twid” and “I’ll put a knife right in you, I’m warning you” would be “he’ll put a knife right in you, Twid’s warning you” and “I ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch” would then be “Twid ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch” and so on and so on.

Even typing that, I started to giggle. Maybe you had to know Twid. Or maybe you had to be a 15 year old girl riding around in cars with boys being stupid.

6. Re-Tard

There is a scene early in the movie The Hangover when the guys are driving to Vegas. Zack Galifianakis is talking about Rain Man and he calls him a re-tard. Not a retard (pronounced retard), but a re-tard (pronounced ra-tard – accent on the second syllable. I have no idea how to write that to get the pronunciation across). After seeing this movie in the theater, I laughed myself to sleep thinking about this line. Still do sometimes.

7. You’re Mom’s House

I was using Foursquare to check in somewhere once and one of my location options was “your mom’s house”. I thought that was the funniest thing ever. So clever, yet so stupid. Basically, I will laugh extensively at any sort of “your mom” jokes.

8. Frank Reynolds

Frank Reynolds is a character on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia played by Danny Devito and he is funny. He’s always calling his ex-wife a whore or random women whores. Expect, he doesn’t say it like whore, he says “hoo-ore”.

I laugh every time.

SWIM

My amazing friend, Jen March, started a project called Co-Kisser. The idea is to put poetry to film, but not just to read poetry over pictures, but to actually create a film based on a collection of poems. She kicked off the project with her own film and I was asked to help score it. I was honored by the request and had a great time collaborating on it with a couple of other folks.

You can learn more about the project and view the film, titled SWIM, on the website: www.co-kisser.com .

(and…Hello!...going to write more….starting….NOW)

Sing Songs Along

What is it about multiple voices coming together to create a unified, harmonic sound that both gives me the chills and warms my heart?

I recently joined a choir. A Lady Choir. A choir of gals that will be getting together to make choral arrangements of our favorite songs to, hopefully, perform at local establishments. We had our first meeting today. None of us are professionals. Yet, we started to sing and the blend was beautiful. It's really very magical how that happens.

Music is such an amazing thing.

On Saturday night, my friend Jen held a gathering at her house for her birthday. Her only request was that people either bring a poem/story to read (one they either wrote or just liked) or music to play, so I brought my guitar and sang a song. Two songs. One was the song she and I put together for one of her poems and performed at the Soap Factory a couple of months ago. It was nice to bring that back to life again. I also sang "Lord, I Have Made You a Place in My Heart" by Greg Brown. It's a cover I do often and one Jen seems to enjoy. I was somewhat nervous to sing around the campfire by myself in front of a group of mostly strangers. But it went well. It's such a relief that singing has become such a comfortable thing for me to do. Especially considering that I plan on playing out as much as I can. Each time gets easier. And I love it.

Everyone should sing. The world would be a happier place.

Sausage

This is Sausage. She and I have had our differences over the years. We had a love/hate relationship when we lived together that mostly leaned on the hate side. She really disliked me and she let me know it.

It is true I favored her more social brother, Pinky. When I would share my bag of Doritos with him, she would sit in the corner, glaring. I would always offer her a treat, but she would not budge. She was a stubborn gal and would never let you see her beg. Except in the mornings. God forbid you were the first one up and did not run to her food bowl and fill it up right away. She would follow you around the apartment howling at your every step.

She made you earn her respect. Not sure I ever achieved that with her. But she had mine.

The fact that I had this multi-leveled relationship with this cat made her very special to me.

Today is her last day. I will miss her very much. I'm sad I didn't get to say goodbye. But not that she would have cared. Or maybe she would have. Either way, she would never let me see it.

Performance Art

Our performance on Saturday went beautifully. My friend handled most of the teaching instructions, thank goodness. I just sang it for them. What was the performance? Well...

Our performance was part of the Talking Image Reading Series. The idea is to connect writers with visual arts. The writers attend an exhibit and create a story, poem, whathaveyou inspired by that exhibit. Then everyone gets together at the exhibit and shares what they wrote.

This particular exhibit is called "The New Land of Milk and Honey". It is a satire on communal living and new age touchy feely-ness. It's splendid. It is at the Soap Factory. You should check it out before it goes away next week.

My friend Jen is a fantastic poet. She was inspired to create something with the audience. So we created a song. She wrote a poem and asked me to put it to music and to find a chorus within it that everyone could sing to. Then, at the show, we handed out the different lines to different people within the audience. They were asked to restructure the verses how they think they should be. Each person called out a line and we put it all down. Then, when complete, I sang it for them as a song while Jen and Sarah performed a dance they created. It was a great moment.

Though they were not my words, it was so amazingly beautiful hearing people sing along to something you had a hand in creating. I was a bit choked up when we sang the chorus for the 4th round at the end. I was just so happy that people participated.

A Ginger Hex And Purple Cradle

What a weekend. What a blur. I spent Friday night at home playing video games (current game is Lost Odyssey, an epic 4 disc RPG that is all consuming) and watching the big Conan O'Brien finale. He went out with class and with a speech that I think everyone should follow.



Saturday it was car maintenance morning. $185 later and our car is up to date.

Saturday night I headed over the Hexagon for a reunion show of sorts. Rank Strangers, Middlepicker, and Party of One. Each of these bands contains members of the band Grickle Grass. Grickle Grass was a band consisting of friends of mine. They were a great little band that broke up about 8 years ago. Each new band is also great. Rank Strangers have been around forever and Party of One played around a lot back in the Grickle Grass days. Party of One also treated us to their song "Skydiver". A song that has been stuck in my head for the past 8 years with no possible way of hearing it.

Also playing that night was Stars As Our Guide. I highly suggest you check them out if you can. Jason Albus (former Chop Logic member) leads the trio on acoustic guitar and vocals. Joining him are a cellist and pianist. It was such a breath of fresh air from the usual noise rock you find at bars like these.

It was a late night, which wasn't the smartest thing considering Sunday morning I had to wake up early for my volunteer shift at Rock the Cradle. I kept watch over the Family Yoga Zone. Basically making sure people took off their shoes and new what to do. I was tired, a little grumpy, and a little hungover and not really looking forward to attending an event with the possibility of 6,000 children running around. But watching those toddlers do yoga was highly amusing. I'm not a kid person, but one little tyke stole my heart. There's always one that makes me think: maybe I could do the kid thing. But then there's always one that makes me know I don't want to.

Now it's Sunday night and the Vikings are playing for a Superbowl spot. I've got the game on mute while I go through my usual Sunday night routine of updating my iPod and surfing the internet. They're losing now. I'm trying to care, but I really can't. I'm not a Football fan. But, if it was the Twins going for the World Series, I'd be all over it. So I understand the hype. And I think it's required to have this game on if you have a television.

Happy Sunday. I raise my glass of Pinot in hopes of a great week ahead.

Cored

I did yoga for the first time yesterday.

My friend is training to be an instructor. She needed a complete yoga novice to come in to her class, so I volunteered. Let me tell you, yoga is not for the weak.

I was a little unclear of how the session would go. My thought is that each trainee would sit with their student (me) and be asked to bring them through a series of movements. So my total actual yoga time would be maybe 5 - 10 minutes.
It was 2 hours.

They set up the training as an actual class. All of the yoga participants had never done it before (or so they said). Each of the instructor trainees took turns bringing the entire class through the movements. One would start off and then the next one would take over and so on.

If this were a real class, it would have taken an hour. Since they were learning, it took two. They moved through everything slower and would also, at times, forget how to get us from one position to the next , so we would be stuck there holding a pose for a lot longer than needed.

Needless to say, I am extremely sore today.

All in all, I thought they did well. I guess I enjoyed it. When I was doing it, I was eager to be done. It was incredibly difficult. I have never set so much. I was dripping. My heart was racing. And if they asked me to get into the downward facing dog pose one more time, I was going to scream. That is supposedly a resting pose. But I'm pretty sure it's the reason I can't lift my arms over my head today. I was not rested while doing it.

I was amazed at some of the things that we were told to do on our first day of class. See the picture below as one example:

I do not trust my wrists that much.

When I was done, I felt amazing. I felt lighter. My limbs felt loose. I felt limber. It was incredible.
But today, I hurt. I really really hurt.

It's hard to say if I'll do it again. I was given a free week of yoga for coming to the class. My friend asked me to join her this Saturday. I might try it again to see what a real one hour faster paced class is like. Unfortunately, a yoga club membership is super expensive and I just can't afford that right now.

In other news....

It was a beautiful spring weekend here. High 50s all weekend. Sunny skies. Just gorgeous.

We had our pictures taken this weekend. It will be my mother-in-law's 60th birthday next week. All she wants is a picture of her kids/daughter -in-law/grandkid. We hired a friend of mine to do the pictures. I am just not a very photogenic person. I hated pretty much every single picture of me, but I thought everyone else looked great. Maybe it's just my self esteem. I just don't like to pose. I love taking pictures. Stupid random pictures when you're out with friends. But I just can't stand there and pose and smile. I feel so awkward.

Speaking of friends, I got to spend some time with a good friend on Saturday night. We don't connect as much anymore and it was really great to hang out with her and just talk. I love her and miss her in my life. Although, I paid for it Sunday morning and during yoga. Not a good idea to be hungover and starving while attempting yoga for the first time.

Now it's Monday and it is an unbelievably beautiful 65 degrees outside and I am stuck at my desk with my muscles cramping up. I plan to go for a quick bike ride when I get home. I have some errands to run and thought it would be nice to do it on my bike. But as sore as I am, I'm having some doubts. It's only for a few miles...how bad can it be?