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Lisa and I walked down the road to Citibank to see our account manager to get some advice on banking matters regarding the house, and other stuff. We also had time for a little breakfast at the local bagel shop, where we perused the local papers and looked at upcoming concerts and events with glee. (Somewhat prematurely, too, I might add!)
Then we spent a little time with Stan on routine computer maintenance, and also talking with him about his plans to publish a web site of poems and cartoons.
We pack our stuff up, ’cause we have a plane to catch at 6:00pm, and appointments in between, including one at the housing development flooring vendor showroom to decide on carpet and other flooring choices. We already have a good idea what we would want, so we manage to finalise our options reasonably quickly. There is quite a quality range of product, but without going crazy we are able to settle on a good combination of colours and patterns that we feel are compatible with our tastes.
Then it’s time to catch our plane back home to California. We arranged to catch a pretty late flight out of Vegas to allow us as much time as possible there, and considering we only had three days, I think we did ok!
Nothing’s final of course until it comes time to talk contracts in November or December, but right now we see no reason to not go ahead with our plan.
As I write this I have no idea where we are – it’s pitch black outside. We are probably about to start our descent into SFO sometime in the next 30 minutes.
This morning Lisa and I walked down to the supermarket and got some coffee and fresh bagels.
Then we drove out to a couple of new housing developments to look at lots and models and sample houses to check out that plan we’ve been admiring on the web. Exhausting work, but exciting too. We took our digital camera and took lots of pictures of things in the specific house plan.
Well, there’s a very good chance that a year from now we could be living on Bandits Bluff, LV. Right now it is just a dusty empty lot out in the middle of nowhere.
Tomorrow we go back to the development and continue talking about options and stuff.
After a pleasant breakfast, at around midday we drive back out to Spring Mountain Ranch to reserve our lot and figure out what the next steps are. Choosing options and comparing surfacing/flooring materials, mostly. And asking a bunch of questions. More measuring. Then we drove down the road to the pile of dirt and walked around on the site, and took a bunch of pictures. We also drove around the finished houses and compared color schemes, before settling on the one that we wanted for ours.
We’re in Las Vegas for the weekend.
It turns out that all of the “Days of Stupid” that were caused by Delta Airlines were worth something after all, because they sent us “Delta money” coupons along with a letter of apology. Cool. We can use the coupons for air travel tickets.
So, we decided to cash some of them in and fly to Vegas for the weekend, and spend some time looking at housing developments.
The flight today was uneventful, albeit because we were flying Delta we had a stopover in Salt Lake City, so in total it made for a 6 hour trip instead of a 3 hour one…
This evening Derek makes it down in time for us to all go out for dinner at a new Chinese restaurant that has just opened in the Northgate mall, before heading off to the wonderful Civic Veteran’s Memorial Hall for a Jethro Tull concert.
The concert was not as good as I expected. Early highlights included an excerpt from _Thick_As_A_Brick_, but things seemed to go downhill from there, with too many pieces from Ian Anderson’s solo albums and not enough Tull classics. Anderson is still a phenomenal flautist, but his voice does not appear to be up to the task of singing these days.
Oh well – another band to be crossed off my list of “Bands to experience before they die”.
Over the weekend Brian and Beth (my Uncle and Aunt) stay with us for a few days on the last leg of an extensive overseas trip that has taken them from NZ to Europe, to London, back to Europe, and now to California. We spend some time with them taking them out to a restaurant in Sausalito; cooking them dinner, and generally suggesting interesting places for them to visit. They hired a car which meant they could be pretty independent and drive around at whim, and from the sound of it they had a great time, even though we couldn’t accompany them all the time what with working Monday and Tuesday of course.
Yup, these two bands are playing at the Maritime Hall in San Francisco tonight! I had bought tickets online as soon as I heard about it, in my usual fashion.
We stop working and leave the house early, at around 6:15pm, with the following plan: park the car in the city and then find a place to eat a quick dinner before getting to the concert venue at 8:30.
At about 6:40 we are approaching Market Ave planning to cross over at get to first street when we encounter a traffic jam, and I am talking grid-lock here. It turns out that a bus has broken down, and everyone is trying to cross over in front of everyone else. I swear I saw the traffic lights turn from red to green and then back to red for a total duration of 1 second at one point, which I’m sure wasn’t helping. No traffic cops in sight…
A crazy woman in a car started crossing over in front of us, apparently intending to go straight across to the other side, ignoring the fact that there was a enormous bus directly in her path. At this point things got worse until a passer-by elected himself traffic director and decided to help out. He started standing in front of cars preventing them from moving into the gap as the traffic left the intersection and enabled the woman to inch out, letting some SUVs go across the front of the car, until she was facing the side of the bus. Over the course of the next 10 minutes she did a five-point turn in the middle of the grid-locked intersection until she was facing the wrong way into the one way traffic, and went around the back of the bus. She would never have been able to do it without the help of the guy, but the truth is that she should never have entered the intersection unless she was planning to turn left and “go with the flow” and find an alternate route.
So that used up about half an hour. The next half hour was spent with the back half of our car sticking out into the North-bound lane on Market street waiting for traffic to clear in First street. Here the obstruction was a big truck with a sign on the back directing traffic to merge left. What was not apparent until we were passed this (30 minutes later) was that the truck itself was trying to get into the right lane, then stop and let the orange-vested guys out to lay traffic cones… argh.
Anyway, by then it was about 8:00 and we drove up and parked a fair way away from the hall, but frankly by then we’d given up on trying to get anywhere by *driving* and walked the rest of the way… it wasn’t very far, actually.
We got to the theater, showed our tickets, and climbed the stairs and passed the t-shirt and program stall, and found some excellent seats right up the back of the theater. At least, we thought they were excellent, because no one was behind us to kick us or vomit on us. Unfortunately, people were walking to and fro in front of us all through the show because it was the aisle “most likely to be mistaken for a walkway”. Dunno why.
Spock’s Beard started their set early, which we knew about because I’ve been following the news on their web site. Dream Theater had asked them to start early so that their slightly overlong set didn’t cause DT to start later and then go over time themselves…
Spock’s Beard were great. They played some of their “hits” and also one track from their new album which I hadn’t got yet. They are a very energetic and entertaining band, playing together tightly and with much fun and exuberance. I think they played about an hour and 20 minutes in total, before getting off the stage and letting the roadies set up the stage for the main act, Dream Theater.
Dream Theater were disappointing. Yes, they can all play 100 notes a second, and their music rocks, but I agree with Lisa when she said “they kind of phoned that one in, didn’t they?” meaning that the band was on autopilot. Also, they were somewhat self indulgent, allowing themselves solo spots for keyboard and guitar, when basically their whole repertoire is keyboard and guitar solos with occasionally vocal lines. And the singer was not at his best that night.
(Hey Walter you might be interested that Jordan Rudess seemed to handle the entire concert with one keyboard- an 88-key Kurzweil K2600 I think.)
They played most of their latest album – the good parts, thankfully – and a mish mash medley of other tracks that was so boring Lisa fell asleep. I knew the set list from the discussion groups on their web site, so when they’d got past the instrumental section of _Learning_To_Live_ I suggested to Lisa that we split and beat the crush and traffic after the show. I knew the encore was going to be _A_Change_Of_Seasons_ which is a 20 minute epic, and frankly I didn’t need to hear it.
(Oh – for those of you concern, we used ear-plugs this time, and the concert was enjoyable instead of painfully loud as a result.)
As we drive away back towards the Golden Gate Bridge, congratulating ourselves for avoiding the most uncomfortable part of the concert, another car fails to stop at a four-way stop and nearly hits us. Ulp! Luckily, he brakes and misses us, but that didn’t stop the adrenalin rush from making me shake for the next few intersections.
We get home at about 12:45, hungry. We still hadn’t had dinner!
We went to see the movie _Space_Cowboys_ tonight. One of the reviews of this film I read said, “Enjoy this as the fairy tale it is”, and I’d agree with that. Entertaining, but suspend your disbelief at the door.
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