Last Friday night I finally saw Rusted Root for the first time. I’ve been a fan of theirs since high school at which time I would listen to the “When I Woke” CD before almost every hockey game. The mix of intense percussion songs and laid back acoustic songs was the perfect mix for my pre-game warm-up. Kim has also been a fan of the band since around the same time as well, so it was a no-brainer when making the decision to go.

Unfortunately the show was at the Beaumont Club, my least favorite venue in all of KC. Luckily Zox, a band from the east coast that I’ve seen a few times before, was opening the show adding even more reasons to go.

The show was awesome and the crowd at the Beaumont was not too big, which made the show even more enjoyable. Zox played very well and I was pumped to finally take Kim to her first show of theirs. She loves the studio CDs and enjoyed their show just as much. After the Zox set, Rusted Root took the stage playing three songs off of the previously mentioned CD. They followed it up with a song I wasn’t too familiar with but then immediately after that played their biggest hit to date, “Send Me On My Way.” All in all they played every song I wanted to hear and spaced them between the lesser known songs (at least for me). It was a perfect night of music. I’m not sure why it took me so long to see these guys, but it won’t take me as long to see them again, that’s for sure.

A big thanks to my friends who went to Bonnaroo this year and encouraged me to go to this show after seeing Rusted Root perform a set of almost all older songs at the festival.

Update: My recording of Rusted Root can be found here.

Welcome to the new site! It’s been a long time in the making, and although everything is not perfect yet I was tired of working on it. I love wordpress so far and I’m sure that love will continue to grow. The one thing I’m not certain of yet is the new photo gallery, which is currently powered by gallery 2. Since gallery 2 now uses a database it tends to run a little slower than the previous version. The features of the updated version are incredible, but it might be overkill for my little website. We’ll see. For now all of my old pictures are there for your viewing pleasure.

I finally got all of my old posts out of blogger and into wordpress. Luckily there is a built in wordpress feature to do this, but I had some problems with it, most likely because of the number of posts I have made. The nice thing is that I am no longer dependent on another site for my publishing. All of wordpress runs on my own server.

Just about everything that was on the old design is here on the new design. Obviously the blog was moved to the front page. I did this because it continues to be the most popular area of the site. The “song of the moment” area was removed, but I am considering adding it back as part of my blog. When I’m out of things to write about, or having a very slow day, I can post about a song and give a link to download. Stay tuned for that, I know some of you want more songs.

I hope you all like this design as much as I do. It took many attempts to come up with something that I could look at all day long, and I think this is the best of them all. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

If you were previously subscribed to my site feed, the url for that has changed. However you may not need to change anything since I setup a permanent redirect from the old feed to the new. If you encounter any problems this is the reason why.

I’ll have to share my stories from the weekend in later posts. Off to work…

We were supposed to watch our second play of the season last night, Dr. Doolittle featuring Tommy Tune. The weather had other plans for us though. Supposedly the entire play was performed, but we stuck around through about half of the first act only. Shortly after we got home it was raining buckets though, just as I had predicted. I couldn’t image being outside in that type of weather, so I’m glad we left when we did. Besides, the play wasn’t that good. They advertised it as the one to bring your kids to and there were many of them, even some on stage. I decided that if there were kids dressed up as animals I was leaving, and that’s just what we did. Next up, in a couple of weeks, is Grease!

About a month ago my buddy Tom posted about Cork’d, a website for rating and cataloging wine. I’ve been using it for just as long and last night I went through and added all of the bottles we currently have to my “wine cellar.” Surprisingly we have about six bottles currently but that’s only because I haven’t had anyone to share one with this week. Kim has been in Cincy all week on a vacation of sorts. Typically we drink wine at a much faster rate than we buy it. I’m going to start reviewing every bottle we drink though and maybe even recommend some to my “drinking buddies.” Sign up for the site now and add me as a buddy. I know I’d like to see Phil and Doni catalog all of their wine online!

Last night I met Phil and Todd out on the deck at the Brooksider. First of all, when the hell did they get a website and why weren’t Phil and I contacted about this? I guess I haven’t really been there in awhile, but they still know Phil’s drink of choice. We should have had first dibs on the site!

Anyway, not much has changed except they supposedly have WI-FI access now. I should have logged into work from the bar instead of leaving early to dial in from home. I’ll have to remember that for the future. It was “taco night” which even includes chicken tacos. I agreed to meet up with the guys for some chicken soft tacos and I was pleasantly surprised. From past experiences I wasn’t expecting the food to be great and truthfully it wasn’t, but I’d still give it a rating of above average. They have some new zesty salsa as well, pretty tasty stuff.

After drilling a big hole in the wall last weekend I thought about adding a picture of it to MyUglyRoom.com. Instead I just spent a couple of nights patching the hole and applying four or five coats of paint. Now it’s no longer ugly, and the office is ready to be organized. I realized that there was no way I stood a chance in winning the contest, just look at some of those disasters.

I did notice that there are two types of rooms on MyUglyRoom.com though. There are the truly ugly rooms with bad paint colors or even worse wallpapering along with the horrible decor. These are the rooms that get my vote. Then there are the sloppy rooms. These rooms aren’t necessarily ugly but they are cluttered up due to a lazy (or maybe very busy) homeowner. Those people just need to find the time to pickup their crap.

I’m sure the lack of posting last Friday went mostly unnoticed. Everyone was either busy preparing for this year’s Pig-Fest or on their way to Cincinnati for the party. After flying into Cincinnati late Friday afternoon I met up with others who had made the trek as well. We started off at Christie’s and after a dozen or so pitchers headed down to the Mad Frog to see Mike Perkins play. A couple notes from the night:

• I miss pitchers of beer, especially when they are only $5.50.
• Potbelly needs to open a store in Kansas City.
• Papa Dino’s is only good after a few beers, luckily they are open until 3AM.
• Recording a show at the Mad Frog can be impossible at times.

Saturday was obviously dedicated to Pig-Fest The 13th! As always it was an incredible party even though the cops really tried to ruin it this time. It would be impossible to document the events of the party so I won’t even try. Thanks to everyone who came out and partied with us. We’ll have to be sure to do it again!

Just as I think I’m getting good at tennis I go and lose to Kim last night. We only played one set and she won the back and forth battle seven matches to five. I think my serving was the deciding factor, especially when I lost one whole match due to serves. It’s a good thing that I’ll be getting some practice in with the guys from work tonight. Apparently I really need it.

This week of work without my boss is really catching up to me. I better get back to it…

With lots of help from Phil, I was finally able to work on a project I’ve been wanting to do since we moved in to our new house. We installed a coax outlet into the second bedroom, which I’m obviously turning into an office. My desk, along with computers, have been in the office since the move, but in order to have a connection I had to run a coax cable across the hallway floor from the master bedroom. I’m not in college anymore so it was decided that something else would have to be done.

Phil and I had thought long and hard about this project and yesterday was the day to actually do something about it. During the month of planning, we decided that it would be easiest to install the outlet on an outside wall rather than messing with interior walls. We picked our ideal wall and I began drilling a hole from the inside of the room with the hopes that the extra long drill bit I had bought would go all the way through to the outside wall. Unfortunately this didn’t happen and I’d say that we miscalculated the depth between the two walls by a couple of feet. Rather than trying to drill a hole on the outside and hoping they were close enough to work, we decided to drill a different hole on a different wall.

Luckily the second attempt worked much easier and cable was run from the outside to the inside with very little problems. We attached the cable down the side of the wall and to the main coax line. It was already split there multiple times so we just had to connect the new cable and everything worked perfectly. Now I’ll just have to patch the extra hole in the wall and finish installing the outlet faceplate. Then the furniture in the office can finally be put into it’s final resting place. The home office is coming together quite nicely.