Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

It's been quite awhile since I reviewed a show. I'm all kinds of lazy, in case you didn't notice. I just don't have the blogging mojo I had in college and I hope you all can forgive me. So Phil and I went to see Slings at eVocal in Costa Mesa on Friday night. It was the album release show for their first full length, The Old Hopeful Trail. In addition to regulars David Pope and Dustin Poulton, Slings has a revolving crew of musicians which currently includes Ann Lynn's Matt Pool.

I would categorize Slings' style as sort of a folk rock but with a wide variety of instrumentation. They even have a dude playing the saw. It reminds me a bit of Havalina Rail Co. but with more of an old timey Gospel feel and maybe some Arcade Fire thrown in. They put on one heck of a show. The place was packed and the crowd was really into it. On their last song they even passed out various percussion instruments and let the crowd play along.

I've always enjoyed Slings but it's been awhile since I've seen them. They've grown even more as artists and this new album is a huge leap for them. If you're in the L.A. area you can catch them at Spaceland on the 21st and if you're not in the area you should definitely check out their CD which is available at CD Baby and on the band's MySpace. You can also hear Slings on our own pop.vox.christmas Volume 2 compilation, which is available here (plug plug).

Time keeps flying by. I don't know where last week went! Our weekend didn't go by all that fast, but the week itself seemed to disappear before I knew it.

Friday at lunch I spent an hour and a half driving to the "nearest" (?) FedEx location to pick up a package. It was a new camera for us to take on our trip. Our old camera was old enough that it couldn't handle more than a 512MB memory card, which simply wasn't enough! I saved up my spending money and bought this one. It's nothing extremely special, since my budget was basically trying to buy a camera for under $150. I've been playing around with it and like the options so far. I like the lighting and flash options, where you can decide how much light comes into the camera, and that you can adjust the strength of your flash, and the shutter speed as well (although I doubt I'm practiced enough to know when to do that). We also got a memory card and a set of NiMH batteries with a charger. I don't know what planet I've been living on, but I think I'll probably start using these in a lot of products, especially since I go through AAs all the time by listening to audio books when I work out. Speaking of which, I was somehow able to make it through week five of the push-ups challenge that I'm doing at the same time as Josh. I'm still not convinced that, in a little over a week's time, I should be able to do a hundred consecutive push-ups, but at least I know my arms are getting stronger and more toned. Friday night Ric and I got together with my sister and went to see Hancock at the cheap theater, which actually turned out to be better than I was expecting.

I got to sleep in for a little bit on Saturday, then went to get a haircut. My hairdresser and I must have different visual perceptions of length, because it ended up about three inches shorter than I expected, and I expected to cut off a big chunk already. So now my long hair is gone, and I do not like my hair right now, except when it's in a ponytail:

I know it looks fine, but my intent was still to have somewhat long hair, especially for all the photo ops on our upcoming trip. So here's to taking strong vitamins and hoping it gets longer in the next few weeks! Haha. It'll grow back.

After the hair, I went to the mall to return a coat that was probably much too heavy for our trip, went to the tailor to drop off a few shirts for hemming (what's with designers thinking everyone needs incredibly long shirts?), and grabbed a bite to eat before heading home and falling asleep again while watching Ziggy Stardust. I got up and bummed around a bit until Ric was ready to go out to eat. We went to Bourbon Street for dinner. I had roasted chicken with sweet and spicy barbecue sauce, creamed corn, and au gratin potatoes with cheddar and blue cheese. I'd have to say that the side dishes outshone the main feature, but all of it was good. Ric prefers a plainer version of Louisiana food, so his mashed potatoes and odd-looking corn (both different than mine) went untouched and he was still hungry after we left. It's really loud in there, which is a negative, and the live sax player was sometimes enjoyable and sometimes a little bit boring. I think I would like to go back to this restaurant for lunch when it's a little bit quieter. I'm interested in trying a couple more items on their menu. After dinner, we headed home and watched Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and I did some reading until I fell asleep.

Sunday we went to church, stood around talking with the Andersons for a while, had a bite at Jack-in-the-Box, went home to change, went to Jiffy Lube for the Mini's first non-dealer service (awww, the warranty is over!), and drove down to South Coast Plaza Mall to get some foreign currency at Travelex. We had to buy both GB Pounds and Euros, and hopefully we've estimated our expenses well. If not, there's always the credit card! After we got home, I spent the next five hours working on the condo. I filled creases between our kitchen cupboards and the wall (where some ugly old paneling used to be), let it dry, painted over it, and did touch-up throughout the kitchen and upstairs hallway. I listened to about a third of The Return of the King! Afterwards, Ric and I went through a few episodes of Sledge Hammer.

Up this week: the wonders of grocery shopping tonight, cleaning while waiting around for a water inspector to come by (they gave me a 9-4 window, yikes!), movie night on Wednesday, hopefully a cheap theater movie on Thursday, my mom's birthday on Friday, and the Hutchins' moving day and a visit from our cousin on Saturday. I guess I don't get any free time this week! In the movie queue for my Mon-Fri lunches: Full Metal Jacket (didn't get to it last week) and Apocalypse Now.