Patients is a Virtue

So I was walking back to work yesterday and looked at one of the many abandoned buildings that make Broad St. the charming place it is, and saw this.

I knew cell phone technology had grown leaps and bounds in the last few years, especially with the new iphone coming out so soon but I had no idea it had grown to this level. Cell phones treating illness and disease - PERFECT! What will they think of next?
And I thought Doctor’s offices and Hospitals were the only one who had patients.

Potomac River Trip

This weekend was just as tight as last weekend, yall.

Friday was First Fridays on Broad St. I missed that, because The Skyline are stressing hard to prepare for this big wedding we’re playing on June 9th. So far so good, and I can’t wait to post the set list over at matthewrock.com once it’s finalized.

Saturday we all took a trip over to the Northern Neck - a place that Anne’s family owns on the Potomac River. The attendees - myself, Diana, Sandy, Anne, David. We ended up going to Costco the day before to buy a bunch of supply for what we thought would be a much larger group, so we found ourselves obligated to drink two 24-packs of bottles of Heineken/Yuengling. At some point we convinced ourselves that we might run out of beer. I don’t know where that hysteria came from. We picked up another 12-pack of Coors Light. It’s ridiculous, because we ended up returning home with close to 24 beers. I am at the very least thankful that we’re not math nerds. Or maybe we were just unable to count past 10 by that point.

So we spent all of Saturday trying to kill this beer supply. I have vivid memories of Diana and Sandy sharing headphones and bobbing heads to The Format, Ryan Adams, etc. We ended up taking “scenario pictures”, the details of which I will update soon (I’m getting my hands on the pictures now). Shot off some fireworks, played some asshole, all of the party prep work we needed to exercise to get ready for the big July 7th Frat Party. And yes, YOU are invited.

Pictures from the weekend:

Memorial Deltaville Weekend

This Memorial Day weekend was one of the best ones in years. Most likely because a dance party was involved. Now that I think about it, most of the highlights of my life have some element of dancing involved. I’m not saying I’m a good dancer, I just like to stand near people and let my body ride the night out in unison. Not many people feel comfortable doing that, so I’m lucky my friends are just as crazy.

Dance parties at our place are always awesome because we really don’t care about being too loud or too dangerous, and we don’t have to drive home drunk. And we reserve the right to challenge anyone to a dance fight, because it is our dance floor. That hasn’t happened yet, but the idea of a Dance Fight Party really excites me - you know, like you either come in a blue shirt or a green shirt, and it’s like a huge battle between land and sea. The blue team could be called “The Global Warmers” and the green could be “The Recyclers”. I kid. But you know, maybe that’s cool?

I don’t even remember what I did on Friday so I’m going to start with Saturday.

Saturday’s Agenda:

• Went to the 42nd St location on the James River. The river was warm so we were all up in the water, no snakebiting whatsoever.
• Purchased a new Charbroil Commercial Series grill from Lowes.
• Had a cookout at our place, utilizing the 45 burger capacity of new grill.
• Hosted an incredibly awesome and successful dance party. MVP - as always, Jon Stepp.

Sunday’s Agenda:

• Went to River City Diner for breakfast (me, D, Sandy, Anne, David). Had myself the classic Sausage Gravy Plus, which will never, ever let me down.
• Me, D, and Sandy packed up and went to Deltaville. Made it just in time for some afternoon rays, got steak n’ cheeses, etc.
• Went wakeboarding and extreme boating with Grant.
• Played Rumy (spelling?) forever and went to bed where I was haunted by ghosts slamming windows shut.

Monday’s Agenda:

• Sandy and Larry made us all breakfast sandwiches, which were to die for.
• I helped Grant begin putting a roof on the garage.
• Anne, David, Grant H, and Mat Shelton showed up, we all collectively sucked every breath of fun out of Deltaville.

It was awesome. The end!

The Belle Isle Experience

The recent beautiful weather has been a relief from the generally sucky weather we had last week. Feeling inspired, Matt, Anne and I took a trip to the river. An activity the we generally look forward to doing every weekend, sometimes twice a weekend in the Summer. We all figured a bit of sunshine and fresh air could do nothing but help our minds, moods, and severe lack of tan. Upon arrival, we set up camp (a couple of bath towels) and laid down to sleep, read, and listen to the ipod. Things seemed slightly trashier than usual, but thankfully we parked it upwind of the resident hippies, drunks, and presumably homeless gents. Aside from a couple of dogs with complete disregard for sunbather’s personal space, things were pretty good.
That’s when all Hell broke lose.
To our right (downstream) about ten feet we notice some shirtless guys stumbling around looking for a snake. Luckily, the leader of the shirtless militia had a plastic grocery bag to put the captured snake in, once caught. This would normally be an activity that comes and goes, ending in the drunk shirtless guy either catching the snake, then letting it go somewhere, or falling in the river, carefully not spilling a drop of his Natural Ice. This time, Drunk Shirtless Guy is shown up by Drunk Shirtless Hippie, who walks straight into the water and grabs the foot long snake. Once caught, the snake (as a perfectly natural reaction) bites Drunk Hippie on the hand. Drunk hippie gets belligerent and starts shaking, squeezing, and yelling at the snake, quickly killing it.
As if things weren’t bad enough for the snake, who after being ripped from it’s natural habitat was killed by a shirtless, drunk, idiot of a hippie, said hippie BITES HIS (or her) HEAD OFF.
The neighbors to the left of us seem to be about as disgusted as we are, but everyone else is fascinated. The snake is passed around, and eventually ends up looped through the killer’s belt loop. The dead snake. Is hung. On his pants.
A tattooed Asian girl comes along and finds the snake’s head, which has been forgotten on the ground, where it was spit out. She tosses it at her boyfriend, who laughs, and they go on their way.
Meanwhile, Drunk guy is sucking the venom? from his hand, and spitting into the water. In utter shock and general disgust, we decided then and there that we had to blog this. Just in case there were any doubts that Belle Isle has completely been ruined by idiots like these. I never thought I would miss the simple days when all you had to worry about was stepping on one of the three dozen broken beer bottles. God bless.

Pictures:

And Video:

Digitally, yes… Physically, no.

So far today, we have:
Played Wii
Not made a new song
…but pulled out all the dusty instruments we have stashed away in the music room
Made and drank two pots of coffee
Not taken a shower
Made fun of Matt’s incredibly witty “one liners”
Watched Secondhand Lions
Laid around
Window shopped online for dresses from Anthropologie…
…then looked for the ripped-off version from Forever 21
Played with/Laid with Maynor
Sandy finished school, while slightly still buzzed… (making sure to get her $40 worth from the Canal Club).
Diana ate beef jerkey
Matt still wants a nap.

all this and it’s only 3:30.

On the Windiest Day Ever…

Me and the ol’ D took a trip up to DC on Monday. We had to drop off some mysterious boxes from Quirk to the Czech Republic Embassy. Some of the boxes were just the right size to fit aluminum tubes, some were perfect for nuclear materials. But I’m not here to raise questions about the special interests of Quirk. But if requested, I WILL email you the lab results of my chemical testing of the contents of those boxes. Wow, where have I gone with this.

The Embassy was great, there was enough surveillance and unprompted gate-opening to make us feel like contracted spies. The receptionist was confused as to why we were even there, but we eventually found our target, and dropped off the… art.

Feeling art-less, we made it our beeswax to head downtown and check out some exhibits.

1. The Corcoran was showing an exhibit on Modernism. We spontaneously ended up there first. They put together a timeline showing milestones for the span of Modernism, I found some stuff that reminds me of Diana’s style of work so I snapped a shot of her mid-sentence. The Modernism exhibit was an amazing experience for me, and because of it, I’m now able to make sense of my own life. That’s that.
2. We walked across the street to the Renwick Gallery and checked out George Catlin’s Indian Gallery which is an AMAZING collection of paintings of the midwest Indian life before it was wiped out almost completely by the invasion of dirty filthy Americans! I absolutely love this picture I snapped of the Grand Salon. Quirk frequent Robert Ebendorf even has something on permanent display, which I think is pretty impressive.
3. Last stop and a few thousand blocks of walking lead us to the National Portrait Gallery. They have a special exhibit up right now, a huge collection of Saul Steinberg’s (illustrator for the New Yorker, among other things) work which is completely amazing. It was my favorite exhibit. Hysterical, creative, and colorful, and he just seems like a down ass dude. Then I went and snapped a picture of Tom Wolfe illegally at the Portrait Gallery. But I did it without flash, so it’s literally like nothing happened. Plus, a million flashes of light couldn’t possibly make Tom Wolfe fade out.

Then we found a pocket of coolness in DC with tons of bars and Ethopian restaurants. We went to this corner bar and thought we’d get a drink and some fries. But did you know in DC you don’t have to sell food at a bar? The bartender was like nope… no food… but you’re more than welcome to order a pizza over here. Haha. DC isn’t so bad after all.

Slowed to a Drip

So I thought… I really thought I could do it. Blog on the regular. Not so! Matt is in California, Sandy’s about to leave for Japan, and me? I’m just basking in the glow of my 13″ Dell INSPIRON 1000. Not my normal work computer, but has proven to be about as useful as the standard. I can literally feel myself becoming pastier by the day. Will Spring ever really be here? It’s not fair to be teased by a week or so of beautiful, warm weather only to be knocked back to reality with SNOW! ON THE GROUND! We couldn’t get snow to stick in February, but April? No Problem!
There’s been shows, and shows, and lots of pictures we SHOULD have posted, but here’s one of my favorites lately. Sarah’s getting tuned up.

Check out Matt’s flickr for many more interesting photos!

On Eating Healthy

I just ate Super King Buffet- so I’m having a hard time pressing the right keys with my crab rangoon-filled fingers. And by the end of this post, you will look back up here and be completely amazed that I had it in me to go to a buffet today.

One of my favorite fun-bloggers as of late is Dooce. She makes a living (ad-supported) writing about her life. Isn’t that crazy? We would be blessed if this blog ever got to pay our Netflix bill every month. What makes Dooce so successful is the way she explains her awesomely hysterical life. Why else would I enjoy reading blogs about the perils of raising a child in Utah, the most boring place on Earth?

The other thing is - the more I read her blog, the more similarity I find between our lives. Such as this blog today where Dooce explains how she and her husband end up resolving their hunger with two trips to fast food joints. Actually reading the post would do it much more justice than I just did. But why is that noteworthy? DIANA AND I went to see Reign Over Me last night. We got RUSHED into it last minute so our little fuel tanks were running on EMPTY. So, for $23 in concessions, we bought the following dinner:

• 1 MEDIUM movie-theater Coke
• 1 MEDIUM movie-theater Diet Coke
• 1 very hard soft pretzel
• Movie-theater popcorn w/ special butter topping (oh hell yes)
• Nachos w/ cheesy cheese cheese

I speak on behalf of myself AND Diana when I say that it was truly awesome. I kind of wish they would have poured butter topping on our soft pretzel, which was so hard that dipping it in soda was considered.

This all comes after we went grocery shopping for things that we can deep-fry. We came out with hash browns that look very similar to McDonalds’ hashies, Crispy Crowns which are like Tater Tots but with more surface area (as per Diana’s preference), and I will be deep-frying various things that are said to be impossible to deep-fry.

Justin Timberlake @ UVA

There are two things about me that most people don’t know:

• I have the courage to blog about seeing Justin Timberlake in concert.
• I am a man.

Generally those two things are contradictory, but I can transcend stereotypes and have seen the beauty in JT’s live performance. And it really was awesome.

We got tickets for about $75 each, after service fees and all the awesome fun bucks they like to throw on the end of your purchase. It’s pretty difficult to make a seat in row S on the upper level of a huge arena to be worth $75. So it was probably worth about $54, the original cost of the ticket before asshole taxes. And if you add in the delicious snacks we bought at the arena, such as applewood sausage, popcorn, soda, we’re talking mega bucks. That being said…

Pink, or I guess now it’s “P!NK”, opened the show with some wicked crazy military dance moves, and she played some songs I completely forgot about, like “Don’t Let Me Get Me” and my all-time-fav “Pill”. From there on it was just Pink rolling around on the stage and bumming everyone out… UNTIL… she came out in some lingerie type thing and sang “Get the Party Started”. Then it was like, a real party down there, like 500 ft from me, Pink was spinning around on a piece of fabric dangling from the SKY. She really does know how to get the party started.

Enter Justin Timberlake, who came for the after-party in search of a disco ball to break. But anyway, at this point, there was so much screaming, I didn’t know what to do so I screamed too. Really I was hoping for some flying action, because I know NSYNC used to do it… but that wasn’t necessary because JT is all grown up, and basically floats around on the stage using patent pending footwork.

I mean, the dance moves were insane, and I have to give so much credit to him for making the show ADULT-LIKE - There was a makeout sesh with one of the dancers, there was one particular moment when JT did a specific hip thrust into an innocent dancer who was bent over in front of him - I mean, totally adult friendly. It was kind of like softcore porn.

But what I was hoping for, and what was most impressive, was his ability to actually play instruments with his songs. Heavy piano use (which slowly rotates while he plays, gotta get one of those), he played some guitar, one of those funky strap-on keyboards from the 80s, etc. No drums - and that’s where I will fill his void, one day. He also did a really amazing version of “Losing My Way”, probably my favorite song of the night - he was just so genuinely into that song, it came out perfect.

So I’m not afraid to say I went and saw Justin Timberlake. Eff all yall.

VCU Wins…the first round.

This was intended for posting on Friday, but I have been slacking off. I’m making a good effort, though. On Thursday night we cheered VCU on as they (Maynor) put up an outstanding fight against Paulus, well and Duke too. VCU won by Maynor’s incredible 3-point shot at the very end of the game.

It was quite possibly the first basketball game I have watched enthusiastically in its entirety, and will be hard to outdo until VCU starts back up next season. Friday night we had a victory celebration at our house which drew a small but enthusiastic crowd. I guess it was a foreshadow of what was to come on Saturday night.

I can’t quite claim I watched the game on Saturday, unlike everyone in Richmond without the HD channel, but I concentrated so hard on the score on the top left hand corner of the Vanderbilt/WSU game that a couple of times I thought I may have had an influence on VCU’s 19 point comeback with the clock at 3:09. Alas, Pitt won in overtime, which I tip my hat to, because they are a damn good team.

Great job this season, Rams! Can’t wait until I’m interested in the games next year.